In 1970 I saw an article about Jimmy D’Aquisto in Guitar Player. Here was a role model for me. This guy was doing what he wanted to do, all by himself, and selling the results for money. Plus, famous players were digging his work and magazines came to take pictures of him. He became the hero of my teen years. Of course, if I had spent those years at the feet of a master, like Jimmy did, I might have been better prepared to make guitars. As it was, I studied the one available book on the subject, Sloane’s Classic Guitar Making.

By the fall of 1971 I hadn’t learned much more but being seventeen years old gave me more than enough confidence to go ahead and hang out a shingle. You know what they say: being seventeen is the next best thing to being omniscient. I forewent my senior year of high school to open a tiny shop in a hippie artist’s mall.

In my new shop, I really believed I could make or fix anything in the nature of a string instrument. The potential for terrible blunders was great, but thank God I didn’t ruin anything important and I only had to give one guy his money back. Obsession gave me the will to invest a whole lot of time in lutherie work, and I gradually started to get the hang of it.

Deb and I got married in the fall of ’73. We bought a strange old barn of a place on the south end of Tacoma, a structure that has always looked to me like a cross between a dirigible hanger and a wild-west hotel. It was the 1891-vintage local meeting hall of the Independent Order of Odd Fellows, but the fellows were getting odder all the time and couldn’t support a dance hall with a mystic meeting temple upstairs with the few members they had left. They asked a low price, and we countered with a lower one, which they happily accepted. I built a 4'×30' workbench and hung out a shingle. Deb worked retail to support us. It is my impression that the American lutherie boom would have been impossible without working wives.

Lutherie was my full-time work in the ’70s, and the Guild was a volunteer project. My two partners, Bob Petrulis and Leo Bidne, and I, got so we could do some pretty good repair work. Ours was the only shop in a city of 250,000. I made some acoustic guitars and Bob and I collaborated on some ambitious solidbodies. In ’78 and ’79 I made a few guitars that still look pretty good to me, and they still play well and sound good, too. I’d say I was just turning the corner to being a journeyman luthier. I was about 25.

By the fall of 1979 my lutherie career was over. The Guild was taking up a lot of my time and making it difficult to keep my guitarmaking business going. Then, while we were frantically preparing for the 1980 convention in San Francisco, a chimney fire got into the attic and burned the roof off our house. I planned to take a year off from lutherie work and rebuild the house, then go back to the bench. Of course, a year later we had hardly begun the enormous remodeling and rebuilding job, but the lutherie monkey was on my back and I still expected to get back to it full time. By 1985 I had to admit that the right thing to do was to remake my shop space into an office so we could bring the Guild back in-house after renting squalid and inadequate office space for over five years. Still, I exempted an 11'×25' room at one end for my power tools and wood stash, thinking that I would be returning to a serious amount lutherie activity as soon as I got a few things fixed up. But after another dozen years of withdrawal symptoms and two kids, I’ve finally had to face it. I’m never going to be a luthier again. I sold my 32" bandsaw to a Guild member and put the best of my lutherie wood in an attic for future generations.

What were you thinking when you first responded to that ad in guitar player back in 1972?

In my letter to J.R. Beall I sent a donation, which I could ill afford, of $11.11, and said that I hoped the new Guild would be inclusive of electric guitar makers. That’s because I was making mostly electric guitars at that time and I didn’t want to be left out.

How is the Guild different from 20 years ago? Is it everything you thought it would be?

More. I thought it would be a source of lutherie information. It certainly was that, and has grown far past anything I imagined in the first years. In fact, the Guild turned out quite different from what it first seemed it would be. J.R. Beall, whose idea it was, wrote up a proposal which called for conventions and publications, ideas which we have implemented with great success. But his proposal also called for a system of skill categories. There would be apprentices, journeymen, and masters, each paying a different annual fee and having different privileges. The Guild would also be a watchdog organization, publicly castigating recalcitrant merchants and craftsmen.

