“Let’s get this baby fired up and bend some wood.”
Thus Scott Baxendale, aging rocker and timeless craftsman, convicted felon and prospective silver screen hero, begins work on a new hand-built guitar.
It is July, and over the next three months, he and his son, John, will put 125 hours into shaping an acoustic masterpiece from pieces of koa, maple, spruce, mahogany and ebony.
Every few minutes, they will be interrupted by desperate touring guitarists from the Bluebird Theater, across East Colfax Avenue, demanding a pre-concert repair. Parents will bring in smashed Martins, crushed by sleepwalking children. Crackheads will steal stereos from Baxendale cars, then turn around and offer to wash the guitar shop windows for $2.
And Scott will hand one of his custom electric axes to Johnny Depp outside the bathroom of an Aspen hotel, begging the Hollywood superstar to play the instrument and star in the script hidden in the back of the guitar.
For now, though, the glamour of a finished instrument is buried in wood shavings and glue bottles. A guitar from which notes will be caressed must first be twisted into submission, flat sheets of wood forced into new shapes by glue and the wisdom of thickened fingers.
On this hot summer day, Scott, 51, drops his reading glasses from the bridge of his nose down to the guitar festival T-shirt he sports. He’s starting two instruments today, one with sides of rich orange Hawaiian koa wood he’ll sell to the public, the other a “plain-Jane” maple-sided model he promised an ex-girlfriend.
The blank koa panels are 135 thousandths of an inch thick, and Baxendale feeds them through a belt sander to take off 35 of those thousandths and reach a flexible heft. He consults with John about keeping a light streak in the wood – “Lose it,” murmurs John, 22, in what for him is a relatively long response. Scott waits to hear more, but John is back to restringing a black maple acoustic as Lucinda Williams caterwauls on the overhead stereo.
The Baxendale construction process is half deliberation, half improvisation. Scott will stare at a raw wood grain for hours, imagining how it will best align with the other pieces three months from now. Yet his tools are often haphazard. Scott wants beautiful seams, not beautiful machines to make them. His bending process for the koa involves two kitchen hot plates placed under gun-bluing troughs filled with water. The straight sticks steam in the water, held under by a handy wrench; as the water turns rust-colored, Scott plucks out the koa and shapes it against a heated iron wedge. A small curve forms, back to the hot water, a little more curve, and an hour later, the unmistakable guitar outline begins to appear in the mellow koa.
“The whole object is for me to bend this without cracking it,” Scott grimaces. The increasingly rare koa costs $550 for each guitar, he says, spritzing the hot wood with water from a Windex bottle. “It always cracks five minutes before you’re done, instead of five minutes after you start.”
Souvenirs of misfortune
Above the Baxendale benches, along opposite walls of the long, narrow streetfront shop, hang wounded guitar tops displaying the hubris and the tragedy of Scott’s brand name. What gives a $5,000 Baxendale handmade its distinctive, rich jangle is a set of hand-carved braces that strengthen the spruce wood top and guide the notes out the soundhole. The half-dozen damaged tops scattered around the shop sport the right braces, but the tops couldn’t withstand the crude working conditions Baxendale forced himself into after his life became a dark soap opera in the early 1990s.
Scott Baxendale learned the luthier’s craft in Kansas, dropping out of college to work for legendary Mossman instruments. He eventually bought the business and moved it to Dallas, becoming the handpicked builder for stars like Willie Nelson, Carl Perkins and John Mellencamp. Fixing up collectible guitars for the Dallas Hard Rock Café, he fast made too many fast friends, and got lost in a world of drugs.
Smoking rock cocaine and exhaling all he owned, he went on a crime spree with two partners, culminating on West Colfax one night in 1992, flashing fake DEA badges and robbing smalltime crackheads at gunpoint. Arrested, Baxendale pled guilty and offered to testify against his partners. Guitars saved him: He convinced the judge he had redeeming skills, and got two years of rehab instead of 10 years in prison.
Life didn’t get easier. His first wife and one of his three children, a daughter, died in a 1993 car wreck. His brother died of a heroin overdose. Thinking three months ahead to a finished guitar was an enormous chore for a reforming addict still dreaming of his next score.
But Baxendale stayed clean, then and on through 10 years of mandatory drug tests. He borrowed $1,000 each from loyal friends to restart a guitar workshop, promising them finished guitars as payback, no matter how long it took. It took seven years. The cracked tops he keeps as both templates and reminders failed their purpose because his first post-arrest shop was a shabby garage with no humidifier. Dry air sapped the wood of its resilience, even as Baxendale was rediscovering his own.
