Last Saturday, Axvault sat down with Grammy Award-winning acoustic guitarist Ed Gerhard, before his show at the Music Emporium inLexington,Mass.Ed is on the cusp of releasing his 9th album. He is renowned for his virtuosity on 6-string, 12-string, and Weissenborn-style slide guitar, as well as for both the emotional and compositional depth of his instrumental guitar tunes.

Going to watch Ed play, or even just watching his shows online, it is easy to sense that Ed is a special guitarist, and not just because of his afore mentioned skill. His passion and personal connection to his guitar—evident in his music—sets a valuable example for younger players. Throughout his sets, Ed is apt to drop tiny nuggets of wisdom—”Every guitar player should learn a few Beatles tunes, the melodies are great and they’re wonderfully written”—gleaned from years of touring and constantly writing new music. It suffices to say, there is a lot to learn by listening to him.

In part one of this interview, Ed talks at length about his favorite guitars, explains why it’s important to have a good relationship with one’s instrument, and talks us through the early days of his career.

Stay tuned for Part Two, and check out the links at the bottom to learn more about Ed and sample some of his music.

Axvault: So I as watching a video of one of your show’s online and you said that one of the great things about guitar is that it’s such a good companion, and not only that, but you can get a lot of music out of that relationship. Could you explain more about that idea?

Ed: That relationship does inspire stuff, but I think just the comfort of knowing an instrument a little bit is a really important thing. A lot of people consider their guitars an adversary, and I’ve never had an adversarial relationship with my guitar. It’s a difficult instrument, nothing comes too automatically at first. It doesn’t seem like a logical instrument, but once you get over that hurtle of being intimidated by it, and find a couple of things that you can do well on it,  and that’s the thing, you don’t have to do anything really complicated to sound good on it. Simple stuff sounds great. You don’t have to be good to sound good on a guitar, but once you start getting a few of those little successes under your belt, well you and your guitar, you start becoming friends. A lot of good stuff is born out of that.

Axvault: So is it one of those instruments that’s very easy to pickup but difficult to master?   

Ed: Well I don’t think anybody’s really mastered it yet.

Axvault: [Laughs] Yeah I would agree with that. Have there been any particular guitars over the years, that you had an especially good relationship with?

Ed: Yeah my first good guitar was Martin D-18, a 1967 D-18 but I got it in 1970. It had been hanging in the shop unsold for a couple years—it was a new guitar—I still have that guitar. That was my battle axe for many, many years. I love that guitar. And it’s one of those guitars that doesn’t knock you out by how good it sounds, but when you sit there and play it you realize like an hour has gone by, you know what I mean? You just can’t put it down, it’s really fantastic. It’s got that really classic Martin sound, the openness and woody-ness in the low end, it’s just a really great guitar.

And I’ve got a lot of guitars , and I’ve got a good relationship with all of them, but some like that Martin are really special. I have a guitar made by Ervin Somogyi out inBerkeley, who built a really fantastic guitar for me in ’85. It’s one of the finest guitars I’ve ever heard in my life. It’s a little clunky for me to play now. The neck is really stout. But as your taste in guitars evolves, and your demands on the instrument change you start wanting different features on a guitar. But I still play that guitar a lot.

I have a couple of Breedlove guitars, they were making a signature guitar model for me for a while, and I have a couple iterations of that, that are really nice. My favorite one is a Brazilian Rosewood, German Spruce-top that I was touring with for about 10-11 years before I retired it. I didn’t want to have to worry about getting the guitar confiscated when I go overseas. So Breedlove built me a dreadnought guitar, just per chance I was looking for a really good utility Mario [Proulx] dreadnought for the studio, and they built me this guitar, and damn if it didn’t blow me away. It’s Sapele actually instead of Mahogany; quilted Sapele and Adirondack Spruce. It’s not a combination I ever would have gone for but it really works. It’s a really great live guitar.

But my signature model guitar I told you about, that was kind of a legendary guitar for a number of people that follow my stuff. They call it “Big Red” because it’s a big red guitar, and the new dreadnought people are calling it “Natty Dread”, ‘cus it’s a very Natty looking dread [laughs].

So how did your relationship with Breedlove come about initially? Had you been playing a lot of their guitars before you collaborated on the signature model?   

No I had been touring with my Somogyi for a couple years, and there’s this guy out inSalt Lake Citywho had a music store, who just kept pushing Breedlove’s on me and finally I found one that I really liked. And I don’t remember exactly how it all came out, but ultimately Breedlove guitars got in touch with me and we struck up a relationship. That was ’94 when I got my first Breedlove, ’97 is when the signature model came out, and all these years later I’m still playing them.

I don’t have much to do with the Corporate people at Breedlove, I really love the people in the shop that are making the sawdust. The guys and gals in that shop are some of the best people I’ve ever known, and I’m proud to play their guitars. See it’s really special to me to know that several of my friends had their hands on that thing and made that guitar. That’s an amazing thing.

That definitely makes a guitar so much more special.   

Yeah, absolutely. Special in a very personal kind of way.

