AADL Talks To: Herb David

Mon, 07/13/2015 - 9:21am

On April 12, 1962, the Herb David Guitar Studio opened in a basement on South State and one of the great success stories in Ann Arbor and the music business began. AADL talked to Herb David shortly after the closing of his landmark studio on East Liberty, almost 51 years to the day the studio opened. Herb's influence extends beyond the students he taught to love music, the musicians who bought his handmade instruments, the local bands he nurtured and promoted, to the top musicians that visited his studio to talk "shop" and discovered David's wide range of interests in philosophy, cultures and travel. Herb's genuine concern for his community and the power of music to transform lives as well as his great sense of humor shine through in this podcast.

Transcript

• [00:00:00] DEBBIE: Hi, this is Debbie. On April 12th, 1962, the Herb David Guitar Studio opened in a basement on South State Street and one of the great success stories in Ann Arbor began. AADL talked to Herb David shortly after the closing of his landmark studio on East Liberty, almost 51 years to the day the studio opened. Herb's influence extends beyond the students he taught to love music, the musicians who bought his handmade instruments, and the local bands he nurtured and promoted. Top musicians that visited his studio to talk shop discovered David's wide range of interests in philosophy, culture, and travel. Herb's concern for his community and his belief in the power of music to transform lives shine through in this podcast. Well, welcome to the Ann Arbor District Library.
• [00:00:55] HERB DAVID: Thank you, Debbie. I feel very welcome here. I feel comfortable in this library. A lot of worms here, a lot of good books, a lot of good people.
• [00:01:05] DEBBIE: Herb, when did you start playing music, and did you start with guitars?
• [00:01:10] HERB DAVID: No. I started playing music when I was nine years old and I started playing with trumpet. Because at that time, when I was young, guitar was really not as popular an instrument. It was a good rhythm instrument that was used in orchestras and played in the back of the orchestra to keep the rhythm as a percussion instrument. But there were a few really popular Charlie Shavers and Harry James and all, and they grabbed my interest. I said, well, this is what I'd like to do. I started when I was in elementary school when I was nine years old and I enjoyed it. I kept on playing trumpet until I started with the guitar. I played the trumpet until I was in the army and I played in the army band for a while. Then there were some guys in the band that played guitar. I said, well, that's an interesting instrument, maybe I can catch on to that. I started playing guitar then. Until then I was a trumpet player, which is not a bad idea. It was fun and good, and not to mention, it has some benefits beyond just playing music. I played on the radio and other places with that. Then we played with the Kernels parade on Fridays. That was a good go in there. I'm glad I played the trumpet. I still play it, I still have it and still play it once in a while. It has some advantages. Besides the music that you can play out of the trumpet, it's good for your lungs. It's a health instrument.
• [00:03:05] DEBBIE: Now, you say you started playing the guitar in the army.
• [00:03:08] HERB DAVID: Yeah.
• [00:03:09] DEBBIE: Did you go immediately into the music profession when you got out of the army?
