Master guitar crafter

Saturday September 28, 2002, 07:20:12 PM

Ask veteran musicians, music store merchants and vintage guitar collectors what they think about Bakersfield guitar maker Bill Gruggett and a similar refrain is repeated over and over again.

They call him the master.

Master luthier. Master craftsman. Artist. Quintessential painter of those fabulous "sunburst" finishes. Maker of musical treasures.

Bill Gruggett can fix, build or rebuild anything with strings, they say in quiet awe. But he is the last of a breed; there's no one waiting in the wings to take the place of this 65-year-old master guitar maker.

"Bill is one of the last surviving American luthiers to actually build solid-body electric guitars," said Bob Shade, a vintage guitar collector, guitar maker and musician who lives in Greenbelt, Md. "He's never really gotten his due."

Shade places Gruggett on a lofty pedestal, in the tradition of such electric guitar pioneers as Leo Fender, Adolph Rickenbacker, F.C. Hall -- and Semie Moseley, the founder of Bakersfield's own Mosrite guitar company.

Artie Niesen, the longtime proprietor of Front Porch Music in downtown Bakersfield and the owner of an extensive collection of rare and vintage guitars -- including a Gruggett or two -- calls Bill Gruggett "the best luthier in the area."

"Bill can work magic with wood," Niesen said.

Since the late 1950s, Gruggett has accumulated more than four decades of experience as a luthier, a maker of stringed instruments. He's built hundreds of his own guitars, but he's improved countless others with his noted fret work, refinishing expertise, custom-made wood pickup covers and myriad major and minor repairs done throughout the years.

Ironically, as health problems begin to slow him down, guitar collectors around the world are learning his name. But local admirers and Gruggett himself realize he will likely never receive the widespread recognition many believe he deserves.

"If Bill Gruggett was in San Francisco or Seattle or Austin, Texas -- a big music scene -- he'd be the hottest name in town," said T.R. Redbone, a longtime Bakersfield musician and the proud owner of a Gruggett eight-string bass. "That kind of (expletive) artistry wouldn't go unnoticed."

But staying in Bakersfield has a way of making "a little fish out of a big fish," Redbone said. "Stay around here long enough, it'll eventually grind you in."

Redbone and others point to the fact that the financially stressed Gruggett doesn't own even one of his handmade guitars -- nor one of the vintage Stradette models that were made in Gruggett's Chester Avenue factory in 1967.

It's an ironic punctuation mark in the story of a man who spent 40 years turning blocks of wood into unique musical instruments.

"Guitar makers have a rough life, I tell ya," Gruggett said last week while standing in the garage at his modest Oildale home. "You really can't make a good living."

A modest beginning

Gruggett was born in the Central California town of Tulare in 1937. His father was a minister who moved the family around during Gruggett's childhood. But the family ultimately returned to Tulare, allowing Bill to graduate from Tulare Union High School in 1955.

A few years later, he moved to Bakersfield where he began working as an auto mechanic. But it wasn't long before he realized he was more interested in the mysterious workings of stringed instruments than the mechanics of a Chevy V-8. He started working on used guitars, mandolins, and violins in his spare time.

He also started playing bass guitar in the clubs and honky-tonks that were sprouting like oil wells in and around Bakersfield. A new sound was evolving in those honky-tonks that later came to be known as the Bakersfield Sound.

"I played bass at about every bar in Bakersfield for about seven years," Gruggett recalls. "At one point, I was playing at the Blackboard six nights a week and building Mosrite guitars five days a week."

The Mosrite legacy

Gruggett's reputation as a guitar maker was already growing when Semie Moseley hired him to work on a bold endeavor to create a new guitar brand in Bakersfield, a guitar that would -- for a fleeting moment -- challenge the primacy of such names as Fender, Gibson and Rickenbacker.

So in 1962, Gruggett began building Mosrite guitars in a tin barn south of Bakersfield.

"Bill was a quiet man, not given much to trivial small talk," recalls Robert McNinch, who was a teen-ager when he went to work for Mosrite in 1962. "He was a hard worker and, under Semie's tutelage, became a great craftsman and luthier in his own right."

McNinch remembers a time when Gruggett accidentally cut off the tip of his finger in the joiner machine.

"Bill hadn't made a sound," he said. "The only way we knew he was hurt was when Semie saw Bill's face turn white and asked him what was the matter. Bill simply held up the profusely bleeding finger and Semie nearly had a heart attack.

"I worked daily with Bill Gruggett for over three years. I never once heard him complain, raise his voice in anger or speak ill of anyone. Bill was a true gentleman."

The first Mosrite Ventures-model guitars were made in that tin barn, and as orders began rolling in, the Mosrite factory was moved to a larger building on P Street, in downtown Bakersfield.

