Martin N20-Willie's Trigger

[beej]

Wow! the routine they go through to keep that guitar playing....

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/trigger?utm_source=pocket-newtab

it might have been purchased by a budding flamenco guitarist or a Segovia wannabe. Instead it was sent to a guitarist in Nashville named Shot Jackson, who repaired and sold guitars out of a shop near the Grand Ole Opry. In 1969 it was bought by a struggling country singer, a guy who had a pig farm, a failing marriage, and a crappy record deal.

Willie Nelson had a new guitar.

Forty-three years later—after some 10,000 shows, recording sessions, jam sessions, songwriting sessions, and guitar pulls, most taking place amid a haze of tobacco and reefer smoke and carried out with a particular brand of string-pounding, neck-throttling violence—the guitar looks like hell. The frets are so worn it's a wonder any tone emerges at all. The face is covered in scars, cuts, and autographs scraped into the wood. Next to the bridge is a giant maw, a gaping hole that looks like it was created by someone swinging a hammer.

The Martin had become the most important part of Willie's sound, and keeping it intact became a top priority. This job fell to Poodie Locke, Willie's stage manager. In the mid-seventies Poodie had gone to see a young Austin luthier and repairman named Mark Erlewine, who had a shop on Guadalupe Street, north of the University of Texas campus. Poodie needed someone to look after the guitar and invited Erlewine to meet Willie. They met at the Austin Opry House bar, and Willie told Erlewine, "Just keep my guitar going—as long as it's working, I'll be working."

Erlewine cleaned the raw white spruce around the hole, then sealed it with lacquer. "Spruce is a very soft wood," he says, "and everything that gets in—sweat, beer—affects it." The Martin already had its first autographs, courtesy of Leon Russell, who etched his in with a knife, and Johnny Bush, who used a ballpoint pen.

Poodie began taking the guitar to Erlewine whenever the band took a break from touring. He was especially worried about the hole, which was getting bigger as Willie dug his fingers into the wood. Just as troubling, the wood around the hole was getting thinner. "It was so thin," says Erlewine, "you could have accidentally put your finger through it." He placed a couple of short mahogany braces under the soundboard to shore it up. Willie played so hard, and his fingers attacked such a wide area—from the bridge to the sound hole, above it and below it to the edges of the guitar—that Erlewine had to clean a lot of wood. He used cotton diapers and naphtha solvent, pushing out the dead skin and dirt. Then he'd lacquer the guitar and buff it. He'd go over the fretboard with steel wool, then rub it down with lemon oil.

Every time Poodie brought in the guitar, it had more autographs. Some were famous musicians—Roger Miller, Johnny Cash, Kris Kristofferson—and others were members of Willie's band or crew: Paul English, Poodie, Budrock Prewitt, and Tune'n Tom, a.k.a. Tom Hawkins, who had become the guitar's caretaker on the road, changing strings every three or four gigs and tuning it up. Some signed the guitar in Magic Marker or Sharpie, and their names were soon lost in the blood, sweat, and beers of the nightlife. Others scratched them in with a ballpoint pen but didn't push deep enough, and their names too slowly faded. Soon Willie lost track of exactly who had signed his guitar.

He and his band were touring all the time; by the mid-eighties they were on the road six months out of the year. His singing and playing were getting more idiosyncratic. He pretty much played the same songs every night but not the same notes. Most guitarists are either the rhythm player or the lead player: they strum or they solo. Willie strummed, but he also played single-note leads, two-note gypsy chords, and arpeggiated solos in which he would (as Django had) play the notes of the chord as well as others around it. He'd bend the strings so far it seemed they would break. Then he'd throw in a blues riff.

This all took a toll on Willie's equipment. He wore away even more of the soundboard, revealing the braces already there, which forced Erlewine to attach more mahogany braces, as well as "cleats," little pieces of spruce that bolstered the thinning wood. Eventually the hole stopped growing. But there were other problems. By this point, someone had dropped the guitar on its input jack, which was set in the side of the guitar, and the wood around it had split. This hole was covered with a small metal plate, and the jack was moved to the very bottom of the guitar. The insides of the Baldwin amp were also wearing out, but fans would give Willie their old Baldwin amps, and his people would then cannibalize them.

Willie was rough on his guitar even when he wasn't playing it. Erlewine found himself having to replace the guitar's tuning pegs, because the one for the D string kept breaking. "The old man's got this nervous habit," Poodie explained to Erlewine. During shows, after Willie played a song, he would fidget with the D-string peg, turning it up and down, which was ruining the gears. Willie had no idea he was doing this, and Erlewine usually had to replace the pegs every four or five years, though one set lasted all of nine months.

In 1989 the band was touring in Southern California when Poodie brought the guitar to Rick Turner's shop in Los Angeles. The bridge had split and broken off. Willie had a show the next day, and Turner had 24 hours to repair it. "We gotta get it fixed," Poodie told Turner. "When the guitar can't go on, he won't go on." Usually it takes a minimum of 48 hours to properly build, glue, and set a new bridge, but Turner did it in a day. Willie and his guitar hit the road again.