Stories from the Jul./Aug. 2002 Bluegrass Express - Volume 22 No. 3

Steeplegrass Reunion

By Rich Powell

It’s been several years since I’ve had the opportunity to get together with my musical friends at the Steeple Center in Vancouver , Wash. It seems like that class/jam was an integral part of and a catalyst for so many bluegrass beginnings (band or personal) that it had always been a part of our local bluegrass scene. According to Ron Swanson, it really was only 17 years.

As most of you know, Ron (owner of the Steeple Center ) sold the building. Several other jams have popped up in Vancouver and Portland to try to fill the Wednesday night void that many of us pickers were feeling after “Steeple moved away.”  But still, there is a void in seeing friends I had made over many years of attending that bluegrass jam.  What to do???

In conversations with fellow Steeplegrassers, we decided to throw a Sunday picnic/reunion/jam for all alumni!!!!  Would it work??  Would it rain??? Would anyone come??

Babette Jacobsen, Chick Rose, contributions from participants at Greg Stone’s Monday night jam, plus announcements on KBOO helped us get the word out. Where to have it?  We found a large, covered picnic area at Lewisville Park near Battleground. Long-time Steeple grasser Don Heikkinen offered Brass, Reed, and Guitar store’s help with sound equipment – and the die was cast. 

We would have a reunion, come rain or shine!  It did rain a little, but it didn’t seem to dampen anyone’s spirits.

On May 19 we had our reunion with nearly 70 people attending (some from as far away as Pendleton).  The planning committee and attendees came up with neat little “Steeplegrass reunion” buttons, name tags, lots of great food, and a great bake sale!  I saw people there who I hadn’t seen in many years and it just felt like, well, an extended family! Picking around the fire went on until right about dusk. 

It was a great jam session, and you had just stepped back from doing the hottest solo in your life. Then the accordion player stepped up to invite you to a private jam session and band audition and to tell you how hot you look, when the strap buckle on the accordion flopped right onto the top of your vintage Guild D-37.

Now you’ve got this divot in the top of your guitar on the bass side of your bridge about the size of a pencil eraser. That does it. No way are you ever going to trust an accordion player near your instrument again.

Now, what to do about the divot?

One of the most expensive, and the key here is time consuming, repairs in most shops is nick and dent work. It’s not physically hard, it’s just labor intensive. The difficult part is trying to maintain the color of the repair with the area around it and allow for future darkening of both areas. Also challenging is filling or drawing the parent wood up to the surface of the surrounding good area so not to leave much of a sub-finish crater. Sometimes there is no choice but to leave the divot below the finish visible, as the repair choice is too expensive or not cost-effective.

Let’s look at the case of the Guild D-37. This instrument is considered to be an acceptable bluegrass guitar and was marketed by Guild as "The Bluegrass Guitar." The current replacement value for this instrument is about $1,100 in excellent condition. The customer has several options in repair.

The first is to make structurally correct but only minor cosmetic improvements – as cosmetics take time, and time is money. The second choice is structurally correct and cosmetically correct. And the final choice is to leave it alone.

The first choice is to remove (drop fill) the divot or hole and build the finish up to the level of the area around the damage. This job can take three to six hours at the shop rate of $65 an hour, so the repair estimate will be $150 to $300. The second choice can mean removing the finish in the repair area and adding distilled water and glycerin to raise the grain, or making a grain matching patch to hide the hole, plus adding color and finish. This can take six to 10 hours of repair time, with the estimate being $300 to $600.

The final choice is to do nothing, which costs nothing, but is it the right choice? Some say yes. I say if the finish has cracked and or popped out, something needs to be done to at least replace the finish to keep dirt and moisture out of the dent.