Baxendale thinks he made it back from hell 13 years ago because of the guitars, and the feel for the craft his hands retained even while his mind was burned out by coke. Looking around at his directionless peers in the mandatory counseling and testing program, Baxendale said it was “absolutely crucial” to have a skill to fall back on.
“I always felt I had much better odds,” he said. “I don’t have a lot of sympathy anymore for the crackheads on Colfax – you despise in others what you despise in yourself. But I’ve always thought the solution to the homeless people holding signs is to take them 30 miles outside the city and put them to work making furniture, give them something to do with their hands.”
Established in his Colfax shop for seven years now, Baxendale has all the equipment he needs. And it’s still a mess. Dozens of guitars wait in cases on two racks, idled by cracked bridges or popped seams. CDs burned at Scott’s home recording studio spill over onto invoices. Scott and John play a constant game of tag with an all-important bottle of Super Glue, certain the other has hidden it for sport or spite.
As Scott searches for a tuning gear to fix a bass dropped off by a band touring the Bluebird, a customer walks in holding a badly warped bouzouki. Scott rests the pear-shaped instrument on his paunch and rips off a tune. “I can fix it for $80,” he says, and adds it to the never-dwindling pile of repairs.
All in the “touch”
By late July, Baxendale is trimming the koa sides of the guitar to match the compound curve of the koa back and its intricate braces. Using a handheld router, he runs a whining blade along a form. The wood chips badly, indicating he’s cutting too quickly.
Looking around for the glue to replace a small divot, Baxendale shrugs. “Wood is imperfect. One of the tricks of being a professional craftsman, over a wannabe craftsman, is learning how to fix things as you go.”
The final product may seem perfect, but the process never is.
Baxendale’s improvisation, and his willingness to share it with even his competitors, has earned him respect among the few dozen full and part time luthiers in Colorado.
“Scott has the touch,” said Alan Dunwell, a professional guitar maker and head of the Colorado Luthiers trade group. “He seems to have passed it on to his son, who is now making some very fine instruments himself. He has taken some of the other members into his shop and shown them how he does things.”
In early August, Scott and John have taken turns carving the braces for the guitar top, the “Zen-like” step of the work that Scott loves best. The shaved curves look like dunes warmed in the afternoon sun, graceful and just shy of symmetrical. Periodically, John picks up the top or the back and dangles it from one finger near his ear, thumping it hard with his middle finger and giving a listen. “This back has a really snappy ring to it now, which is a good sign,” he grins.
The thumping over, Scott drizzles wood glue along the linings attached to the sides, then plants down the back. He calls John over, and suddenly the mellow hand crafting is replaced by a furious four-handed round of clamping, covering every inch of the guitar with pressure before the glue can dry.
With the guitar body now taking shape, the Baxendales must turn their attention to hacking a blocky chunk of laminated mahogany into a neck. Scott searches the cluttered benches for a two-handed draw knife, freezes the block in a vise, and digs away. This portion of the work, creating the curved back of the neck that caresses the player’s hand like a whisper, has no form to follow. “We either ask the buyer to show us their ideal,” Scott says, “or we just get a feel for carving it as we go.”
In mid-August, Scott begins block-sanding the koa sides of the guitar to level out invisible bumps. If he doesn’t, multiple coats of lacquer will spotlight every imperfection with a depressing glare. Scott’s sanding has a live soundtrack today, as jam buddy Haylar Garcia works his way through blues riffs near the front of the shop.
The Baxendales play regular host to drop-in picking sessions, visited by a circle of musicians whose remarkable guitar accomplishments are only their second- or third-best skill. Garcia has played lead and done vocals in numerous bands, as has Baxendale; but, like Scott, he needs a more reliable gig to pay the bills.
So of course, Garcia chose the reliably impoverished life of amateur filmmaking. Once he heard Scott’s operatic life story, Garcia wrote it into a screenplay called “Narcophonic,” correctly fingering music as Baxendale’s lifelong addiction. Turning disaster into a film suits Scott’s mind-set – it’s not that he denies responsibility for what he did back then, it’s that he’s been sober long enough that it feels like another lifetime.
“When I read about it, it seems like a bad movie,” Baxendale said.
Baxendale and Garcia immediately decided that only Johnny Depp, who has real guitar chops, could play Scott in the movie.
