Paul Hostetter, luthier bowed instruments plectrum and other instruments professional background art plastic! The rest of the site
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 I
come from a family of engineers, builders, architects, carpenters and artisans.
For example, one of my great-grandfathers, George Shand, was a coachmaker
from Falkirk, Scotland who emigrated to America and pursued coachmaking
in Detroit. He was working for Fisher Coachworks, a coachmaking company
that made the transition to automobile body building (Fisher Body),
when he passed away in 1929. Another great-grandfather built - from scratch
- the house that I grew up in. My grandfather was a general contractor
and my father was an architect and a civil engineer. Not to mention
a great whittler and boatmaker. They were my first real heroes. Thanks
to them, I grew up with the attitude that when you needed something, you
just made it. If you didn't know how, you figured it out, or you got help.
I always had a pile of tools to play with when I was a little kid. Becoming
a luthier was thus a natural blending of that experience with music. So
although I entered lutherie professionally in 1963, that phase of
my life built on an even earlier body of experience.
Sometime in high school, in suburban Detroit, when all my contemporaries were listening to the Kingston Trio and the Four Freshmen, I stumbled across the Harry Smith Anthologies, Ravi Shankar, Greek music, Frantic Ernie (a great Black DJ on WJBK), Reverend Gary Davis, Hungarian gypsies, Ian Buchanan, and the New Lost City Ramblers. A couple of longtime dear friends named Marc Chover and Bob Hewitt get the thanks for carting me to many, many concerts and gatherings, before I was quite old enough to do it myself. While still a budding teenage guitar player, I met Marc Silber. He was matriculating at U of M in Ann Arbor and was already a legendary guitar player and authority on the mystical old guitars, long before there were any books, luthier's guilds, videos - anything! He became a hero of mine real quick. A few years later he was in Colorado, building banjos and working at the Denver Folklore Center (though I just missed him there when I moved west in 1963). Then he was in North Africa. Then he was in the south hanging out with great blues guys like Mance Lipscomb. Then he had a wonderful guitar shop in Greenwich Village, where I did catch up with him. Then he was in Europe again, or was it the Bahamas? Then he disappeared, but showed up again after I’d moved to California. He gets better all the time. He's still my hero. Another crucial, major influence from Detroit was Joe Fava, owner of the guitar store I grew up in, who was a gentleman, a brilliant musician, and a very savvy collector and dealer of instruments. He had the first D'Angelico I ever saw, the first National, the first dot-neck L-5, the first OM-28, the first Vinaccia, the first Loar F-5 -- all back around 1960. He got me into the Gibson plant over in Kalamazoo with a red carpet at my feet because I taught in his studio. If you have ever seen those old Gibson catalogs, he's one of those innumerable Italian guitar wizards they sprinkled through their pages. He's still my hero. I went to the Newport Folk Festival in 1963 and never went home after that. I "roamed and rambled" for a couple of years. I went to Denver. I don't know why Denver exactly, but I was hitchhiking and that's where I went. I have been a luthier for most of the years since 1963, when I made my first nuts and saddles for pay at the Denver Folklore Center. My cohorts and inspirations back then were bandmates and a circle of craftspeople I had met, most of whom were attached either to the Folklore Center or to the Ode Banjo Company. Among them: Marc Silber, Jon Lundberg (by mail and Railroad Express), Creston "Kix" Stewart, and Ray Chatfield who were then at Ode, bandmates Mike Kropp and Mac Ferris, and the mentor of us all, Harry M. Tuft, proprietor of the Denver Folklore Center. |
Marc Silber, myself and Harry M. Tuft, thirty-some years later. Whew! |
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| When I got lonesome for structure and
focus, I (a high school dropout) talked my way into college, into a full-blown
university education (Bachelor of Philosophy from Monteith College, 1969,
finally). During this time, I worked as a teaching assistant in the art
metals studio of the Wayne State University Art Department, moonlighting
by cranking out lots of wedding rings to help pay living expenses and tuition,
and playing in blues bands. My specialties were casting (diamond settings
to life bronzes) and sheet raising. My experience in the realm of art materials
manipulation was pivotal in my refining my approach to problem solving
and lutherie.
So I found myself back in my home town of Detroit, working as a TA for Phillip Fike in the Studio Arts department of Wayne State University while working through a PhB at Monteith College. At the end of that episode, with a triple major in studio art (specializing in art metals, sculpture and ceramics), humanities, and natural sciences, I worked at the Detroit Institute of Art as an object conservator, under S. N. Hlopoff. It was in this position that I made my first tender leap from fretted instruments to violin family instruments thanks to an association through the museum with Curt Wunderlich, one of Detroit's most esteemed luthiers and violin dealers at that time. In 1970, weary of living in an inner-city war zone, I left Detroit for California and by luck and happenstance, moved directly to Bonny Doon, about 75 miles south of San Francisco, quite near the ocean and Santa Cruz. After a very brief period working at the M.H. DeYoung Museum in San Francisco, I decided to lower stress, shorten my commute and avoid internecine museum politics, and instead hung out my shingle as a luthier in Santa Cruz. At the time, it seemed a remote place, but I staked my future here on the southern edge of the San Francisco Bay area, and I have never regretted the move. The Bay Area has always teemed with talent and good attitude, and some of my model luthiers and guiding spirits here have included: Richard Johnston, Frank Ford, who knew fretted instruments, and Henry Lanini, a superb violinmaker, and maverick bowmaker John Bolander. Not to forget Marc Silber, who has been somehow present in most phases of my life, a continuing guardian angel all these years. I soon met Richard Johnston and Frank Ford through the vibrant music scene in Berkeley, around 1971 or so. They were making Gryphon guitars then, a bit, but the shop of that name had yet to exist. Jon Lundberg was still the premier vintage shop in the Bay Area. Richard and Frank were veterans of Lundberg’s, but they had a vision of another kind of place altogether, so they moved to Palo Alto and did a good thing by opening Gryphon String Instruments. I cannot give thanks enough for the support and companionship I have received unflaggingly from both these guys over the last (gulp) almost thirty years. Because they have always envisioned a music store as a center of real culture, not just a place to sell merchandise, they've been, and continue to be, kindred spirits. Over the years, I have met quite a number of luthiers who I consider masters and/or inspiring humans, whose understanding of instruments is exceptional. To name a few more: Stefan Sobell, Dana Bourgeois, Bill Collings, David Gusset, Earl Gormain, Oded Kishony, John Monteleone, Dan Erlewine, Michael Darnton, Bob Childs, Flip Scipio, Ron Chacey, the late Richard Schneider, Armin Barnett, Otis Tomas, Steve Anderson, Richard Hoover and Adam Rose at SCGC, and...well, I have lived a long time and have met a lot of good people. And while I am giving thanks, I must add François Charle. He's not a maker, but he's taught me an enormous amount about French guitars and Selmer Maccaferri guitars particularly. And thanks to to my erstwhile neighbor and old pal Bob Brozman, who is also not a maker but who has been a guide and co-conspirator in the realm of resophonic instruments and good music for many years now.
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