On the morning of October 15, 1974, Bob Taylor, Kurt Listug, and Steve
Schemmer opened the door of their small workshop in Lemon Grove, California,
expecting to spend their first day of business as the Westland Music
Co. building guitars. Instead, they discovered that during the rainy
night a storm drain had overflowed, and the shop floor was under three
inches of water. The three partners and their tiny crew of workers spent
the day mopping, shoveling soggy sawdust, and scrambling to get the
precious pieces of spruce and rosewood up off the floor before they
were ruined.
Despite this inauspicious
beginning, over the next 30 years Taylor and Listug—who bought
out Schemmer's share of the business in 1983—overcame that setback
and more serious obstacles to create Taylor Guitars, one of the most
successful guitar companies in American musical history.
An American Dream
Bob Taylor was destined
to become a luthier. When he was nine years old, he bought an acoustic
guitar with a red-and-black sunburst and painted-on white "binding"
from a friend. The binding was scuffed, so he embarked on his first
guitar repair by painting over the white trim with model airplane paint.
A year or so later, he sawed the neck off his guitar in an attempt to
convert it into a solid-body electric, but he soon discovered that project
was beyond his abilities and abandoned the effort.
During his junior year in
high school, Taylor decided to build an acoustic 12-string guitar in
shop class. His teacher gave him a copy of Irving Sloane's book Classic
Guitar Construction, from which he learned the rudiments of guitar
building. Although it took him almost the entire school year to build
that first guitar, it turned out so well that he constructed two more
guitars his senior year.
Like many boys his age,
Kurt Listug, Taylor's future partner, became obsessed with guitars after
hearing the Beatles in 1964. That year for Christmas, his parents gave
him a guitar, which inspired him to form a series of garage bands that
never left the garage. In September 1973 Listug got a job finishing
guitars at the American Dream, a small guitar-building shop in Lemon
Grove, California. A week later, Taylor, who discovered the shop when
he was building his first guitars, also started working there.
The Dream, as people soon
came to call it, was founded in San Diego in 1970 by brothers Sam and
Gene Radding. It began as a combination retail store and instrument-building
workshop to sell the guitars and dulcimers that Sam had been building.
When Sam moved the workshop to the nearby town of Lemon Grove, he set
it up as a cooperative and hired luthiers who worked as independent
contractors building guitars based on Radding's designs.
The young Bob Taylor impressed
his fellow workers with his intensity, which stood out in the laid-back
environment of the Dream. "Bob's bench was next to mine,"
recalls Dreamer and future Taylor employee Tim Luranc. "He came
in out of high school, and he just blew everybody away with the speed
and quality of his work. I'd tell Sam I was going to go surfing for
the rest of the day, but Bob never did stuff like that. He just had
a drive to excel that was unlike anything I'd ever seen." Greg
Deering, Dream employee and founder of Deering Banjos, had similar thoughts.
"Bob was notably different from everyone else there," he says.
"He was the only person, apart from me and Sam, who wasn't a long-haired
hippie."
Soon after Taylor started
at the Dream, a friend of his brought in a Guild G-37 that needed neck
work. After removing the neck and examining the dovetail joint, Taylor
wasn't quite convinced that it was the best way to attach the neck to
the guitar's body. "So I cut the dovetail off," he says. "Then
I glued that block of wood into the body, drilled holes in it, filled
it in, put some bolts in there, and I was done! I successfully repaired
it by converting it to a bolt-on neck."
This memory stuck in Taylor's
mind when he started making guitars under his own name a few years later.
His first version of the bolt-on neck featured a mortise-and-tenon joint,
which he soon dropped in favor of a simple butt joint. Not only was
the bolt-on neck easier to manufacture, it made formerly complex repair
jobs like resetting the neck a relatively simple proposition. The success
of the Taylor bolt-on neck helped bring legitimacy to the once disdained
construction technique.