There’s a logic to the duo’s reasoning, but don’t try too hard to follow it. It’s a two- year-long improvisational riff. Scott built an electric guitar he dreamed up just for Johnny. He left a rectangular hole in the back to hold the script. They drove cross-country trying to hand the guitar and story straight to the elusive Depp. Garcia decided to make a documentary about their effort, thinking the “Johnny & Me” concept might play as a nonfiction movie even if his screenplay never got produced.
Cut to the hallway outside the restroom of the Hotel Jerome in Aspen. It’s late August, after the infamous memorial service where Depp paid $2 million to shoot late journalist Hunter
Thompson’s ashes from a tube. Baxendale and Garcia had slept in a camper at Woody Creek, hoping to track Johnny down. They waited in the hotel bar for Depp to walk away from his bodyguards. A bathroom break for Depp was their chance. Scott took the electric beauty out of its case and handed it to Depp, who said he’d heard about it, and curled his delicate fingers lovingly around the custom neck.
Send the script to my agent, Depp told them. And now the two guitar-philes have hope, however slim, to get them through the fall and winter.
Nearing completion
Sixteen-ounce cans of energy drinks stand sentry over the guitars lying prone on the Baxendale repair benches. While Johnny is reading, the koa is waiting.
Scott takes another swig from his “Rock Star” brand can before picking up the router that will score the slot where the cursive “Baxendale” name will appear in the neck as a pearl inlay. The router has an aquarium pump rigged to the side, to blow away sawdust. The inlay fits into the ebony facing on the neck almost perfectly, but almost isn’t good enough. Scott hacks away at an ebony scrap to create some useful sawdust, then blends the dust with glue and crams the paste into the flawed spaces. When sanded, the result will be smooth ebony, reinforced to iron strength by the glue.
“Customers don’t understand that if they ask you to engrave their ‘Lucky 7’ on it, or flying squirrels, or something like that, it takes days,” Baxendale said. Nearly ready to affix the neck to the guitar body, Baxendale’s target price for the guitar is moving up. (He also changed his mind about the maple, deciding to pay the ex-girlfriend debt in some less dear fashion.) The base price of about $3,500 for a plain Baxendale has crept skyward as he polished the koa to a fiery sheen, and shaved the neck to that just-so feel. “Now I think this one will go for about $4,200,” he says with a grin.
Last year, Baxendale sold 12 custom-built acoustics. He may be on pace for a few more this year, but even his friends in the successful touring group Drive- by Truckers get their guitar orders overruled. “You can’t ever count on anything until you get a deposit. By the time they run it by their wives, it’s a no-deal.”
On Oct. 11, Baxendale’s custom koa was ready for buffing and sanding. “We use water and Windex and spit for the final wet-sanding of the guitar,” Baxendale said. A movie fan, he adds, “It’s only recently I discovered the Windex part, after watching ‘My Big Fat Greek Wedding’ where the guy uses Windex for everything. Before that, we only had the water and spit.”
He and John now have three solid orders for new guitars to finish, before Christmas, including two narrow-body cutaways and one jumbo. While John runs scales on an electric guitar he’s repairing in the background, Scott speculates how the koa model will sound in two more days, when the neck-glue dries and he can finally string it up.
“We could make the same guitar out of 10 different woods, and the basic tone would be the same. But we think the different woods give a little different color to the sound,” he said. Expensive Brazilian rosewood “slaps the sound on the butt” on its way out the soundhole. Koa coaxes it more gently, he believes.
Thursday in mid-October is a fine day to hear a new guitar for the very first time. Baxendale is on a double high today, from a call they placed to Johnny Depp’s office the previous day. “Narcophonic?” the secretary said, encouraging them with her knowledge of the script’s title. “Johnny’s got that in the Caribbean, right now, and he’s reading it as we speak.”
Scott strings up the koa, then pauses to scrape deeper slots in the bridge to better seat the strings. He plucks the low-E string as he threads it – “I can already tell it’s going to sound good,” he says. Five strings later, and a minute of tuning, and he launches into “Brown-Eyed Girl” and any other requests from the shop audience. The sparkling notes leap from the guitar to the air, like coins into a fountain.
“I had a friend who said for the first 10 minutes you play it, the wood in the guitar still thinks it’s a tree,” Baxendale says, plucking a scale and enjoying the results. “They say it takes three months to totally cure the finish and hear the real sound. I think it takes two years.”
He graciously hands the guitar to John, who sits down and launches a few blues runs across the strings. Scott watches, tired and giddy.
“I might have to keep this guitar. Of course, I say that on every one.”
Staff writer Michael Booth can be reached at 303-820-1686 or mbooth@denverpost.com.
