Story About a Stool

So recently, an old guitar friend stopped by the shop as he was passing through my area, and we enjoyed a nice conversation, catching up on everything. During our conversation, he squinted quizzically at me and asked,

"So how did you get into making guitars anyway?"

And that's a great question, of course. Because of all the great opportunities that life presents, how in the hell would someone wind up building guitars?

I was in the process of trying to keep the answer short and simple when I glanced around the room and saw the stool beside my bench. The confluence of the subject at hand and the presence of the stool helped me make a connection that I had not yet made, and I suppose that it makes a fairly strange story.

Back when I first became interested in guitar, I actually tried to build one. I often forget how making a thing is usually my first way of experimenting with something new, but that is how it worked. There were some guys in the local high school playing all the popular grunge rock songs for an audience of cute ladies, and that alone will steer the focus and direction of most any young man. Of course, I didn't have a guitar, and when one of my high school friends talked about Brian May of Queen building his own guitar, the next steps were obvious for me. If something of interest was made of wood, I would attempt to build it.

So, a couple of pieces of walnut got married in an Oreo cookie way to either side of a piece of ash, and there was my guitar body. I did manage to cut it into an electric guitar profile with a coping saw before I found myself at a loss for what to do next. I can't remember what distracted me from completing it, but given my age of 16, it could have been any number of trivial things, from too much homework to a distracting pimple. That unfinished guitar body laid around until I had graduated from college with a degree in guitar performance and was working at Gallagher Guitar Co. for a few years thereafter. I had an ambition to build a classical guitar in my own shop at that time. I built myself a nice workbench that I still use today, and when it came time to build a seat, that electric guitar body was the obvious choice. "Sorry, my old friend," I said, as I bandsawed its guitarness into the shape of a seat.

The stool that resulted was remarkably sturdy for a stool. The completion of Guitar No. 1 in 2006 precluded my departure from music for several years. This was the aforementioned chapter of attempting to be useful to the world. Joining the Peace Corps was a strange attempt at best, but I didn't know any better. It cast me down a strange path amidst people and institutions that were severely foreign to me. Two years later, I had returned to the US seeking to capitalize on skills I had learned in the Peace Corps and found myself coordinating a non-profit. This hiatus towards normality ended when a friend noticed this aforementioned stool and requested I build him three or four. My compensation would be the tools and wood to build them, and he obliged. Tools were acquired, more stools were made, and with them returned the means to build guitars. After I had completed a couple of guitar projects, I quit my job, sold the guitars, and have been doing this guitar-building ever since.

So that early attempt at guitar building came full circle. I hesitate to say the story is over, although one shouldn’t lay any claim on the future. A year ago, I was doing something stupid, caused the stool to tip over, and nearly cracked my skull on a concrete floor. In this way, that stool story would have literally come full circle but would have had to have been written by someone else.