• [00:03:13] HERB DAVID: I was taking lessons of playing classical guitar and I went back to school. I was drafted into the army out of grad school and it was a great experience for me. I was happy to be in the army because my family were all immigrants and they found very peace and welcoming life in the United States and they always felt good about it, so I felt good about it also. I had a good experience in the army. I did research in the army and helped them because I was drafted out of grad school. The professional societies had an agreement with the forces that they wouldn't waste the talents and brains of the future, they're attributed to the grand future of our people. We had really very little military obligations and we didn't wear uniforms. We just were as much citizens with regard of the military people when they saw us walking around in army T-shirts and sport shoes. I was stationed at an army medical research lab in Fort Knox and there was a military training center, so the military trainers were just going nuts when they saw us coming. But we were only answerable to the sergeant general. We had a campus, we had a lecture concert series that we could organize and we had lots of support from the government for the research that we were doing. I was working on that. That was the army. It wasn't bad. I played on the side. There were rules against playing professionally so that they wouldn't interfere with the local people that were playing in bands. We could play, but you couldn't play for money. That was when I took up guitar in the army. Actually, my wife took up guitar in the army. She was into country music and bluegrass. Then I used to sit in When she took her lessons and I said "That's really interesting, I could try that. " I tried it, then I learned faster than she did and she got discouraged, so I said I better quit because I had musical experience, so it's easier for me to pick up on it. I took up the banjo instead of the guitar. That was what I did. But we got out of the army and I played the guitar. In the side in the sneak when she wasn't around, I could go in a room and close the door and play guitar. I continued taking lessons and playing guitar when I got out of the army. Then I continued doing research. I had a lab at Fort Knox where we were working on some brain processes. The way the brain memory works and concept formation, how ideas. We helped to build the chair that the monkey they send them to the space, the chair that monkey sat in and all that. But they really didn't like the fact that I brought my guitar to the lab one day and I wanted to hear what it sounded in a soundproof room because we worked in one. The head of the project came in and said, you really shouldn't play that mandolin around here. I said, yeah, that's a good idea. I should take this mandolin home and I should go with it. I dropped out of the PAC program and I took my guitar home and all the data that I had gathered about their concept formation and monkeys, and I worked with rhesus monkeys. I started playing and then I started teaching, I had some students. It was great. It was really fun to help people learn how to play and it kept me playing. They were coming to the house. They were coming in and I would use the backroom and I used to play.
• [00:07:57] DEBBIE: Was that here in Ann Arbor?
• [00:07:58] HERB DAVID: Yeah. Then my wife got mad at me because I lent one of my students an issue of a magazine that she liked, and it was a special issue and the guy never returned it. I was on a bad side of things and so she said, you got to get out of here. I went around town and found a place in the basement underneath the bookstore, Bob Marshall's bookstore in State Street. It was dusty and dirty, but it was a place. I was the only businessman, so to speak, on the street who dressed in t-shirts and Levi's and all the legitimate people who ran a legitimate businesses on this ground level, they thought people like that are never going to succeed. Of course, the end result was that everybody there has succeeded and people who had the established stores upstairs that they inherited from their fathers and their family, they failed. But anyways, that's where I was teaching, in a basement. Some students used to ask me, I have trouble with my guitar, doesn't play good, or something's wrong with it, what can I do about it? I don t know. I said I don't know, I have no talents with woodworking. But I thought, well, what the heck, I'll try it. There's no loss and I didn't know anybody I could take it to to get it fixed. I re-glued a bridge for a guy and when I went the next morning back to put the strings out and try it, I couldn't get the strings on and I couldn't figure out what was going on. Then finally it dawned on me, I'd put the bridge on backwards. That was my beginning. From there I just got the idea that you don't want to limit what you can do by the idea that you can't do it. You just go ahead and do it and as you get surprising results. I started fixing things and making instruments. I started out by making Dulcimer example ancient instruments. Because a lot of folk music was around, very popular at that time and Dulcimer, it was a popular instrument. House Beautiful got word that I had been making Dulcimers. They did a story about me and that was beginning of my future. When they did that, it was an affirmation that I was on the right path.
• [00:10:50] DEBBIE: Now, were you still underground at this point?
• [00:10:52] HERB DAVID: I was still underground and still in the basement. I moved up to the second floor where it wasn't so dusty and I didn't have to watch the cockroaches. I stepped on them and they were as big as skateboards. The bug people used to come over and pick them up and pad them up.
• [00:11:18] HERB DAVID: I get used to it. But I was happy to leave that environment. Things started to be developed and I kept making instruments and helped to start the arc. In our boots, it was a very popular, one of the best folk and venues in a country. Lots of people who used to come to the store, be some very famous people who were traveling across country. NR Bruce is such a great place, such an active place politically and in every other way is that in the '60s at that time, they used to stop in and say hello including Bob Dylan used to hang out and John Lennon and people like that used to come over there and lots of other people. It got to be well known. Then I kept on making instruments.
