Mule

I showed up to the steel Quonset hut reflecting the 118 degree air back hotter yet. 15 yards past the spray booth were piled up junk cars. Surrounding the yard were rusty barbed wire fences too high to climb. 

I was 19 years old and I had flown from Michigan to the distant planet of Phoenix, AZ.  In Michigan we have a mere 200 miles less of coastline than California and all of it is drinkable. In Phoenix sometimes you couldn't get water from the tap.  Growing up in Michigan grade schools you could check your firearm into the office on opening day.  Here they told us to check our shoes for bugs that might kill us. In the Mitten the air hurts our face from October-March, here during summer you couldn't hold the steering wheel. 

I couldn't try to capture the spirit of the man before my time, John Roberts, aka "Juan Roberto", the school's founder.  The alias picked because it sounded more suitable for a luthier.  The wood to start the school was apparently torn from old boats. His multi-neck, turquoise inlaid acoustic guitar is a folk icon to the spirit of this place - the headquarters for the motorcycle club of the guitar making world - The Roberto-Venn School of Luthiery.  I could, however, attempt to capture the spirit of the place through it's past and present leaders.

I was 19, keep in mind, and had never been anywhere except Chicago where everyone is from Michigan or Wisconsin anyways. My bench at Roberto-Venn was next to a pagan, a jew, and an atheist who read Bertrand Russell at lunch. The director of training spent more time telling us about spirituality,, the cyclical nature of all things, and the times he's had his friends leave him in the desert to walk back home than he did how make instruments. The main instructor is more football coach than he is teacher, has played in the best Grateful Dead Cover band on the planet for 30 years while missing the same finger Jerry Garcia was plus another.  The other instructors have equally unequalled personalities. Vibrant characters you couldn't make up. They wonderful. 

I remember once I was gluing my sandpaper to a glass block incorrectly. John Reuter, the football coach one, walked by, recognized what he saw two steps past, and let out words that made my stomach drop, "Demo in the hut!" That was the signal for the entire class to stop what they were doing and gather in the place and around the voice saying it.   I was seated at my bench and I had 42 people standing around me.

"What's wrong with this?" John asked the class. 

My friend Brian mercifully raised his hand.  It was an honorable death. 

"His caul is clamped upside-down." Brian said, making eye contact with me to let me know it would be over soon.

"That's right. Go away." John said.  

Brian might have put his hand on my shoulder.  Maybe I'm making that part up. 

And yet sometimes the first bout of public discipline doesn’t take. 

I was “driving the bus”. I had assembled the rim of the guitar and was turning the whole thing back and forth in a sanding dish. I was attempting to make it match the form so you could see no light between the form and the rim.  I was doing this outside in the heat and it was taking me hours. It was hot and my blood is made of snow. The mold wasn’t heavy but it wasn’t easy to move.  More sanding, check. More sanding, check.  I chased gaps all day.   Eventually John, cigarette in his mouth,holding a slab of ziricote as long as his truck, walked by.  “John, can you check this?” I said. My shoulder length hair was a sweaty mess. It was a hail mary. Maybe I’d get lucky and could stop. 

John leaned his head inline with the rim on the form. It took him longer to lean over than it did for him to see daylight. He picked up his board, threw his cigarette into the parking lot and walked inside without saying a word. Brian again with his hand on my shoulder. 

What John Reuter teaches is that how you do shit matters. People don't change unless there's consequences. Most people can't make themselves uncomfortable to change until some cosmic force like embarrassment in front of your future peers does that for you. What he teaches is why do anything unless you’re going to take it seriously and submit to rules other than the ones your brain makes up to let you off the hook. Because this is not about you. Could there be a more important lesson for these modern times? 

William Eaton’s, the school director,  lectures would sometimes be an hour and half. The other professors were tasked with teaching us how to cut things and William was in charge of updating us on the color of our auras. William used words I hadn’t-never heard before to describe all sorts of things that weren’t real to my cornfield of a mind. It was a big world and there were a lot of thoughts out there.  He was able to convey most of them in six months. It cracked my mind open. Every instrument he makes is not only a unique design it’s a unique instrument.  They aren’t guitars, or lyres, or harps.  They can look like an electrified Prince logo, a henna tattoo, or an entire tree branch strung up with cables. He creates an instrument, builds it, and then learns what music you can make with it. There’s no goal of technical proficiency. It’s pure inspiration,. 

What William teaches is why you do shit matters.   That beyond weighing brace stock, and counting grain lines, and arguing about values of pots is the Why. Beyond the specifications is the willingness to spend entire days holding in your hands curved wood panels you can see through while they glue because they are to thin to clamp without crushing. Knowing that there’s music there that can’t be heard any other way except for finishing. That building instruments leads people to different musical choices - that’s Inspiration. 

The first time I went back to Roberto-Venn about 5 years ago I brought one of our steel resonators.  I walked into the office and Bart, Rob, William, and the spirit of Kris, all former teachers of mine, were there.  We talked like friends. Like sharing a beer with one of your highschool teachers at a friend’s wedding. 

I handed the guitar to John, the man who built the first resonator I had ever seen, an all koa with brass hardware masterpiece. He started playing. And he played a little more. He stopped playing and looked it over and said one of John’s notoriously trademarked sayings:

“It’s a beautiful thing.”

The most recent time I went to Roberto-Venn to talk to the students was this week. I talked with John about his health,, his wood stash, the class.  He told me a story of a notorious Hells Angel who shall remain unnamed who had worked for a short lived metal body resonator business back when the MC had started.  He told me a story of the business owner walking in one day to see the club member on his knees with six guns of Hells Angels Elders pointed at his head. During the discourse it was mentioned the the new logo for the unapproved chapter that had been started was pretty bad ass.  The club member left with his head intact and the original chapter had a new logo. Later that night John texted me a picture of the club member’s name engraved alongside a motorcycle on the back of one of the unused metal guitar bodies.  

Here’s the thing.  This is a fun story and all and you can think, “What a great story, Matt. I am entertained.”  But this is a story about teaching and learning and people absolutely derailing other people’s lives for the better just by being who they are intensely combined with the desire to give what they can to others.  They’ve found a way to put themselves first while putting others ahead of themselves.  The meaning of the story and of the school is more important than entertainment.  But finding that meaning is up to you. Our teachers give us the hard part- the questions.