I never liked the idea of skill ratings. Initially this was because I was not about to do all the work to set up a system that would pronounce me inferior! But there were four other reasons I didn’t go for it. Firstly, it’s too darn much work. Believe me when I tell you that our information sharing activities are enough work, and that to categorize, test, and check up on 2500 members, as well as answer all their gripes as to why so-and-so is a master and they are not, would be an administrative nightmare. Secondly, it is by definition elitist, and that which is elitist is divisive. The point of an elitist organization is to keep somebody out. Why go to all that trouble just to reduce your readership and make your information more expensive per copy? Thirdly, it is unnecessary. With brain surgeons or jet pilots, it is necessary in the interest of public safety to certify competency. But we are only talking about guitars and fiddles here. A customer can ask around and get adequate assurances from other clients. If there is a big problem with scamming, con-man luthiers, I’m not aware of it. Lastly, this whole hierarchy thing is just a load of crap. That’s why it was fun to mock it as a hippie teenager. From it, there drifts the foul stench of the arrogance and distrust that is an unfortunate part of our materialistic and competitive culture. I understand that we lazily fall into these patterns as a result of our cultural programming, and prompted by our baser instincts to build ourselves up by cutting others down. But we can be better than that. We can choose to be cooperative, inclusive, supportive, tolerant, eclectic, respectful, courteous and imaginative. The Guild is living proof of it.

Is the Guild all that it can be?

The form and general activities of the Guild are about what they can be given our current resources of money and personnel. We strive to improve our efficiency and we are making good progress in that area. But until we can handle our current tasks in a more timely manner, I’d say we won’t be adding much to our agenda. Not one single issue of American Lutherie has ever been mailed on time. That is something to think about.

But I think, Todd, that your question runs deeper than that, and on a more thoughtful level, no, the Guild is not all that it can be. Within our current framework we can become much more. With the help of the membership we can provide information which is more diverse, more succinct, better illustrated, and more complete. We can present more where our coverage has been weaker. We can do more to nourish the thoughts and convictions of luthiers, as opposed to their strictly informational needs. And we can do it faster and more attractively. I believe we have made significant moves in that direction in the last few years.

Is the Guild successful? Why do you think the Guild has enjoyed the success that it has?

We have managed to stay focused. The Guild has had one goal: to provide an information sharing system for the advancement of lutherie. In that, it has been wonderfully successfully. The craft has advanced quickly and dramatically since the Guild’s first faltering steps in 1972, and I believe that our publications and meetings have played a role in that advancement. Since that has been our only goal and we have far exceeded our wildest dreams for it, I would have to give an unqualified positive answer to your question. The Guild is successful! Let me echo the words of Murray Eaton in our motto: “The Guild is great, the Guild is good. The Guild is great and good!”

What makes the Guild different from other organizations? What makes the Guild what it is?

There are lots of organizations in the world, such as political parties and labor unions, where people come together only to get what they can while giving only what they must, where each individual struggles to promote his or her own self interest against that of the other guy. People justify such behavior with statements like “We are hammering out our ideas!” But in the process, they are also hammering the life out of the human spirit; they are hammering the hand innocently extended in cooperation. This Darwinian model of communication and idea formation should be entirely beneath the dignity of luthiers or any other civilized persons.

The Guild’s original members were people who wanted to share what little information and experience they had for the benefit of each other and the advancement of the craft. With a few notable exceptions, these were mostly people like me who were young, idealistic, self-taught, naive, starving, and largely ignorant. It could be argued that we had nothing to lose by pooling what little we had. Maybe so. And if ignorance led us to do the right thing and start a good snowball rolling, it wouldn’t be the first time that the Lord had worked in a mysterious way. In any case, I believe that good people were attracted to a good idea, and that their desire to help others has been the foundation of the Guild’s success. I am particularly pleased to see that as the lutherie community has become far more knowledgeable and successful over the years, our members’ commitment to the Guild’s underlying ideas of sharing and mutual assistance has only strengthened.

Obviously there have been trials and storms during the these 20 years, and we have had the good fortune to weather them. Have the hard times strengthened your conviction and commitment to the Guild doing?