• [00:12:14] DEBBIE: How many different instruments? What are some of the instruments?
• [00:12:17] HERB DAVID: That I make?
• [00:12:18] DEBBIE: Yeah.
• [00:12:18] HERB DAVID: Innumerable. I can't even count. I had the curse of being unforgivably curious about everything that I see. I can go around and say, well how come there are cracks in the sidewalk? How come there's a dividing line in the sidewalk? Where's the sidewalks separated? I get curious about things like that, about where it came from and with development where historically, how ancient was ancient times and all that of stuff. I got curious about instruments from all over the world, all of the different places. When people were coming in, and Ann Arbor is such an aesthetically varied town, and all people come from everywhere, and so they used to coming to the store and they talked to me about, can I fix this instrument? Or how do you fix that instrument? I got familiar with instruments from everywhere in the world, and because they were there, I also got familiar with how to play them. The Zoom used to call me and asked me about instruments because they knew the organology, that is the derivation whether how the instrument fit into the culture, where it came from but they didn't know how to play them. They really didn't know much about what it did in the culture yet it was there and evolved. I had it all worked out with what came from what and where it went into what and all that stuff. But I had the knowledge, and still do, actually about how you play those instruments, the music and how they fit into the culture, social setting and what was the role of music in a culture? Was it always entertainment? Were there more to it than then? I found some very fascinating things out about what music meant to the people. I used to make a whole variety of instruments from every place on earth you can find them and still to this day, I think I'm the only one around here that knows what to do about one of these world's things, which is not so weird to me.
• [00:14:36] DEBBIE Is your Harp still at the Smithsonian?
• [00:14:39] HERB DAVID: I'm sorry.
• [00:14:39] DEBBIE: The Harp I read an article about.
• [00:14:41] HERB DAVID: I took it back.
• [00:14:42] DEBBIE: You took it back?
• [00:14:43] HERB DAVID: [OVERLAPPING] I took it back. There I had bunch of instruments at the Toledo Museum too. Life was good to me, exceptionally good to me. I grew up living in a in a basement where we had to pull the bed down out of a closet in order to cook, and the kitchen was behind the bed. I forgot what they call that but it was in a basement. We had no money at all. My mother got real mad at me one time when I bought a yo-yo for 10 cents. But life has been good to me and it's taken me far beyond what I ever thought I was going to be able to do. I had no problem going into a field that was indefinitely was I going to make a living or not make a living, I just did it because I had to. It was my bliss or whatever, it was my calling, I had just had to follow it. In that course of time, I've been around the world about three times, in and out of places that nobody wants to go except me. I was roaming around in the Amazon with an Indian for two months, I went kayaking up near the North Pole, rode horseback and reindeered across Mongolia, I tracked up in the Himalayas on Everest and all that always with the idea of how does music fit into this culture? What is music like? What do they do with the culture? The trip through life has been fascinating and very rewarding. That's where I went with the music and I found out the music mostly in other culture is not so much for entertainment as it is for social values of how they're keeping people, what rules to follow in the environment in your daily life. If you play an instrument if you're of a certain belief or a certain level of spiritual, that was fine. But if you weren't at a certain level of spiritual, and you play the guitar, you can only play on one string. For colors, one for each of the elements, basic elements, water, air, fire, and let's add on bile. If you've touched another instrument, they weren't sure what the result would be because not knowing much and we still are today is fascinating. You can see that when people play that, anything that makes the sound has to have some a thing making that sound. When you play a musical instrument, that sound has to come from somewhere, and why not some spirit, some god or something. But if you don't know, you got to be careful because you don't want to bring pestilence and sickness and bad. I find that really today it's still working societies that are not urbanized.
• [00:17:58] DEBBIE: Now, what brought about the move from State Street to liberty?
