Culture
A Lifetime Of Music: Dan Erlewine
By: Emily Votaw
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Dan Erlewine has worked on an awful lot of famous guitars, some of which have been strummed by the likes of Bob Dylan, Jerry Garcia and many other notable musicians. With decades of music experience under his belt, Erlewine has both performed extensively with rock ‘n’ roll and folk bands (during the counterculture heyday of the mid-60s, spending a great amount of time in the famous Haight-Ashbury area of San Francisco with various bands,) and worked on hundreds of instruments.
It was at an early age that the seeds that would eventually blossom into Erlewine’s luthier (stringed instrument repair) career were planted.
“I was raised by parents who were into the arts and woodworking,” said Erlewine in an interview in his spacious guitar repair workshop in Athens this summer. “My mother was an artist and my dad was a business man, but his hobby was making things with the family. My brothers and I always had all the art supplies we could ever ask for from early on.”
Raised in Ann Arbor, MI, Erlewine was exposed to a lively music scene in his teen years, when he first started playing in bands and repaired his very first guitar.
“In about 10th grade I went into a pawn shop in Detroit and bought a cheap guitar, one that had been painted with black and white stripes,” said Erlewine of his first luthiery endeavor. “I wanted it to look like natural wood, so I stripped it and I did a very good job. Throughout high school I kept diddling with guitars, and by the end of high school I was playing guitar pretty well.”
It was at that point that Erlewine approached Herb David, the owner of Herb David Guitar Studios, for a job.
“At the time I was working at McDonalds and I used to make Herb triple decker cheeseburgers back when there wasn’t such a thing on the menu and try to woo him,” he said. “So, after a while Herb gave me a guitar that I now know was a very valuable guitar to try and repair. It had a hole in the side. Almost as a joke he asked me if I could fix it, so I took it home, and, with the help of my mother, I did a very good job on it. So that got me a job.”
Erlewine said that even though he had gotten his foot in the door of the guitar studio, David insisted that he sell guitars in the front of the shop and give guitar lessons for a while before he could become a fulltime luthier.
“It was about 1963 at that time, and I worked at the shop on and off for a number of years. At that time my friends and I had already started a pretty serious band, The Spiders, so we were playing a lot and Herb would fire me now and again,” said Erlewine, who recalled specifically being asked to leave the shop simply because he had picked up an electric guitar at another shop.
Throughout the ‘60s and ‘70s Erlewine traveled a lot, mostly with various rock bands, including his second band, The Prime Movers, who starred none other than the James Newell Osterberg, a.k.a punk rock royalty Iggy Pop.
In 1967, the “summer of love,” Erlewine’s band opened for Cream in San Francisco, one of many notable musical phenomena that took place around that time for Erlewine.
“It was tough sometimes,” he said. “Back then band would rent helicopter hangars to practice in, and we would sleep in the hangars and have to get up early in the morning so whatever band that was playing there could practice.”
During this time, Mike Bloomfield of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band served as Erlewine’s mentor. Erlewine would even go on to play in the Paul Butterfield Blues Band’s drummer, Sam Lay’s band for a short stint in Chicago.
“It was a fun time, what an experience,” said Erlewine. “We ended up disbanding out there, and I drove back to Ann Arbor and started playing with my cousin in what you would probably call a folk act. After my cousin decided to leave for Austin, where a lot of people were going at the time, I started to focus on guitar repair and guitar lessons more seriously.”
At that point, Erlewine was once again working for Herb, who helped Erlewine and his wife purchase a house in the area. Erlewine and his brother opened up Erlewine Instruments, a business that would fade when Erlewine’s brother decided to leave, taking the name of the outfit along with him. Within a few years Erlewine and his family packed up and moved to Big Rapids, MI to get away from a music scene that Erlewine wasn’t digging so much.
“So then I started Dan Erlewine’s Guitar Hospital, and I would drive all around to music stores in Michigan and pick up instruments that I would take home and work on,” said Erlewine, who mentioned that one of his other brothers helped him brand himself.
In the early ‘80s Erlewine made the first of what would be many, many guitar repair videos, an endeavor that was encouraged by one of his brothers who had been involved in the early days of computer technology.
“It was recorded on the first Panasonic home recorder, and it was pretty crude compared to what we can do with video today,” Erlewine said. “At the time I couldn’t believe that anyone would go to a store, rent a machine and a video tape and go home and watch them. At that point the only video I had ever seen was Jane Fonda’s workout tape. I couldn’t have been more wrong about how popular video s were about to become.”
The videos caught the eye of the musical instrument industry, and in 1984, when Erlewine attended a National Association of Music Merchants (NAMM) convention, he was asked to demonstrate his talents at the booth maintained by Jim Dunlop’s company.
It was there that Erlewine was spotted by Athens’ own Stewart-Macdonald, which would offer Erlewine a job that brought him to the little town of Athens in the mid-80s. In November Erlewine and his family will have lived in Athens for 30 years.
Soon Erlewine was penning a column for Guitar Player and Bass Player, as well as a music publication out of the U.K. After several years of regular column contribution, Erlewine decided to publish all of his written works on guitar repairing, as well as some extra stuff, in a volume entitled “The Guitar Player’s Repair Guide,” a book that has seen numerous editions over the past several decades.
“I would say that the videos and the books that I wrote at that point are what put my kids through college,” said Erlewine, who continues to make a regular series of videos for his longtime employer, Stewart-MacDonald.
“It’s been a great ride,” said Erlewine. “Coming to Stewart-MacDonald allowed me to join luthiery groups that I wouldn’t have been able to join otherwise and fly to conventions all over the country that I wouldn’t have been able to afford. I don’t do it so much anymore, but for about 20 years I was flying to conventions and teaching at them and making friends in the industry.”
As Erlewine continues to repair stringed instruments and lend a hand to the upcoming generation of luthiers, he expressed a general sense of hope and positivity towards the new professionals in the trade.
“My generation of luthiers is getting older and there’s an awful lot of young ones coming up and I would say that I trained a lot of them through videos and books,” said Erlewine. “This is a trade that I learned by myself. And if you have the desire to really learn this trade, that’s something you can do.”