Love story with strings attached

In “Guitar: An American Life,” Tim Brookes takes us on a riveting autobiographical odyssey through a charged, emotional world atremble with soulful yearnings, suspense and evolving American musical styles.

Just before Brookes turned 50, airport baggage handlers snapped the neck of his 22-year-old handcrafted guitar, a beloved remnant of his flighty single life and an uncomplaining companion through two failed marriages and a successful one.

Heartbroken over the loss of an instrument bought “in 1980, when I was an unfinished person, a collection of bits and pieces, surviving by my wits until a better idea occurred to me,” Brookes sets out to replace it with a “dream guitar.”

On the advice of friends, he chooses master luthier Rick Davis, whose house in the Vermont hamlet of Jonesville is home and headquarters of Running Dog Guitars, to help him fashion it from raw materials.

Their relationship is tense from the start. Brookes despairs of ever holding another instrument he could love as much as the Fylde, the handmade English folk guitar he lost. Davis, it seems, is fed up with inlay and pearl that suggest “fifty oysters died for this guitar,” and refuses to build a dreadnought, which has a big, booming design with strong bass, loud treble, but no middle.

They settle on a jumbo concert-style with a full range and a cutaway design so Brookes can reach those flashy jazz chords nearest the body.

Then, as the guitar takes shape on Davis’ cluttered workbench -- from lustrous planks of Vermont cherry wood for the back and sides to reinforcement braces, truss rods, epoxy and fine lacquer finish -- Brookes takes us through the tumultuous history of the hollow, wooden instrument that has never lost its hip edge.

A wealth of anecdotes and opinions about famous as well as obscure musicians -- and guitar makers -- makes you want to grab a guitar and crank out a few bars of the Stones’ “Satisfaction,” or Willie Dixon’s “I’m Ready.”

Take his chapters on picks -- Carl Perkins used a tooth from a comb, Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top uses a peso -- and players’ obsession with keeping long, strong fingernails. “You start off playing guitar to get chicks,” muses New Hampshire guitar player Ed Gerhard, “and end up talking with middle-aged men about your fingernails.”

Brookes begins 2,500 years ago when the first wooden stringed instruments with fretted necks and hollow bodies appeared in the artwork of the Hittites, early inhabitants of what is now Turkey. The guitar sailed to the New World with French Huguenots. The last century saw it reinvented by Hawaiians who tuned their guitars to open chords, Italian jazz guitarists, Mexican American ballad singers, singing cowboys and wannabe Bob Dylans.

He tells of the pioneers -- including the astonishing Maybelle Carter, who invented counterintuitive bass-string licks in the 1920s that eventually became a staple of rockabilly and country players.

Another revolution took place at the turn of the last century in the rural South, where poor African Americans using rubber bands and cigar boxes began playing blues, a basic 12-bar form that is divided into three sections of four bars each and three-line stanzas.

From the blues came rock ‘n’ roll, rhythm and blues and the 1960s onslaught of British rock bands.

Brookes wryly points out that “one of the great ironies of the British Invasion was that it was a guitar-based musical movement that came from a land with virtually no guitar tradition at all.” That, it turned out, was good because it spurred innovation. In less than a decade, Britain roared from the entry-level styles of such skiffle players as Tony Donegan to the psychedelia-tinged finger work of guitar gods like Jimmy Page.

But it was first in Elvis Presley’s hands, Brookes says, that the guitar became “dangerous, repulsive, and, at long last, cool.” “This is why men fall in love with men who play the guitar: the power, freedom, the screaming girl fans. The invulnerability,” he writes.

It is also why the front row at any guitarist’s show is packed with “finger-watchers, sitting in that half-leaning-forward position, frowning slightly, their eyes -- our eyes -- flicking back and forth between what the left and right hands are doing.”

Brookes’ heartfelt stories suggest “fretted Americana” continues to evolve. His loving blend of lore and craft makes this a book a must for guitarists. And it just might coax former players to pick up guitars that have been gathering dust in closets. *