For those of you who missed our last episode, I’ve been obsessed, for many years now, by the concept of a Gurian cutaway. Although one of my musician friends condemns them because “they’re not shaped like women”, for me, a cutaway guitar, with the bite taken out of the body right below the neck, has always said “rock’n’roll” – play a cutaway, and you’re already cooler than the guy next to you. And the combination of the craftmanship of Michael Gurian, luthier extraordinaire, with rock’n’roll godhood, well – let’s just say the prospect left me inappropriately giddy. And Tall Toad Music, in Petaluma, CA, had one in stock. And I – my, how the coincidences seem to pile up – was on my way to the Bay Area.
It should be noted, at this point, that I was not on my way to the Bay Area to look at this guitar, exactly. My wife, She Who Must Be Taunted, and I have many friends scattered around San Francisco and its environs, and February always seems like a marvelous month not to be here. But certainly, if I was going to be out in the Bay Area, Tall Toad Music was going to be on our itinerary.
Tall Toad is in an old California downtown (well, as old as California downtowns get, I suppose; SWMBT and I visited History Park, in San Jose, where we viewed multiple salvaged and restored historical buildings which look almost exactly – yawn – like the ones in my neighborhood). It’s an honest-to-God old fashioned instrument store. They’re lined up in rows along the wall; they’re hanging from the ceiling, like bats. The Gurian was waiting for me – I imagine that it was tingling with excitement, having been told all about me – and I went upstairs to play it, with SWMBT and her trusty ears by my side.
And I didn’t want it.
I was going to say “hated”, but I didn’t hate it – it just didn’t interest me at all. It was a beautiful instrument, sweet and clear – and those of you who know my music know how bad an idea a guitar like that would be. I couldn’t get it to make any sort of statement at all – no punch, no grit, no gravel, no guts. It took me all of five minutes to try it, walk it downstairs, thank the nice people, and leave.
And so the quest is over. “But wait”, you say. “Don’t give up! Every instrument is different!” True enough, but I’ve learned in the meantime that the Gurian cutaways are his smaller-sized instruments, and I’m kinda suspecting that the whole quest thing was a mistake from the beginning – I won’t like any of them, is my guess.
It’s not like I needed another Gurian – I already have two, for heaven’s sake, and the second one barely gets played. I’m about as far from Nigel Tufnel as you can possibly get. I was already wondering how I’d fit the cutaway into the rotation, since, as I’ve said, there actually isn’t a rotation – it’s just me and the first Gurian I bought, while the second, understudy Gurian sits around waiting for me to break a string on stage. So it’s likely that, in retrospect, this quest was about as well thought out as, say, the Children’s Crusade, but at least I wasn’t sold into slavery.
Three things can happen at the end of a quest, I suppose. You can win your heart’s desire (e.g., SWMBT, although to be honest, she was the one who asked me to marry her, and it was six weeks after we met, so, I guess, no, not much of a quest); you can fail and slink home in humiliation (see Children’s Crusade, above); or you can just, well, lose your interest in questing. Of these, the last is by far the weirdest. There’s an unfilled space, one you just decided to leave empty, one that you need to decide what to fill with. It’s an odd feeling.
On the other hand, I do have to finish that damn album. And as an epic tale of frustration and failure, nothing beats recording in my book. Maybe I’m not done questing, quite yet.