In the generations before us, I know a number of people whose parents built their own houses.

Yes, and he worked. He got his master’s degree while he was working, he had a family, built a house, he refereed basketball.... I don’t know how he did it.

So I grew up in the suburbs of Buffalo, and I got a good education. I was supposed to follow in his footsteps, and I was good at all that. I went to Ohio State as an engineering student. I was good at math and science.

What about woodworking?

Somewhere I have the first thing I made in 7th grade shop. I don’t want you taking a picture. It is a little corner shelf. Everybody was given a pattern, and everybody followed it. I didn’t follow the pattern, and it was stupid looking. It made no sense. It had a flat bottom rather than one with a nice decorative ogee. The point is that I didn’t want to follow their preconceived patterns; I wanted to make my own. That was in me from the start. I just want to do things my own way.

You are all the way up to studying engineering in college. Back up to guitars and music.

I took piano lessons starting in 4th grade. In my memory my mother made me, but when I asked her she said, “Oh, no, your older sisters were taking lessons, so you wanted to take them, too.” I took lessons for a couple of years, and then I wanted to be in the band and play trumpet. My piano teacher said, “Don’t do that. Everybody wants to play trumpet. Play the French horn. There is less competition, and you can be first chair.” It’s like in baseball; everybody wanted to play second base, so if you played third base you got to play. So I did that, and I was first chair, and section leader, and I have a few awards and mementos from that period.

Then in seventh or eighth grade I heard this drummer named Sandy Nelson on the radio playing a song called “Let There Be Drums.” I got the 45, and I played it over and over. I went to the band teacher and told him I wanted to be a drummer, and he said, “No you’re not! You are our section leader, and we need you where you are.” So I bought some sticks and a couple of rubber practice pads, and I tried to teach myself the rudiments. I bought every Sandy Nelson album. I think I had eight, and he played the same thing on all of them. It was pretty repetitive, but it caught my attention.

The guy across the street played the guitar, so I would ask him to show me something. He would show me an E chord or something, and I would try it. He would laugh and say, “You can’t do that!” I don’t know why — it was just this challenge or something — but I all of a sudden wanted to play the guitar, and we started our first band together.

Was this an older kid?

No, he was a year younger than me. He actually went on to have some success. His stage name is Gurf Morlix. He lives in Austin, and he has produced Lucinda Williams.

What were you playing?

I got a Kent electric guitar. Horrendous. The action was terrible. We played the Beatles and the Beach Boys. I think “Louie Louie” was the first thing. He had a Harmony acoustic archtop. It was probably plywood, and it had a pickup. It did make a sound, but it had a big neck and was hard to play.

Some people we knew had real Fender guitars, and it was like, “Wow! This is a pleasure to play!” So my first thing in lutherie was figuring how to get my Kent guitar so I could play it. How do I get the strings down? My fingers were hurting! We put on lighter strings, and filed the nut down. My father had a workshop in the basement, and he had some files and stuff.

Did you get the strings down, and then discover you had fret problems?

Yeah. I never got as far as working on the frets. I just knew I needed a better guitar. I wanted a Fender, so I worked in the summer at a truck farm picking peas, and I saved my money. I took the bus into Buffalo and went the music stores looking for what I could afford, which ended up being a Fender Mustang. I think it was $150. I can remember someone trying to sell me a used gold-top Les Paul for $90. The guy handed it to me and I said, “No way! This is too heavy. That’s not what the Beach Boys play!” It had a big neck, and my friends had Fenders with really thin necks.

So I bought this Mustang, but it didn’t quite have the sound I wanted. I loved the music, but I was also interested in the equipment and the sound it produced. The Mustang was a little wimpy, so I started trading. I sold it and bought other things until I finally had a Telecaster that I liked a lot better. It was made out of ash, and was a little bit heavy. The really light ones were more plucky and thin, and had more of the sound they like in Nashville. Mine had a good powerful sound. And then I decided to put humbucking pickups in it.

Did you spend much time with that kind of work?

No. My first real woodworking project, outside of birdhouses and things in woodworking shop, was speaker cabinets, because I had to have an amplifier, cheap. I was fourteen or fifteen and I didn’t have money. I didn’t use routers much — just a skill saw, drills, and a jig saw — making panels and cutting holes for the speakers, screwing and gluing. That was really the start.

Did you play different amps, too?

I never had a good amp. I had little Fenders, like the Harvard or Princeton. I couldn’t afford a Super Reverb 4×10. That’s the one I wanted. You could get one used for $150, but that was a lot of money.

What was the name of the band?

I think the first name was The Plague. Then we toyed with the idea of The The. Later in the ’80s there was a band from England called The The. I remember our first gig at the community center. My parents hid my guitar and I didn’t get to play. They had their reasons: I wasn’t doing my homework. I was something like ten math assignments behind, so we had this running battle. After I found it I would hide it in the back of my speaker cabinet, and they didn’t figure that out for awhile.

That was their biggest parental lever.

Exactly. One time they must have put it in my father’s office in Buffalo, because I searched and searched that house whenever they were in church or something, and it was gone. I was always enough of a screw up that I could never be in a band. It was too difficult, but I always wanted to.

You never got on stage?

I could make it to practice. I did get on stage a couple of times — never at the community center — but I did do a couple of gigs for weddings or something. Really bad, like a pick-up band with no rehearsals, but at a wedding reception nobody cared. They would slur, “Hey, you guys are great!” It was quite embarrassing. But I managed to graduate high school, and I managed to go to engineering school, but I never did do my homework.

And engineering school was Ohio State?

Yes. They had a good engineering program, but I always felt I was going to be a musician. I went to college, but it didn’t last long. When you’re taking calculus and advanced chemistry classes, if you don’t do your work you can’t just go to the final exam and pass it.

I used to solve problems in a different way than was taught. My calculus class would be fascinated because sometimes the teacher would put a question on a test and the only person who could solve it was me, using some weird innate logical process, not what they had taught us.

I used to do that in geometry. Class was just after lunch, and I could never stay awake. When nobody else could solve a problem the teacher would wake me up to try and embarrass me, but I always got it.

That was a false confidence factor for me, so I didn’t go to classes. I would just hang out, or hitchhike to Antioch in Yellow Springs to see music and meet girls. But then I would go to the finals, and there was symbolism that I didn’t understand, and there was no way I could solve the problems, so they booted me out of college. If you didn’t make grade point you’re out. There was no leeway. The only thing I passed was basketball, because I knew the answers. I could take the final in basketball even though I didn’t go to classes.

Anyway, I decided I’d rather take philosophy and psychology. I didn’t want to be an engineer. What was I going to do, work for DuPont? I just couldn’t see it.

Once you’ve been kicked out of one college it’s hard to get into another one until you go to community college or something, but I had an in at Oswego State College in New York. My older sister was a sorority leader or something, and she pulled some strings and got me admitted. So I was at Ohio State from September to December, and by February I’m taking liberal arts at Oswego, which was this antiquated school that mainly put out teachers. I went to psychology class, and it was like seeing those black and white documentaries about psychology in the ’50s. It was 1969 by then, and there was this whole other world that they didn’t know existed. I decided that this was nonsense, so my roommate and I dropped out at Easter break. He was going to be a writer, and I was going to be a musician.

That was the end of my college education. By then I had a ES335 kind of guitar, and anything I had fit in the case, and I would just hitchhike from college to college — crash in the lounges, eat for free in the dorms and cafeterias, hang with friends, meet girls, and wait for summer.

Did you have any success with the music?

I met this guy in Oswego who played guitar and trumpet, and a drummer from New York who had jammed with Jimi Hendrix, and we decided to form a band. By this time I had gone through the blues, and I was interested in anything jazz-rock fusiony. The drummer was graduating from music school in Oswego, and the guitar player had transferred to the University of Buffalo in psychology, so I moved to Buffalo and waited for him to graduate. Then we had a band! We had a big place to practice above a bar. We tried to get a bass player. We were interesting, but not sellable. People wanted to hear Jethro Tull, but I liked music that was hard to make a living at — instrumental jazz-rock fusion like John McLaughlin and the Mahavishnu Orchestra, or Herbie Hancock’s Head Hunters album. Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew album is my all-time favorite.

I love that album, but people either love it or hate it.

That was my ultimate. So we tried to have this band, Big Wooba — don’t ask me why. We decided that we better move to San Francisco. I thought LA, but they said San Francisco was way cool, so in ’73 we moved to San Francisco. We played what we called “the new electric music,” but in ’Frisco they were into the Grateful Dead, and there wasn’t much jazz rock, so we had temporary jobs.

How did you get back into woodworking?

I had a girlfriend who worked at a place that had a computer timeshare. They needed something to feed their paper through. I happened to have a skill saw and some other tools, and I knew how to make speaker cabinets, so I said, “I can make that.” I made this thing, and they wanted another one, and all of sudden it dawned on me that I could make things out of wood, make money, and be independent. There was a back porch I could work on, and I was making a living. It was unbelievably cheap to live in San Francisco back then. I rented a house on Fillmore and Duboce. It had a basement for a shop, and I had three roommates. I think our monthly rent was $40 each!

Then one day I saw a book by Donald Brosnac called Electric Guitar: History and Construction in a corner store. I opened it up, and thought, “Wow! This is totally doable.” So I decided to make a guitar.

The first instrument I built was kind of a copy of a Fender bass for a lefty bass player friend. I even made the case. He still has it, and it’s a decent instrument. The worst thing was the finish. I didn’t know how to spray lacquer, so I brushed on shellac and polished it as well as I could. But I could do the woodwork, and the frets, and I could get a nice feel. This was about ’76.

I was starting to call myself a guitar maker, and I was getting better and better, but I was still building furniture. The good thing about building guitars was that I was beginning to use some exotic woods, and if I met some architects who wanted a desk or a conference table made out of something like birds’-eye maple I knew how to see that. So all of a sudden I started getting nicer work because of the guitars, and that was better than building plain cabinets. I started to do better, and I was collecting tools. I still thought I was going to be a musician, but I needed to make money. I did the guitar thing for about three years. I also did the electronics. I made active circuits to modify tone. But mainly I made a living building furniture. It was too hard to sell guitars. I had a guitar at Don Weir’s Music City that was in a showcase — a Flying X. It was a weird instrument, but it looked good. And I had some guitars at Stars Guitars, but they were hard to sell, and I was making better money with furniture, so I stopped. From ’79 to ’89 I didn’t make any guitars. I just got burned out on it.