My Father, Guitar Guru to the Rock Gods
When the greatest musicians of the 1970s needed an instrument—or a friend—my dad was there.
www.theatlantic.com/magazine/arc…

[image or embed]

— Marion Friedl (@mari-19.bsky.social) August 10, 2025 at 10:08 AM

Nancy Waleki, at the Atlantic [gift link]:

In August 2000, when I was 2 years old, my mother put me in a maroon velvet dress and stuck foam earplugs in my ears. She carried me through the backstage corridors of the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium—the same venue where, in 1964, James Brown gave one of the most ecstatic performances of his career. It’s where, in 1972, George Carlin first listed the “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television.”

My mother remembers the night in flashes. David Crosby—walrus mustache, smiling eyes—telling jokes. Bonnie Raitt’s aura of red hair. In the distance, the sound of Linda Ronstadt warming up. Sitting in a dressing room with Michael McKean and Christopher Guest, already in costume as Spinal Tap’s front men.

That night, the auditorium was hosting the Friends of Fred Walecki benefit concert. These friends included Crosby, Raitt, and Ronstadt. Also Jackson Browne, Graham Nash, Emmylou Harris, and Warren Zevon. Three of the four original Eagles, who in this room in 1973 had performed their new album, Desperado, were there too.

One of the Eagles, Bernie Leadon, had helped put the event together. He had known Fred Walecki, my father, since they were teenagers, when Leadon started coming into Westwood Music, Dad’s musical-instrument shop in Los Angeles.

Dad had recently been diagnosed with Stage 4 throat cancer and had undergone a complete laryngectomy. Surgeons removed his vocal cords and created a hole in his throat that he used to breathe; to speak, he pressed an electronic buzzer against the side of his neck. If people gawked at him, he’d joke that everyone on his home planet sounded like this.

When Leadon had learned that my father was sick, he called Glyn Johns, another of Dad’s close friends and a groomsman at my parents’ wedding. Johns is the English sound engineer and producer who worked with pretty much every major rock band of the ’60s and ’70s—the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Who, the Eagles. He and Leadon suspected that my family was struggling to pay Dad’s medical bills, so they contacted his other friends and asked if they’d play a benefit concert for him. Everyone said yes. Dad’s classmate from Emerson Junior High School, Jeff Bridges, who’d recently starred as “The Dude” in The Big Lebowski, would be the evening’s emcee.

I wish I had been old enough to remember this night of thank-yous to my father. He was 51 when I was born; I’ve only known Dad with gray hair, and I have no memory of his original voice. But Browne remembers my father’s impeccable Jimmy Stewart impersonations; he remembers Dad as the guy who turned him on to Gibson guitars. At the concert, he performed “My Opening Farewell” on a guitar that had been assembled at Westwood Music. Dad had spent hours polishing it to give it the rich hue Browne wanted.

Crosby thought of my dad as his “guitar guru,” and like many of the performers that night, he praised my father for his friendship. “Fred’s helped a lot of people when they really needed it. Really needed it,” he said. He and Nash then played their song “Déjà Vu.”…

Every time he sold one of his father’s violins, Dad would reinvest in new inventory—handmade guitars by the Spanish luthier José Ramírez; Traynor amps imported from Canada; and, for musicians who wanted their own sound system, Lamb Laboratories mixing boards from England (because Dad found that if he adjusted the board’s settings just right, it could “get you a really good Rolling Stones sound live”). Martin guitars, a favorite of folk musicians, had only a handful of authorized retailers in Los Angeles; Dad was one of them. As musicians started traveling more and more by plane, he found a man named Mark Leaf, who built fiberglass guitar cases on his kitchen table in Virginia. Dad told Leadon that a guitar in that case could fall onto an airplane tarmac without a scratch. (Leadon later learned this to be true.)…

All of them were so young. Browne was only 18 when he wrote “A Child in These Hills.” Linda Ronstadt was the same age when she moved from Tucson, Arizona, to Los Angeles. Crosby and Hillman were in their early 20s when, in 1965, the Byrds essentially launched the folk-rock genre with their cover of “Mr. Tambourine Man.” By 1970, Hillman and Leadon had fused country and rock together in the Flying Burrito Brothers. (Their pedal-steel player used Jimi Hendrix–esque fuzz distortion and was also an animator for The Gumby Show. His name was Sneaky Pete.)…

Chris Hillman described Westwood Music to me as “the hardware store” of the L.A. music scene. Guest had a more romantic metaphor: Dad, he said, “was like a matchmaker,” a conduit between the human soul and the instrumental one. Where other salesmen might just tell you the price of a guitar, with my father, “it was about going so much further than that and thinking, I’m listening to you play, and it sounds like this might be a good guitar for you.”…

*****

Joni Mitchell stopped touring in the 1980s, and in the ’90s told Dad she was going to do her last-ever public performance, at the 1995 New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival. Her songbook incorporates about 50 different tunings. “I’d tune to the numbers in a date, I’d tune to a piece of music that I liked on the radio, I’d tune to birdsongs and the landscape I was sitting in,” she said in a 1996 interview. “I’d work out these wonderful fresh harmonic movements, only it was a pain in the butt to perform and I felt like I was always out of tune.” She didn’t want to do it anymore.

But Dad told her he might have just the right tool: Roland’s new VG-8, which could electronically alter a guitar’s sonic output and, crucially, memorize tunings. Mitchell could keep her guitar in standard tuning, then push a button for “Big Yellow Taxi,” say, and the VG-8 would convert the sound of each string to match that tuning. Dad knew Mitchell had had polio as a child and still suffered from muscle weakness, so he built her a guitar from lightweight spruce (commonly used in violin making) and placed the VG-8 inside. He painted the guitar his favorite color, British racing green. She named it “Green Peace.”

What she thought would be her swan song “turned into the first performance in a whole new period,” she said in that 1996 interview. She used the VG-8 to make the guitar sounds on Taming the Tiger, giving her “access to all kinds of possibilities in keeping with the way I hear guitar, which is like a full orchestra, with the treble like a brass section and the lower strings like the viola, cello, and bass.” To another reporter, she said, “This instrument is going to be my savior.” She used my father’s name in one of the album’s lyrics—she calls him “Freddie”—and, in the liner notes, thanked him for “rekindling my desire to make music.”…

Dad is 78 now, and still repairs instruments for customers like Guest, Sklar, Robby Krieger of the Doors, the Edge, and anyone else resourceful enough to find his new shop, unlisted on Google Maps and located inside a converted greenhouse at a succulent nursery in Malibu. Dad brings lettuce from home to feed the rabbits that run beneath the pallets of cacti; the other tenants include a glassblower, a clothing designer, a painter, and a sculptor. When he leaves home in the morning, he will say, “I’m off to do my father’s work”—referring to both Hermann and his heavenly father.

His repair shop still smells of Westwood Music’s old wood and lacquer, along with the ocean and the faded paper in his boxes of ephemera. (My favorite piece is a photograph of Crosby, Stills, and Nash’s recreational baseball team, the Hoovers—a cocaine joke, Dad had to explain to me.) He keeps his father’s Goethe quote above his workbench, where he recently repaired a cello from 1876. “You know what’s interesting? I realized that’s what I like to do,” he told me. If he didn’t love guitar players so much, he’d work only on cellos. Repairing them reminds him of his father…