Into the Westland
By the middle of 1974, Sam
Radding was getting tired of running the American Dream. He announced
he was going to close the shop, but after some of the workers urged
him to reconsider, he agreed to sell it instead. Listug and fellow co-worker
Steve Schemmer decided to form a partnership to buy the business.
Listug's father quickly
spotted the one thing missing in his son's plan. "The first thing
my dad asked me was, ‘Do you or Steve know how to make guitars?'"
Listug recalls. "I had to tell him no, we didn't. He suggested
that if we were going into the guitar-building business, it might be
a good idea to have a partner who actually knew how to build guitars.
He asked me who the best builder at the Dream was, and when I told him
Bob Taylor, he said he'd loan me the money if we could get Taylor to
sign on."
Listug and Schemmer convinced
Taylor to join up with them, and the new partners paid off the debts
and bought Sam Radding's tools, outstanding orders, and stock of wood
for $3,500. But after the deal was done, they discovered that Gene Radding
had retained the American Dream name for his retail shop. Disappointed,
the trio decided to call their venture the Westland Music Co., figuring
they could grow into the large-sounding name. But after some discussion,
they settled on Taylor for the headstock. "Since Bob was the only
real guitar maker among us, it made sense for us to use his name,"
Listug says.
When the Westland Music
Co. opened for business on that soggy day in 1974, the crew consisted
of Taylor, Listug, and Schemmer as well as Tim Luranc, Bob Huff, Tony
Louscher, and Bob "Moze" Mossay, who had stayed on from the
American Dream. Sam Radding took a break from guitar making for a few
years, but he now builds Go Guitars travel guitars. Taylor still remembers
Radding with fondness and respect. "I don't think he's received
the recognition he deserves," he says. "He inspired a lot
of great builders, and he's one of the smartest craftsmen I've ever
met. He taught me how to build guitars, and I can never thank him enough
for that."
Over the next year, Taylor
started refining Radding's guitar designs, which consisted of a jumbo,
a dreadnought, and a shallow-bodied dreadnought that was popular with
local fingerpickers. At first, all of the guitars Taylor and crew made
were built to order, but after building a handful of prototypes, they
came up with their first standard model: a dreadnought with Brazilian
rosewood back and sides, spruce top, white binding, abalone soundhole
rosette, and diamond-shaped fretboard inlays. A few weeks later they
developed the naming system that Taylor Guitars still uses today: the
first digit of the three-digit model number indicates the wood and level
of ornamentation; the second digit, whether the guitar is a six-string
(1) or a 12-string (5); and the third digit, the size. The new model
was christened the 810.
By the end of 1975, the
Westland Music Co. had made 36 guitars, which provided hardly enough
money to support three owners, let alone the other workers, so Taylor,
Listug, and Schemmer had to lay everyone off. At the beginning of 1976,
they changed the name of the company to Taylor Guitars and began to
sell guitars at wholesale to dealers. In early 1977, responding to its
first dealers' demand for a broader line, Taylor introduced the 900
series, which featured bird's-eye maple back and sides, and the 700
series, a cosmetically plainer version of the 800 series. That same
year the company switched from Brazilian to East Indian rosewood.
In 1978 Taylor Guitars signed
a distribution deal with Rothchild Musical Instruments, who encouraged
the young company to expand the line again. Taylor added the mahogany
500 and 600 series (after an interruption in production, the 600 series
was reintroduced later with maple back and sides) and hired a number
of new workers to fulfill the expected orders from Rothchild, but when
the boom failed to materialize, Bob Taylor once again had to lay off
his entire workforce.
The company ended its relationship
with Rothchild in early 1978. With only three people to build guitars,
Bob Taylor began designing and building jigs and fixtures that would
make the building process more efficient. He discovered that the quality
of the guitars also began to improve because he was assembling them
out of consistently made components. Listug was aggressively marketing
the guitars and was out of the shop for weeks at a time on selling trips
across the country. Schemmer, in turn, found that he didn't like working
long hours for little pay, and in 1983 Taylor and Listug bought out
his share of the business.