Just out of curiosity what was your first guitar?  

My first guitar was a little cheap nylon-string classical guitar. It was pretty good guitar. Everybody talks about their first guitar: [impersonating angry old man] “My fingers were bleeding!” But I never had that experience. It was nylon string, it actually sounded pretty good and it stayed in tune. And it played in tune.

That’s important!

Yeah that’s really important! And it’s such a great time now to be a guitar player, because you don’t have to shell out a lot of money for that feature of having a guitar that plays in tune. I don’t remember what that guitar would have cost me back then, but a Martin D-18 at that time (this is 1970 when I started playing) retailed for what I think was about $300-$325, or something like that. So this guitar at that time would cost me about 75 or 80 bucks. So the scale is probably still about the same. It was pretty good guitar.

You know I really liked classical guitar when I first started playing, [like Andrés]Segovia. I’d never heard a guitar all by itself before. I didn’t know that other music was possible on the guitar, I thought that the only way you could play the guitar was classical.

What other kinds of music were you exposed to before you heard Segovia?

You know, whatever folk or pop stuff, or anything on the radio. My ear was always searching for music. Most people get all their information through their eyes. My ears were the thing that entertained me the most. So I’d listen to anything on the radio. But when I heardSegoviaplaying the guitar, that’s when I really started getting interested in playing, because I’d never heard one all by itself. And that’s why I was kind of interested in pursuing Classical guitar, because I’d never heard any other kind of instrumental music on the guitar, except for like [The] Ventures kind of stuff, which was not my thing as a kid.

And I grew up outside ofPhiladelphia, and I didn’t want to have to travel all the way intoPhiladelphiato take Classical lessons. I took a few lessons in a music store near me, and back then it was a hard way to learn. You went into the back of a little music store, and you’d have to learn to read notes and play one string at a time, and there was nothing musical at all about that experience. And there was no place up the road where it looked like it was going to pay off and I would get to enjoy it, and so after about three lessons I quit. And then I guy moved in across the street from me who was a guitar player, and showed me some Mississippi John Hurt stuff, and turned me on to some really great stuff. And when I heard Mississippi John Hurt and those guys it was all over. My Classical career came to an abrupt halt.

How did you keep learning after that? By ear? Listening to the radio?

Well the guy who I’m talking about, is a guy who just passed away last year, named Bill Morrissey, a singer-songwriter. And he showed me a lot of stuff. You know this was inPennsylvaniaand he went to school inNew Hampshire, and whenever he’d come back for a vacation, you know he’d be back for a week or a few days, I’d try to grab a lesson with him. And he showed me some finger-picking stuff, but in the time that he was gone I had to pretty much study myself. So I developed my ear pretty well, and I was really motivated. You know when Morrissey would come back home for vacation and we’d have a lesson, I think it was $2.50 for a half-hour or an hour, I would learn like an entire song in one lesson. I didn’t fuck around. I really got down to it and I just, you know, I was hungry for it.

And that’s one of the things that I don’t see a whole lot of in guitar players right now that are learning to play: an appetite. I see an expectation and a sense of entitlement a lot more than I see this appetite for it. And I had an appetite for it that was never ending. I always wanted to be playing and I always wanted to be hearing music, or playing music, or writing music. I was never one of those guys that wanted to learn a million scales, and learn a million tunes. For me the guitar was a real personal thing. You know it was not a great child hood I had and the guitar was such a great way to kind of escape.

And then I learned years later that not only is it a great place to sort of disappear into, it’s a good place to come out of, and possibly have something of value to share with other people. The guitar has just been everything to me.

So at that point in time, did you envision that your career was going to unfold as it has now?

No, you know, when you’re a kid, and you live in the kind of household I grew up in, you know you have this sort of fantasy about how things are going to be, and you try to sort of inject yourself into your fantasy because you want to see what it’s going to be like. But there’s nothing that can prepare you for the reality of what it is. And what you find is that the rewards for doing this are very, very few, but those rewards are really, really meaningful. And I wouldn’t do anything else. I love doing what I do. I don’t mind traveling so much any more, it’s more difficult now than when I first started doing this. You know you’ve got TSA, you got just a more intense climate of fear.

But I still love being other places and playing. I never thought for a minute that other guitar players would be wanting to play my stuff. My music was really just for me for most of my life. And my first record came out in 1987, and that’s when I realized that [my music] was getting out there to people that I couldn’t see, and people would write from all over the world saying they’d bought one, or they’d heard it on the radio. Then I realized wow, music is such a powerful thing. And we don’t always relate it to our experience, but you know as I was relating my music to what other people were thinking and feeling and saying, and expressing to me, that’s one of the best rewards you can get; that people not only take you seriously and will listen to you, but think that you have something to say that adds to their happiness or contributes to their lives. That’s a powerful thing.

http://www.virtuerecords.com/

http://www.last.fm/music/Ed+Gerhard

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0OGlC94URuo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wL2qj16Hw_w

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Check back early next week for the second part of the interview! In the meanwhile you can check the links below to hear some of Ed’s Music: