|
Fahey's Recording King Reborn |
From
Acoustic Guitar, October 2001, No. 106 © 2001 String Letter Publishing.
All rights reserved. For more information on Acoustic Guitar, contact
String Letter Publishing, PO Box 767, San Anselmo, CA 94979;(415) 485-6946;
fax (415) 485-0831; http://www.stringletter.com |
|
|
John Fahey was not known to play fancy instruments. He tended to pick up inexpensive guitars and then pawn them when he needed cash. During his heyday in the late ’60s and early ’70s, Fahey was partial to a 1930s Gibson Recording King with a sunburst top and a bell-like tone. He used it to record some of his most enduring albums, including America, Of Rivers and Religion, After the Ball, and Fare Forward Voyagers. |
  |
|
 |
||
|
Sometime around 1974, Fahey smashed the Recording King in a fit of rage. A friend gathered together all the pieces of splintered wood and planned to someday put them back together. In the early ’80s, Wisconsin guitar maker Fred Sheppard gave Fahey a lap-slide guitar, and in a deal Sheppard refers to as "a convoluted kind of a trade," Fahey bequeathed him the pieces of the Recording King. Sheppard, too, put the project on hold for nearly a decade and was finally propelled to make it happen after Fahey’s untimely death earlier this year. |
||
| Fingerstyle
guitarist Peter Lang, one of Fahey’s friends and protégés,
told Sheppard that he’d be recording "Witness to the Messenger"
16 days later for a forthcoming Fahey tribute album. Sheppard unplugged
his phone, locked himself in his shop, and spent the next two weeks madly
refurbishing the guitar. While the top was pretty much intact, the rest
of the guitar was absolutely shredded—the left side alone, for example,
sported 24 major cracks. "I recognized that the guitar was a piece
of Americana that needed to be preserved," Sheppard explains, "and
I didn’t want to replace the sides. I wanted to use every single
scrap of the material that was in the guitar when John had it." |
 |
|
|
|
||
| He
rebuilt the guitar from the back up, using hide glue and more than 150
lightweight spruce and rosewood cleats. "I also had to put a new
bridge plate in, because it was toast," he says. "The headblock
where the dovetail goes in was in five pieces, and I had to remove a lot
of the braces and reglue them into a flat position." As he assembled
the body and top, Sheppard could only hope they would fit together when
he was done. "It was an absolute perfect fit," he recalls, "like
two pieces of broken glass! When I brought it up to pitch, there was no
doubt in my mind that this was the guitar used on those records. It’s
got that indescribable quality, and it sustains for ten full seconds!"
Lang strung the Recording King with GHS light-gauge strings (the kind Fahey used), and he too was overjoyed with the familiar tone. "It sounded like a choir of angels," he says. "Fred didn’t do a whole lot with cosmetics. The main thing was to get it playable. With all the cracks, I felt a little bit nervous playing it, but Fred assured me that it’s solid. Hide glue is amazing stuff."
—Simone
Solondz |
||