• [00:18:04] HERB DAVID: The availability of it. I always wanted to move out of that place on State Street. It was good and got me going and took me through a difficult time and it was a formative time in my life. But where I was upstairs in the second floor, the walls were coming down, they were in plaster but they were all decaying. There were cracks in the wall that mice used to come through. We had little cockroaches that used to wander around in there and I always worried about, well, if I was showing somebody an instrument that I had for sale, would a cockroach come crawling out of it. It never happened, but it was always a concern. I was looking for a place, I had a more solid background for me and I found this, I was talking to everybody, so I was going around knocking on doors downtown and saying you want to sell this building or? What they need to do that we're going to run some space here. Finally, a guy from Dobbs Optical, he said, "Yeah, I know of a place that's available." He says it's across the street from my shop, and that was his store, there was a place on the corner of 5th and liberty, and I right away jumped down. I went and talked to people that owned it. I was able to put some money together and borrow some money and buy it. Ever since then, the sun has been shining at my place because it had no cockroaches [LAUGHTER] to deal with.
• [00:19:38] DEBBIE: Did you take employees with you when you went from State Street to Liberty? Did you have other employees by that point?
• [00:19:44] HERB DAVID: Yeah. I had four or five. I had a lot of things that were wrong with being on State Street. I was on the second floor and the landlord never shoveled the snow off the stairs, so it always concerned me about who's going to go flying off the stairs. An elderly woman died on the stairs one time. This is not a thing that makes me feel warm and in dear to the space you're in, so I just wanted to get out of there where I could control cleaning the place, it wasn't what I could offer.
• [00:20:23] DEBBIE: You've been in a lot of teaching over the years have gone on to be musicians.
• [00:20:29] HERB DAVID: Yeah, a lot of them have gotten professional, I'm getting one that went on to be well-known rock and roll people. I had a friend of mine, a woman, an acquaintance, she came in and started one day and she said I've got a gift for you from this gentleman who lives in Basel, Switzerland. He's one of the best known musicians in.
• [00:20:59] HERB DAVID: In a country, it plays loot and guitar and performs and left off and he claims that you taught him how to play. He called me and we had a conversation and so that's where that one that was just marvelous to have somebody that you didn't know that you are doing anything for and here they've made a life out of what you hope to help them find.
• [00:21:29] DEBBIE: Now, in addition to helping with the whole Ark thing, tell us how the pleasures came up off the outdoor concerts that you put on at the Liberty Plaza?
• [00:21:40] HERB DAVID: That was a places just a mess. The drug dealers and homeless are hanging around there. Hanging around and Liberty Plaza And I just decided I just thought this is a nice places. This a place located close to the downtown area of Ann Arbor's, it's close between State Street and Main Street. Nice environment and maybe we could do something with it and there are people who are taking lessons that always would like to have a place just to play, just to perform. Even well-known performers like to just play just because they enjoy playing so much and so I thought, well, let's see what happens if I talk to some musicians about playing in the park and we got just a very big response, a tsunami. Lots of musicians that signed up and wanted to play over there. Even well-known musicians. Drug dealers and the homeless and we're still hanging around a drunks, the people were drinking. We still hung around in the parks, but I found a guy who I can work with and he was working with me and we found a way to organize the people around the downtown area, in order to see what we could do to make Liberty Plaza little more appealing and then they eventually got the hygiene, the mayor of the town involve. People has some good ideas about how I dress up the place and so they cut down some bushes and Laura the concrete walls around the place and, and put lights in and things and so it became more and more appealing. Then little by little, the negative elements disappeared and it was a joy to walk down the street. The people use to avoid this, they would cross the street and avoid going by. Then it came a time when his students and young secretaries and people would just eat their lunch out in the park comfortably. Place to hang out, relax and that was great to see. That really made it worthwhile to play the music and I kept on doing that and then as a result of the mayor's efforts to help to fit just the place up and make it, it made a few mistakes like that port-a-potty there for awhile and so they got rid of that one who figured it wasn't every overhead element. It didn't cover this. Then add to many positive smell to the area people come to the bank then the Bank of Ann Arbor and other organizations got interested in what was going on there and started support. They support once a week they sponsor people, pay the professional musicians. I never paid anybody, but because I couldn't afford to but the bank could, and they did and they get some really good people playing in the park in Liberty Plaza. I used to have Battle of the Bands and all things going on there.
