Psychologist - Writer - MUSICIAN - Steve Bonham
Wide brimmed hat. Long dark coat. Guitar slung on back.
21 years on the road.
A 100,000 miles and half a thousand hotel rooms.
From the Berlin Wall to Atlas Mountains.
From Sahara Desert to the streets of Hong Kong:
A memory brewed in the long simmering soup of people and place.
A man who has learned to watch and to listen
to walk and talk in the ebb and flow of meeting and parting.
He is a chronicler of the human spirit in words. and music.
Guitars and the meaning of life.
In the Autumn I flew into Atlanta to hang out with my good buddy Rob McHale - the great singer-songwriter from North Carolina. I was going to do a few showcases with him, a bit of radio and this and that. As I waited in the queue at the airport my phone buzzed with a message that I gig I thought wasn’t going to happen, was. A gig in Nashville the following night. Great news but one big problem as the guitar I was going to play on this visit was over on NC and Rob was away. Inevitably and like sirens calling from the rock, my brain repeated “Guitar Purchase Opportunity”.
Like the devil on one shoulder and the angel on the other, the argument immediately raged in my imagination: “go on buy one for the gig - you can always sell it later and remember you’ve been thinking about getting a new one, you need a new stage guitar anyway vs Steve you have eight guitars!, you are supposed to be saving money at the moment, a guitar for one gig, are you mad…!?”
Guess who won?
By lunchtime the next day I was heading in a hire car to Nashville with a brand new Martin Streetmaster in the back. How come the result was inevitable? Because of the dozens of guitars, I tried this was the only one that called to me.
I think the relationship between guitarist and guitar is deeply personal and is murmuring voice of a more ancient one. Almost pagan and mystical. The idea of an object imbued with a mysterious power. The list is long: bows, chalices, crowns, amulets, cloth, cloaks, spears and swords all could have an intimate relationship with a chosen one. Dark age warriors would give their swords names and attribute magical properties to them. They would honour the craftsmanship with which they were built and the craftsmen that made them. So it is with a good guitar. Guy Clark the great songwriter and mean luthier himself nailed it in his song ‘The Guitar’. In it he tells of finding an old guitar in pawn shop. Almost disdainfully, he picks it up and starts to play. He is astounded by what fizzes and flashes as he plays and by the skills it seems to unleash in him such that he wonders who is playing whom. When he turns to the pawnshop owner to ask how much the guitar is, the owner shows him that his name is already written in old guitar’s case.
That nails it for me. It is the notion, compelling and obvious, that certain
guitars can set the dark well of your soul and imagination echoing. After the
gig I headed over to Rob’s and in one afternoon, sitting in his den, looking out
on sunny waters as the leaves of fall danced down to the earth, me and my
new guitar wrote three songs together, amongst the best I have ever made.
Alchemy.