Mosrite would ultimately produce perhaps 50,000 guitars, but it was hard and demanding work. After four years without a vacation, Gruggett finally took a few weeks off in 1966. It was a turning point.

He decided to leave Mosrite to work with another Mosrite-trained luthier Joe Hall, the founder of Arvin-based Hallmark guitars.

A name of his own

"I made Hallmark guitars for about nine months -- until they ran out of money," Gruggett said.

Before Hallmark flamed out, Gruggett remembers the night Joe Hall went to a concert in Bakersfield featuring the '60s group The Mamas and the Papas. Halfway through the show, Hall went up onstage and presented two Hallmark "sweptwing" guitars, a doubleneck and a bass, to the band.

"They actually plugged them in and played them that night," Gruggett said.

But too few players were buying the guitars -- and not even The Mamas and the Papas could save Hallmark. It was time for Gruggett to strike out on his own.

In 1967, Gruggett designed and built the all-new Stradette model, advertised as a guitar "for the Mod Generation." The body was shaped like a violin, with a double-cutaway where the body meets the neck to allow easy fingering on the high notes.

According to the "Blue Book of Electric Guitars," Gruggett built the first 40 Stradettes in his garage, and then moved to the Chester Avenue factory and hired a few employees.

Gruggett's creation won a dubious distinction in 1985 when Guitar Player Magazine held its "Miss Off the Wall" guitar contest, featuring "13 of the world's weirdest guitars."

The Gruggett Stradette landed in fourth place for its "originality, functionalism, cool looks and off the wallness," according to the article, which went on to describe the distinctive guitar as "sort of a cross between a Ventures model Mosrite, a Hofner violin bass and Bullwinkle Moose."

Gruggett is amused more than anything else by the piece and still mistakenly refers to it as the "ugliest guitars" contest.

"I didn't think it was quite that ugly," he said in soft-spoken self-defense. "But that's OK."

Between 1967 and 1968, Gruggett's company started about 300 guitars but only finished 120 of them, according to the "Blue Book." During that same period, Gruggett constructed 35 guitars under the Epcor label.

To this day, Gruggett doesn't think much of the Epcors. He said he was never paid in full for his efforts.

In 1969, Gruggett's father fell ill. The guitar maker closed his shop and assumed responsibility for his dad's home-based pipe and cable business. For five years, he ran the business until his father's death in 1974.

Then in 1976, Semie Moseley returned to Bakersfield and hired Gruggett to manage his shop. The Brass Rail model guitar, featuring a rectangular brass rod running the length of the neck, was among the guitars produced during this period, Gruggett said.

But in the topsy-turvy world of guitar making, it was hard to count on stability. During this period, Moseley spent most of his time trying to raise money to keep the business afloat, to no avail, Gruggett recalled.

His second association with Semie Moseley lasted just six months.

Heart and soul

So Bill Gruggett returned to what area guitar players and guitar enthusiasts treasure the most: an extended period of creative guitar making during which dozens of one-of-a-kind musical instruments were lovingly formed using the highest standards and the finest aged woods obtainable.

"I put my heart and soul into every guitar," he says.

Gruggett also performed literally thousands of repairs and restorations for area customers and retailers. One of those loyal customers is Marc Lipco, a longtime local guitarist and proprietor of Alan's Kern Guitar World.

"Bill has fixed hundreds and hundreds of guitars for me," Lipco said, standing in his shop in downtown Bakersfield. "He has that gift. I can't explain it; he can't explain it."

Some years ago, Gruggett built Lipco a red, white and blue copy of a '61 Fender Telecaster. The guitar fits Lipco like a comfortable pair of shoes, but it's worth more to him than a handful of diamonds.

"Bill made this for me," he said, his voice almost reverent in his respect for the master. "It's as good a guitar as can be bought."

But even Gruggett admits he's winding down. Three years ago, he started having heart problems. He's tired a lot. He doesn't take on new work anymore and he's having trouble completing the dozen or so projects that remain unfinished.

"I'll get them done," he promises.

Still, area musicians worry that no one will ever replace Gruggett's skill and artistry. Like an aging watchmaker from another generation who spends his life mastering the intricate workings of quality timepieces, Gruggett's gift cannot be easily handed down to the next generation.

"It's a shame he can't pass that on," Lipco said. "But it doesn't work that way. Either you have it or you don't."

Knowing how a well-made guitar neck caresses the hand; how an instrument's heft and balance contributes to ease of playing; how the right guitar in the right hands can make a vibrating string sound like loneliness itself: These are traits that cannot be taught. These are skills that cannot be measured.

"When the book of guitar repair is written, Bill's chapter won't be in there," Redbone said. "It's a shame."

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