Country shredder Daniel Donato.
Question: What was the defining band of your teenage years?
Guest Picker Daniel Donato
Photo of J.D. Simo by Adam Abrashoff
A: The defining band of my teenage years was the Don Kelley Band, an infamous and tenured Nashville honky-tonk band. This band introduced me to the potential that simple country music can have when played and sung by an incredibly tight and hardworking, disciplined group of four members. The band hosted Nashville’s finest and most famous Telecaster players: Brent Mason, Johnny Hiland, J.D. Simo, Guthrie Trapp, Luke McQueary, just to name a few.
Gypsy jazz innovator Django Reinhardt.
Photo of Django Reinhardt by William P. Gottlieb
Current obsession: Bob Dylan, Django Reinhardt, Bob Wills, Khruangbin, and 1995–1998 Phish. Whether it is a lyrical reach, compositional approach, or mindset intention, I find great inspiration in these spirits mentioned above. They are all fantastic at conveying their own unique and eternal perspective of how they see the truth, the most subjectively specific yet objectively enduring ideal that anyone who ever creates anything can ever aspire to manifest into form in space and time.
Charles Saufley Gear Editor
Psychedelic rockers Quicksilver Messenger Service.
A: Teenage me craved romance, freedom, and energy. I could never pick one band to sum those longings. But these artists and songs embody the hunger and awakening of my young self: Neil Young & Crazy Horse’s “Like a Hurricane,” John Coltrane’s “Africa,” Black Flag’s “Nervous Breakdown,” Sonic Youth’s “Teen Age Riot,” Roberta Flack’s “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,” Pink Floyd’s “Echoes,” Quicksilver Messenger Service’s “Fresh Air,” and Augustus Pablo’s “King Tubby Meets the Rockers Uptown.”
’80s noise rockers Sonic Youth.
Photo of Sonic Youth by Monica Dee
Current obsession: Surf music—as in, music actually played to the breath of the ocean and waves. Recently my gal and I played a medley of dreamy instrumentals for a friend’s wedding with the waves lapping below. I’d love so much to do that again.
Perry Bean Videographer
The real Mr. Bean.
A: What I wouldn’t give to go back to the ’90s and hear NOFX for the first time again! I must have skateboarded 20,000 miles to White Trash, Two Heebs, and a Bean. That band created a baseline for most everything I still listen to today. Melodic, technical, and goofy. Just how I like it!
NOFX's White Trash, Two Heebs, and a Bean.
Current obsession: Lately I can’t seem to get away from literally anything Will Putney touches. If he produced it, mixed it, played on it, or wrote it, chances are I’m gonna love it. I still can’t believe I haven’t wrecked my car listening to his band End.
The album cover of End’s Splinters From an Ever-Changing Face.
Lee Whiles Reader of the Month
A: The Presidents of the United States of America! I was around 14 when a friend played me their debut album on cassette. Up until that point, the only music I really listened to was whatever my parents played (which I still love) but that band blew my world right open!
The Presidents of the United States of America’s album, II.
Current obsession: My covers band is currently learning the Fugees’ “Ready or Not,” and my favorite heavy metal vocalist Keith Buckley has just released a new song from his new project Many Eyes called “Revelation,” so I’m just bouncing between those two songs. Oh, and a UKHC [U.K. hardcore] band called Malevolence.
UKHC band Malevolence.
Photo of Malevolence by Stefan Bollmann
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Tom Bedell in the Relic Music acoustic room, holding a custom Seed to Song Parlor with a stunning ocean sinker redwood top and milagro Brazilian rosewood back and sides.
A born storyteller, Bedell doesn’t keep his passion to himself. On Friday, May 12, at New Jersey boutique guitar outpost Relic Music, Bedell shared some of the stories he’s collected during his life and travels as part of a three-city clinic trip. At Relic—and stops at Crossroads Guitar and Art in Gilbertsville, Pennsylvania, and Chuck Levin’s Washington Music Center in Wheaton, Maryland—he discussed his guitars and what makes them so special, why sustainability is such an important cause, and how he’s putting it into practice.
Before his talk, we sat in Relic’s cozy, plush acoustic room, surrounded by a host of high-end instruments. We took a look at a few of the store’s house-spec’d Bedell parlors while we chatted.
“The story of this guitar is the story of the world,” Bedell explained to me, holding a Seed to Song Parlor. He painted a picture of a milagro tree growing on a hillside in northeastern Brazil some 500 years ago, deprived of water and growing in stressful conditions during its early life. That tree was eventually harvested, and in the 1950s, it was shipped to Spain by a company that specialized in church ornaments. They recognized this unique specimen and set it aside until it was imported to the U.S. and reached Oregon. Now, it makes the back and sides of this unique guitar.
A Bedell Fireside Parlor with a buckskin redwood top and cocobolo back and sides.
As for the ocean sinker redwood top, “I’m gonna make up the story,” Bedell said, as he approximated the life cycle of the tree, which floated in the ocean, soaking up minerals for years and years, and washed ashore on northern Oregon’s Manzanita Beach. The two woods were paired and built into a small run of exquisitely outfitted guitars using the Bedell/Breedlove Sound Optimization process—in which the building team fine-tunes each instrument’s voice by hand-shaping individual braces to target resonant frequencies using acoustic analysis—and Bedell and his team fell in love.
Playing it while we spoke, I was smitten by this guitar’s warm, responsive tone and even articulation and attack across the fretboard; it strikes a perfect tonal balance between a tight low-end and bright top, with a wide dynamic range that made it sympathetic to anything I offered. And as I swapped guitars, whether picking up a Fireside Parlor with a buckskin redwood top and cocobolo back and sides or one with an Adirondack spruce top and Brazilian rosewood back and sides, the character and the elements of each instrument changed, but that perfect balance remained. Each of these acoustics—and of any Bedell I’ve had the pleasure to play—delivers their own experiential thumbprint.
Rosette and inlay detail on an Adirondack spruce top.
Ultimately, that’s what brought Bedell out to the East Coast on this short tour. “We have a totally different philosophy about how we approach guitar-building,” Bedell effused. “There are a lot of individuals who build maybe 12 guitars a year, who do some of the things that we do, but there’s nobody on a production level.” And he wants to spread that gospel.
“We want to reach people who really want something special,” he continued, pointing out that for the Bedell line, the company specifically wants to work with shops like Relic and the other stores he’s visited, “who have a clientele that says I want the best guitar I can possibly have, and they carry enough variety that we can give them that.”
A Fireside Parlor with a Western red cedar top and Brazilian rosewood back and sides.