Signature Style
The year of the company's
tenth anniversary, 1984, marked a turnaround in its fortunes and the
beginning of a decade of rapid growth. At the January NAMM Show (the
semiannual music products trade show), Taylor exhibited a custom-ordered,
bright blue—stained maple 610 that led to a number of orders for
colored-finish instruments from musicians like Prince (a purple jumbo
12-string) and Alabama's Steve Cook (a green dreadnought).
At that same show Taylor
Guitars introduced the small-bodied grand concert, the first model Bob
Taylor designed from the ground up. The new guitar was developed with
input from fingerstyle guitarist Chris Proctor. Bob Taylor appreciated
Proctor's insights into what guitarists wanted. "By the time Chris
came around, my ability to build guitars had grown beyond my ability
to play guitar," Taylor says. "To get to the next step as
a luthier, I needed to build guitars that really good players responded
to. Chris was the perfect guy to bounce ideas off of."
Although the grand concert
wasn't a huge seller compared to the dreadnought, it proved to be popular
with studio musicians who were looking for a guitar with a well-balanced
tone that was easy to record. Taylor's growing reputation for building
good-sounding guitars began to attract well-known musicians. In 1986
the company released the Dan Crary Signature Model, a cutaway dreadnought
designed with the help of the legendary bluegrass flatpicker. "We
tried to create a guitar that was better for ‘pros' to play,"
Crary says. "We wanted a guitar that was easy to mic onstage but
still sounded good in the studio."
The fledgling line of artist-endorsed
Taylor guitars doubled in 1990 when the company introduced the Leo Kottke
Signature Model. The mahogany cutaway 12-string was designed to be tuned
down to C#, which made it a very specialized instrument. But because
Kottke was well-known as a stickler for tone and playability, the addition
of the model increased the profile of Taylor guitars among more discerning
players.
In 1989 Bob Taylor ushered
in a new era in the acoustic guitar world when he became the first acoustic
guitar builder to buy a Fadal, a computer numeric control (CNC) machine.
Taylor realized that the new tool would allow him to increase production
while also increasing the precision with which the guitar parts were
made. Initially, he used it to shape and contour fretboards, but he
soon figured out how to use it to make bridges, cut fret slots, and
carve necks. As Bob Taylor and his crew became more proficient at programming
the CNC machines, they explored ways they could enhance the cosmetic
as well as structural aspects of the guitars. Complex CNC-enabled inlays
first appeared on Taylor's 1997 limited editions and have been used
on a veritable who's who list of Taylor signature models.
In 1991 Bob Taylor demonstrated
how valuable the Fadal really was when he introduced the 400 series,
the only all-solid-wood guitar built in America at that time that sold
for under $1,000—a project that would have been impossible without
the CNC. Taylor was now making nearly 5,000 guitars a year and for the
second time had outgrown its space (in 1987 the company had moved from
Lemon Grove to a 4,700-square-foot factory in Santee, California). Bob
Taylor designed every aspect of the company's new 25,000-square-foot
building in El Cajon, down to the placement of the electrical outlets,
the size of the offices, and the width of the doors.
Once the Taylor crew settled
into the new facility, Bob Taylor embarked on some new projects that
had been shelved during the move. He, along with Tim Luranc, Matt Guzzetta,
and Steve Baldwin, developed a finish that cured in just a few minutes
under ultraviolet light. This meant that they no longer had to find
a place to store the hundreds of guitar bodies that were in the process
of drying, which greatly sped up production. The new finish was also
more environmentally sound, requiring fewer solvents than the previous
material.
Soon after moving into the
new factory, Bob Taylor helped develop new products for the Taylor line,
including an acoustic bass, introduced in 1995, designed in collaboration
with innovative luthier Steve Klein; the 3/4-sized Baby Taylor travel
guitar; and the grand auditorium model, first released as a limited
edition in 1994 for Taylor's 20th anniversary. The grand auditorium
was added to the standard line two years later and has become the most
popular size Taylor builds. By the end of 1996, Taylor had 167 employees
on its payroll and was building just over 15,000 guitars a year.
