Just in case you were wondering what I do in my spare time…
As many of you know, I’m kind of in love with the guitars of Michael Gurian. Not the “The Trouble With Boys” guy – he doesn’t make guitars. Well, neither does my Michael Gurian – but at least he used to. Our story begins on Carmine St. in New York City, back in the days when “Inside Llewelen Davis” was tomorrow night’s bill at the White Horse Tavern a few blocks away. Our Mr. Gurian was one of the leaders of the renaissance of modern American handcrafted guitarmaking. After he got his start down there in the Village, he moved to New Hampshire, where he and his cohorts happily handcrafted guitars until the early 1980s, at which point he simply stopped. He’s now enjoying life as an obscure luthiering legend, doing custom woodworking for furniture and guitar makers in a bustling woodshop on a barge in the Seattle, Washington harbor.
I fell in love with my first Gurian guitar at Mr. Music in Allston more than fifteen years ago now. I bought it used, and proceeded (as you can all tell) to beat the hell out of it. Because beating the hell out of it occasionally results in one of my strings succumbing to the torture, I bought a second Gurian several years later, to beat the hell out of in those rare cases where the first one is indisposed. And for years now, I’ve been obsessed with finding a Gurian cutaway to subject to the same sort of mistreatment.
Why? I’m still not sure. I think it goes back to my days in my ska band, where guitars played by cool people (us) had cutaways, and guitars played by non-cool people (you folk musicians) did not. Hell, some electric guitars had a cutaway above the fretboard too, just to drive the point home. Perhaps the idea was that we didn’t need so much stinkin’ guitar, or something. In any case, whatever the reason, now that I’m them instead of us, I still seem to feel the same way: it’s just cool.
But the problem is that Gurian cutaways are mighty hard to find. Sure, every so often one of them is auctioned off on eBay, but I’ve yet to win a single auction. The last time, some fool didn’t even auction it off – he just put it up for sale at 4 AM, and it was gone at 4:06. So a few years ago, when I noticed that there was a guitar store in California that had one of these things for sale – for an ungodly amount of money, mind you – I filed it away in my little brain.
Well, it’s still there, three years later. And I happen to be going to California.
So I called up the store, and spoke to the manager, and it turns out that it hasn’t been there for three years – it’s been there for twelve. At least. It was there when the manager was hired, and it’s still there today, gathering dust and taking up precious room on his display wall, as I like to think. I imagine that the problem is that it’s a bit of a dog (good for me, since I plan on beating the hell out of it, as we’ve already discussed), it’s overpriced (or so I claim), and hardly anyone on the West Coast has heard of our friend Mr. Gurian (true fact). The manager has sent me photographs, and I’ve sent him a record of every Gurian cutaway sold on eBay for the last decade (yes, I keep a list of every Gurian sale – you wanna make something of it?). And neither of us has scared the other away yet. I’m told that the owner has sent the guitar to their luthier to “spruce it up”, as if it’s a fading starlet with a double chin – I think he smells money, but I doubt he smells as much money as he thinks.
Will I return, triumphantly, from vacation, new guitar in hand, or at least en route? Or will this particular Gurian fail to enchant me, or fail to descend to a mutually acceptable price? Tune in next month for our thrilling conclusion.