Friday, April 6, 2018

MARTIN GUITARS: An enthralling lecture

On April 5 at Kennett Friends Meeting, Dick Boak gave a fascinating, standing-room-only Hadley Fund lecture about legendary Martin Guitars, the musicians who play them, and why they sound so good.
Mr. Boak recently retired from Martin (based in Nazareth, Pa.) after working there for 41 years and told wonderful anecdotes about his encounters with Martin clients like Keith Richards, Eric Clapton, Mark Knopfler, Paul Simon, Steve Miller, Jimmy Buffett, Joan Baez, Johnny Cash, and many, many others. (I tend to feel out of touch with modern popular music, so it was heartening to recognize all the artists he talked about.)
Have you ever wondered about "went down to Nazareth," the lyric in The Band's song "The Weight"? According to Mr. Boak, the songwriter, Robbie Robertson, needed a town name and couldn't come up with one that fit the meter until he happened to see "Nazareth" on the guitar label.
And the Martin guitar that's named after Mark Knopfler features a drawing of the dinosaur Masiakasaurus knopfleri, so named because the paleontologists who discovered the creature had their best success at unearthing its bones when Dire Straits songs were playing on their boomboxes. The dinosaur drawing is deliberately hidden inside the guitar, so that the owner has to search for it just like the paleontologists did.

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