New Technologies
In 1999 Taylor Guitars celebrated
its 25th anniversary with two limited-edition models: the XXV-DR dreadnought
and the XXV-GA grand auditorium. Both featured figured sapele back and
sides, a spruce top, custom fretboard inlays, and Taylor's new, patented
neck system, dubbed the New-Technology (NT). The NT neck was designed
to be a complete bolt-on, so the fretboard extension was actually inlaid
into a shallow channel cut into the top, rather than glued to the top.
This allowed workers to set the neck angle more precisely and made neck
resets even easier.
The NT system also featured
a stacked heel and a headstock that is grafted onto the neck using a
complex finger joint, a construction technique that conserved more wood
than the old-style one-piece neck. "We want to consume less of
a tree every time we make a guitar," Taylor explains. "Why
cut down a tree to make 50 guitars when you can figure out a way to
get 100 guitars from that same tree? Some people might say, ‘Well
that's just an economic move on their part.' Well, no, it isn't. We're
determined to be less wasteful."
In 2002 Taylor introduced
a series of nylon-string guitars that are based on the grand concert
body silhouette but are as deep as a dreadnought. The new guitars, which
have steel-string—style radiused fretboards, narrower necks than
classical guitars, a cutaway, and onboard electronics, are designed
to appeal to players who want the mellow nylon-string tone but don't
want to play a traditional classical guitar.
The following year, Taylor
Guitars entered the electronics field with the Expression System pickup,
which combines two body sensors affixed in carefully chosen spots under
the top with a string sensor underneath the fretboard. The pickup was
designed in-house over a three-year period by longtime employees Bob
Hosler, Matt Guzzetta, and David Judd, and it was paired with a preamp
designed by audio pioneer Rupert Neve.
Taylor is marking its 30th
anniversary this year with a limited-edition grand concert with a deep
body, slotted peghead, and short 24 7/8-inch scale length in a variety
of wood combinations. "We got the idea for the short-scale guitar
from [Taylor endorsee] Doyle Dykes," Taylor says. "He mentioned
that the long stretches he used in his playing have put a lot of strain
on his hands over the years. He asked us to make a shorter-scale instrument
for him, and when we did and found it had a slightly mellower, sweeter
tone than our standard-scale guitars, we decided to offer it as an anniversary
model."
Living the Dream
Bob Taylor and Kurt Listug
achieved their remarkable success by allowing each other to do what
they do best. "I discovered early on that even though I love guitars,
I'm not cut out to be a luthier," Listug says. "It turns out
that I'm as good at managing a business as Bob is at building guitars.
It's extremely fortunate for both of us that our skills and interests
complement each other so well."
"I give Kurt most of
the credit for the success of the company," Taylor says. "I
was probably destined to be a guitar maker, and I like to think I would
have succeeded on my own if I had bought the American Dream by myself.
I tend to get the lion's share of the attention because it's my name
on the headstock, but if it wasn't for Kurt in the background keeping
the company running smoothly, we wouldn't have had the time or money
or tools to develop things like the NT neck or the Expression System
pickup."
And what does Taylor see
as his legacy? "I think we've built some really nice guitars over
the years, which I hope people will play long after I'm gone,"
he says. "I pioneered the use of CNC machines in acoustic-guitar
building, and there are some tools we designed that I'm proud of. But
I'd be content to know that after I've gone, people said, ‘He
left the world of guitars better off than when he found it.' That would
be a good way to be remembered."
EXCERPTED AND ADAPTED
from the book Taylor Guitars: 30 Years of a New American Classic
(PPV Medien, www.ppvmedien.de).
Excerpted from
Acoustic
Guitar magazine, May 2004,
No. 137.
