One of the oddities of my life is the enduring interest people express in my long-ago musical career. I still get mail about my records, concerts, guitar pedal-capo, touring with Alex de Grassi and Michael Hedges, and so on. It’s odd because I haven’t recorded or performed in decades....
I had been making instruments, sort of, since high school. I fell in love with the classical guitar thanks to Andres Segovia and not long after fell in love with luthiery thanks to Irving Sloane’s marvelous book Classical Guitar Construction. I’m not sure when Glenn Johnson caught the romance...
This is my second post about Moondog, another study of one of the remarkable people I’ve known. His real name, we learned, was Louis Hardin. He had grown up in Kansas, Wyoming, Arkansas, and Tennessee, then spent three decades in Manhattan. He had a curious, double reputation. On one...
This is the sixth portrait in my series on “Meetings With Remarkable People” — ruminations on exceptional individuals I have known and explorations of just what qualities make a person “remarkable.” Moondog was certainly a unique man, one whose unusual circumstances resulted equally from fate, predisposition, and personal choice. My...