There have been some very lean times in our history, and some painful storms as well. At first the Guild was an ever-increasing distraction from what I felt was my calling, namely lutherie. Then working for the Guild involved financial hardship which ground on year after year. Lately the Guild dominates my life in a way that seems out of balance with my other responsibilities, particularly as a father of two young sons. The worst storm involved an attempt to derail the Guild from its founding principles and take it in an elitist direction. In the end, we were faced with a choice to let the Guild be destroyed in principle, or to fight for it. We fought, and won a clear victory in court. Since then, we have gone on to produce our best magazines and conventions and to enjoy our largest membership ever. That painful episode has further strengthened my conviction that the Guild’s success is based on it’s adherence to right principle.

Where did the Guild’s principles come from? Let’s be frank about it; they came from me. Or might I say, they came through me. The original idea for the Guild was J.R. Beall’s, as explained in this issue by R.E. Bruné. J.R. asked me to send a newsletter to a list of 40 interested people, and soon he had turned the whole Guild thing over to me. I took it up with the help of the people in my immediate circle, as Bon explains elsewhere in this issue. J.R. had a vision of the Guild that included a skill level hierarchy, and there were others who suggested organizing marketing efforts and trying to provide union-style services and benefits. But since it was I who was given the job of translating the Guild from a rough idea into a functioning reality, I built it up in accordance with my vision, based on my
principles.

In the fall of 1971, about a year before I saw J.R.’s ad in Guitar Player, I had become a Bahá’í. I found in Bahá’u’lláh’s teachings not only the answers to the problems that had vexed me as a Christian, but the way to redeem a world hurtling toward self-destruction. The principles of unity, inclusion, abandonment of prejudices, and problem-solving through consultation became basic to my life, and I have tried, to the best of my feeble ability, to be guided by them. Consequently, these Bahá’í principles became the underlying ideas of the Guild.

In Bahá’í consultation, the idea is for each person to put the good of the group above their own, listen to each other member with courtesy and respect, and offer what they can in a spirit of humility and with the aim of building on what others have offered, to reach a point which is closer to the always unreachable goal of Truth. This process is in stark contrast to the political, “hammering out our ideas” model so often used in our culture, which tends to leave needlessly battered losers on one side and glorified winners on the other. Bahá’ís use this method because it is a kinder and more loving approach which places proper value on all of God’s children. But we also use it because it works!

The experience of the Guild shows how successful this kind of approach can be for an educational organization such as we are. I feel that the Guild has offered a safe haven for a thousand-sided discussion. It has been the vehicle for a large number of people to progress in their understanding of a very complex subject. And while it has been the place where thousands of valuable business connections have been made, I am much more gratified that it has been the place where human connections are made, where people find kindred souls with whom they can share their efforts to perfect their instruments and themselves.

Many values that are important in my own life are ideals that the Guild strives to communicate. As an example, the concept that everyone has something to learn from everyone else is a cornerstone of this organization. It relates to people treating each other as equals and having respect for one another. Participating in this organization provides another opportunity for me to express and help further these ideas in the world.

The Guild is a micro-step in the direction of building a culture which values and respects people, and one which values and celebrates the talents of its artists and craftsmen.

What is the relationship between who you are as a person and your work with the Guild? Does your work with the Guild help your relationship with the world at large or your ideas and values?

Publishing a magazine is a lot like lutherie work. You are basically operating in your own little world, playing with your own highly specialized toys which seem extravagant to outsiders, having contact with only a few selected people, and producing something which has lasting value for the use of others. I seem to be just as obsessed with publishing as I was with guitarmaking. (Just where the line is between dedication, obsession, and addiction is still under discussion.)

Working for the Guild is my opportunity to serve. It is an enormous satisfaction to me that so many of our members feel the Guild is useful to them, that it furthers their strivings toward excellence. There were years when that was my only reason for producing Guild publications, and it was a powerful reason.

Luthiers, I have noticed, are hard-working people. Long hours at the bench and relentless striving for improvement are the norm in this field, although the earning power of lutherie is still poor, on the average. Bahá’u’lláh says that work, no matter how humble or esoteric, is, when undertaken in a spirit of service, identical to worship of God. When we make good use of the talents God has given us, we give glory to God. That makes luthiers a very worshipful lot!

The members of the Guild give me the precious opportunity to serve them. I believe that the work of the Guild is a good thing which contributes in a small way to the general good of mankind, and something which will live on to be of benefit to future generations. And in the final analysis, my service to people is the worship I offer to my Creator.