Guitar Artist

MUSIC CAN BE A PITILESS ADDICTION. One practices for years, puts together a band, plays for surly drunks, maybe gets knifed, sires a line of surly and grasping children, develops an addiction or two, eventually goes broke, goes to detox, perhaps goes to Jesus–and can’t get enough of it.

Along the way a fine instrument is often acquired, which is shown off like a trophy wife. In the best cases an instrument is commissioned from a renowned artisan and squired around like Elizabeth Taylor–before the rot sets in. And if you’re an acoustic guitar player, it doesn’t get much better than having Wayne Henderson, of Rugby, Virginia, craft you one of his signature models. That’s akin to having Bill Gates whip you up a personalized computer program, or having Fidel Castro roll you a box of cigars.

Interestingly enough, Henderson does not worship his customers nearly as much as they worship him, as we learn in this somewhat worshipful book by Allen St. John, a Wall Street Journal columnist with a guitar addiction of his own. Henderson seems to know something the high and mighty of rock and pop music tend to overlook: Rumors of musical genius are greatly exaggerated. That goes for Eric Clapton, the patron saint of rock guitarists, air and otherwise.

To understand the degree to which Clapton is worshipped, one need look no further than an early anecdote in which Clapton first encounters a Henderson guitar. The place was a New York recording studio, circa 1994. He was astounded by its tone and liked its flat fingerboard. When asked by its owner, a recording engineer, if he’d like one of his own, Clapton responded enthusiastically.

A few days later an unidentified man walked into the studio and asked to buy the guitar; he had heard that Clapton had played it and wanted to present it to his daughter, who adored the British legend. The guitar was not for sale, he was told.

“Yes, it is,” said the visitor, who wrote out a check for $100,000, waved it under the owner’s nose, then stood back to allow the money to work its magic. The visitor soon exited, guitar in hand. We assume it hasn’t been played since.

By contrast, Henderson, a somewhat impish man of around 60 years, is not the worshipful type, apparently at any level. He calls himself a “buzzard Baptist,” meaning his church attendance is mostly restricted to attending funerals. Guitars, he explains, do not come into being as a result of a mystical process: “You just get a pile of really nice wood and a sharp whittling knife. Then you just carve away everything that isn’t a guitar.”

He has a similar view of many of the people who play them, including Clapton, whose more devoted fans, Mr. St. John reminds us, hold that “Clapton Is God!” Henderson knows better. He’s an accomplished guitarist who plays gigs at Carnegie Hall, among other places. And he also seems to have the country boy’s view that lots of people can benefit by being taken down a few notches.

That viewpoint was in full flower during a telephone conversation with Clapton, retold by St. John, in which Clapton expressed concern about eventually coming to Rugby, population 7, to pick up the instrument Henderson was making for him. Henderson assured the great man that his presence would cause no problem.

“Aw, heck, I didn’t even know who you were till last year,” Henderson cracked. “And there’s only six other people in Rugby, and none of ’em even like your kind of music.” There was silence on the other end of the line, St. John writes, perhaps the sound of Clapton’s ego collapsing. This seems to have inspired Henderson to deliver another dose of reassurance: “I suppose that we could walk down Main Street buck naked and I reckon nobody’d care.”

In a world that worships celebrities, including those whose mediocrity is among their most profound characteristics, Henderson is a world-class dash of cold water. The effect is made ever more frigid by the fact that, until fairly recently, he augmented his guitar making business with a job as a rural mail carrier.

St. John seems somewhat bewildered by Henderson’s lack of reverence but clearly reveres him as both a musician and artisan. He also reminds us–unintentionally, one suspects–that the world of rock music includes pedantic blowhards of the first stripe, including the almost supernaturally inane Dave Marsh: “There are few moments in the repertoire of recorded rock where a singer or writer has reached so deeply into himself that the effect of hearing them is akin to witnessing a murder, or a suicide,” he is quoted. “To me, ‘Layla’ is the greatest of them.”

Amusingly enough, elsewhere St. John tells of the time he and Henderson were driving around when “Layla” came on the radio. When St. John informed Henderson he was listening to “Eric Clapton playing that old Martin,” the Sage of Rugby’s response was perfect: “‘Oh, yeah,’ he replied, only thinly disguising his complete lack of recognition.”

St. John has many pages to fill, so readers are presented with a detailed description of the process of building Clapton’s guitar. Those not particularly interested in the current state of the Brazilian rosewood supply, the amount of pressure six steel guitar strings exert on the wooden superstructure (200 pounds), and similar arcana, may find their minds drifting.

Fortunately, St. John includes some interesting tidbits from around the acoustic music world. Mark Twain, for example, once owned a Martin guitar, and Henry Ford, an enthusiastic fiddler, played old-time classics such as “Turkey in the Straw” on a 1703 Stradivarius. He also passes along some of Henderson’s jokes. The maestro and a few cronies trade wisecracks while he chisels away in his workshop: “Did you hear that they were going to do ‘CSI West Virginia’? But they ran into a problem. All the DNA was the same. And there weren’t any dental records.” A bit lame, by some measures, yet preferable to reciting Bruce Springsteen lyrics.

There’s also a footnote of interest to political obsessives: “A repairman working on Joan Baez’s vintage Martin 0-45 penciled ‘Too bad you are a Communist'” under the guitar’s top. “The message wasn’t discovered until years later, by another repairman, and Baez was so taken by the gesture, if not the sentiment, that when Martin produced a limited-edition reissue of her guitar, she requested that each of them bear that same inscription under the top.”

The most memorable aspect of this story, however, is Henderson’s deeply sane perspective. Near book’s end,

St. John writes that the craftsman does not have a website, has never taken out an advertisement, has no business cards, and hasn’t even bothered to put his name on his shop door. Fame is not a top priority.

As for Clapton, he never came to Rugby, perhaps fearing he would not be noticed, even if buck naked. That should be worth a historical marker of some sort.

Dave Shiflett is the author, most recently, of Exodus: Why Americans Are Fleeing Liberal Churches for Conservative Christianity.