• [00:25:44] DEBBIE: Now you've had some pretty famous instruments over the years. Tell us about the v guitar?
• [00:25:52] HERB DAVID: The what?
• [00:25:53] DEBBIE: The guitar, I saw a picture of you holding it.
• [00:25:55] HERB DAVID: Oh, that's the one that guy came in.
• [00:25:57] DEBBIE: Looks like a set of wings to me.
• [00:25:59] HERB DAVID: There is a fine V guitar they call it. It was something that was made in the 60s and it was popular and I never could know why, because it's hard to play, it's hard to hold. It wasn't real comfortable, but this guy came in and he said, I'd like to sell this. I worked at the Gibson factory and I bought this guitar. It was a Gibson guitar and it was one of the models that they use in order to experiment and design the instrument. He bought that in the 60s and he said I need to sell it now because of my grandson, don't want to go to school and I had to get some money for him. He said, I want $130,000 for this instrument. I said a lot of money. He said yeah, and then he named a few other places that they're selling them. I said, are you sure they're selling or do they just listening and he said, no, they're selling them. I said, okay, well, we'll try it and see what happens. It's ridiculous to me how much people will pay for a guitar but, people pay a lot of money for posters too, and I had an incident with that by doing a poster from a Bob Dylan concert that he gave before he was real well-known. He played up here in Ann Arbor to union building and all that and I had a poster advertising he played it next day at a Hootenanny. There is to have Hootenanny is we have a bunch of musicians got together in a freeze building which doesn't exist anymore, but it was on State Street and he had lots of musical venues by the folk music society of Ann Arbor they got together. Hootenanny is just like the arc does when they had their money gathering in January, February, just get a bunch of really good musicians together and they perform on stage for the benefit of people around and I helped to get people that I knew, some banjo players and guitar player and Bob Dylan was a show and I played on that show too, how did I get into this.
• [00:28:28] DEBBIE: With a guitar, but I want to hear about this poster. What happened with the posters?
• [00:28:32] HERB DAVID: I had a posterior from there, but they misspelled his name, D-I-L-0-N. One of the guys that works when we got this poster and he gave it to me, I said, oh, what I want to know a poster for, he said, keep it. I hung it up near my shop and put a frame and hung it in the shop. It hung there for since the 60s for 40 years or so. Then all over sudden a guy was calling me from California, said, I want to buy that poster. I said, it's not for sale, I just enjoy it. He said, no, I want to buy it. But he kept calling me and calling me. Now a sudden one Saturday he just appeared. He lived in California and he flew in to see if he get to buy that poster, I said No, I really don't want a sell it and he reach out of his pocket and he pulled out a truck or load of money like the size of a softball and I said, Well, think of maybe think about this [LAUGHTER]. I sold it to him and I said I'll sell it to you, but you got to make a copy of it so I can have a copy of it. It took my wife and I, we were able to take a trip to Tibet on the money that were made from that poster. You don't know, really go by, the movie posters and all things and how much they're worth a piece of paper like that. I said, Well, I'll try and sell this guitar for 130,000. I'm just amazing at a hunk of would give me that much. But I sold Eric Clapton a goldtop Gibson that I had fixed up for him and then the price of goldtop Gibson shot up and nobody could afford them anymore. I took it to a show. They used guitars sales. Yearly had a thing like that overnight and Detroit on fairgrounds.
• [00:30:44] HERB DAVID: I took it there and I got some offers and I was really surprised. But I had offers for 65,000. These are from people who knew what they were looking at. It would have been worth more except he didn't have original case for it and that made the people suspicious that it was a copy or whatever it was. I told them I got offers at 65. This is what you should take for it because that's what people want to pay. He said these other places they're selling them for 130. I said they're not selling it for 130 they're offering them for 130. He said, well, I'm going to take it back and take it somewhere else so they can sell it for me. I said, good luck. I saw him a year later and these other people that were offering their guitars they were now offering them for 30,000, and he sold his for 30,000, which is not any chump change either. It's pretty good price, but it's still amazing, was that he should have taken the 60 when he did so that's the story about that. It's a flying v is in the shape of a wing.
• [00:31:56] DEBBIE: Now did you hold onto John Lennon's chair? Tell us a story about that.
• [00:32:02] HERB DAVID: Well, there was a gathering over the Crisler Arena when John Sinclair was in prison. John Sinclair was in prison for selling marijuana cigarette. He offered it to an agent, not knowing he did and so they put him in maximum security prison. The White Panther Party and some of their outreach and John Sinclair was a popular guy around town. They had organized a festival over in Crisler Arena. A lot of well-known performers played there, Stevie Wonder and all thing like that. John Lennon came to play there too. While he's in town he just dropped in.
• [00:32:57] DEBBIE: Like your store?
• [00:32:58] HERB DAVID: Yeah. He just came to the store. You guys, what happens when musicians do when this musicians are on holiday, they spend their holiday looking at guitar stores and music store. John Lennon came in the store and he's in there. I said, you're John aren't you? He said, No, I'm not. I said who are you then? He said I'm his cousin. I said, cousin come and enjoy yourself. I didn't know who was, John Lennon's cousin or John Lennon because this guy had red hair and I didn't think John Lennon had red hair. He did, and actually so we just sat around and argued for a couple of hours that afternoon in a nice way just discussing things in a way that made it more interesting to just discuss things. That was it. He sat down in the chair and he didn't play anything but sat around and we talked and that thing.
• [00:34:05] DEBBIE: Do you still have the chair?
• [00:34:08] HERB DAVID: Well, I've retired now and things that were in the store, I think it's still there. I'm not sure what happened to that chair. I had it until the last month. That's something I was thinking about the other day. What happened to the John Lennon's chair. It's just an old chair, but it has some character to it. I don t know about it something I have to discover. It might be even though I retired, I'm going to rent my building. But the third floor of the building is the guys that used to work with me in a repair shop and I was still doing that, they rented a place in her work in up there and the chair might be up there.
• [00:34:59] DEBBIE: Do you plan any more travel?
• [00:35:03] HERB DAVID: Sure. Where, I don't know. I was thinking, I liked Iceland a lot and I like to be up in Spitsbergen and ever been up there, Spitsbergen, is North of Iceland. It's where we're Admiral Byrd took off when he went to look at the poll to reach the North Pole. I liked the Arctic but I also like the Amazon and so I might go back there. I've been in remote areas like that but I've never been to Europe, and I've never been to Africa. I was thinking maybe we should go to Italy or something like that. Boltzmann's holiday order to take it. Interesting because I enjoy art and sculpture and painting and all that stuff. Smithsonian took my harp over there. I went there and I thought, well, this is my town, I'm part of the town. Looked at paintings and looked at data for photography exhibition. I looked at photography. I know that until that time I used to go to the art institute or something and just walk along the corridors and look at the paintings as though we're hanging there. There were interesting but I had a girlfriend and she said, Jesus, I wonder what that woman in the painting was thinking about. I said what? It never occurred to me to think of these things as people who paintings of people and incidents and situations and places. We're just somebody's imagination. I learned to say there were stopping and looking at, and you think about trying to understand what it's all about. The same thing with the photographs. It was just to me to begin with, the photographs are just something that you put it in an album of memories. I learned to look at the photographs as an interesting example of something that was outstanding, worth taking a picture. That's what I learned to really appreciate art. I appreciate it before but not as much as I do now.
• [00:37:39] DEBBIE: Well, thank you so much for coming today. We've really enjoyed this. [MUSIC] To learn more about Herb David, visit old news at oldnews.adl.org. Music for this episode was Appalachia 2 by Raymond Ford, office early sessions album, which you can find on the AADL catalog, by going to aadl.org/magnitunes. AADL talks to Herb David has been a production of the Ann Arbor District Library. [MUSIC]