This is an interview with my friend, guitar maker and owner of Creston Electric Instruments, LLC, author, father, and time keeper Creston Lea. Building dreams for the likes of Adam Ant, Will Johnson, Anders Parker…and the players list goes on. Creston Lea is the author of Wild Punch, published by Turtle Point Press 2010 that houses 15 flawless short story diamonds. His kindness and generosity is that of a true-wit well lived man with a pan and heart of gold. He is currently playing bass for Anders Parker Cloud Badge, building a “million” guitars, and lives in Burlington, Vermont. Here we go…
How was your recent trip to Maine?
It was lovely, as always. Though our one, yearly vacation proved a little less relaxing now that we have two little kids. Only one of them can walk, so I was pretty busy keeping her from drowning, etc. My son was learning how to sit up, but that mostly meant carrying him around all day. He’s heavy.
What are your ties in Maine?
My grandparents bought a perfect camp in Washington County in the late ‘50s and we’ve been visiting ever since - mostly in summer, but when I was very little we spent a fair amount of time there in the winter, too. Tourists, really, but my parents’ generation made a lot of close friends there, including my recently deceased surrogate grandmother who was a true longstanding sweetheart to my extended family. I was named after her brother, Creston MacArthur, which explains how I got this peculiar name. Though where he got HIS name is a murkier subject. I first heard he was named after a western outlaw and then, later, from his own sister, that he was named after an Italian princess.
All of the old people that I knew there as a kid have since died, but they were an amazing bunch with good stories – log drives, ice cutting, life in the woods and on the water, etc etc. So they loom pretty large in my notion of what is and isn’t awesome.
What's your favorite part of Maine?
Maine’s a big state, and I’ve spent a lot of time there. But the only parts I really know at all are the St. Croix watershed region and Brunswick. And Brunswick only sort of – I just went back there for the first time in about eighteen years. But as a kid, I spent a lot of time there with my twin cousins who grew up on Mere Point Road. Otherwise, I can count on one hand the Maine towns where I’ve spent the night: Hollowell, Augusta, Limestone (working on a monster festival for the Burlington band Phish – I was on the Loring AFB for a month. Rolling Stone covered it and misspelled my name as “Preston Lee.” It was pretty confusing, after the third week, to watch 80,000 people show up in that desolate place). I think I slept in Casco once. Oh, and Portland and Ogunquit now that I think of it. I guess I need two hands.
Are you working on a new book at the moment?
No more than usual. I’m pretty on-again / off-again with writing. That’s one reason why my book took sixteen years to write. I think my next book will be non-fiction.
Do you have horses?
No. But my mom ran a horse farm for about twenty years. She boarded horses and donkeys and a Nubian goat I didn’t much care for. And she owned a few horses or ended up in possession of horses that more or less got abandoned there. One such abandonee, a really mean-spirited thoroughbred, was the grand-daughter of the great race horse, Native Dancer. She tried, at great expense I’m sure, to breed her. But it never worked out. I rode a lot from a very young age until I got to high school and got fascinated by skateboards and other things that were incompatible with living on a dirt road in New Hampshire. My sister was the real equestrian – competed, etc. My mom taught 4H. I’d like to pretend I helped out around the barn more than I did, but really I hardly did anything beside unload the 100lb sacks of Blue Seal feed into bins. But all the farm and field bits of my stories in Wild Punch are set in the remembered geography of that barn and the land around it. My mom sold the places and quit horses about ten years ago and I haven’t been on one since.
Are you working on a guitar?
I’m always working on at least a dozen guitars. Twenty-two right now, but I’m trying to get a bunch finished and make that number smaller.
What's your favorite part of Texas?
La Carafe in Houston.
What's your favorite flower?
Indian Paintbrush.
Do you have any white-tale hunting or fishing stories?
I never hunted deer. I never hunted anything under my own steam, though I used to duck hunt with my dad as a kid. Froze my ass off while he did all the work. As for fishing, I once caught an eel while sleeping in a canoe with my line reeled-in and the rod resting on the gunwale. It latched on and scared the pulse out of my heart [I’m terrified of snakes]. My dad – look, there he is again! - grabbed it and it whipped itself around his arm about a million times. He whacked its head on the gunwale, carried it up to the fire, cooked it and ate it. I don’t have any real yearning to hunt and fish, but I used to like to shoot guns [responsibly!] when I was young and lived in the country. Nothing overly creepy – mostly a tiny .22 rifle that I got for my ninth birthday. I think I only ever shot a pistol once – just one shot. It was a black revolver with bone handles. Some drunk person or other gave it to my dad because he was worried he was going to drunkenly shoot his wife. I shot one bullet from the porch into a mound of dirt across the road and then, soon after, it seized up and never got used again. I also liked to take this huge brown fiberglass bow that we had, lie on my back, put my feet on the bow, pull back the string and arrow as far as I could and launch that f@#$ing arrow to the moon. I could do that all day as a kid. You’ll notice there’s a lot of past tense in all this. I live in a small city now, Burlington, VT, and there’s none of that – though my wife did witness my teenage neighbors shooting a flaming arrow into a target in their driveway a few years ago.
What's your favorite food?
Tomatoes with salt and pepper.
How did horses change your life?
At my aunt’s big horse operation in Pennsylvania, an enormous draft horse named Glarnk stepped on my foot when I was about seven. That’s probably where I learned that life can change pretty quickly when you least expect it. But I don’t have any lasting damage from that episode. It’s hard to talk about horses without immediately straying into horribly cheesy sentiment, but let’s face it: they are beautiful. I especially like the draft horses, Percherons and Belgians. I always make a point of seeking them out when I’m at a fair or some other likely spot. I saw a bay- colored saddle horse in a parade in my hometown last week that was stunningly beautiful. That’s all – just pretty, but a memorable kind of pretty. I don’t know that horses changed my life, but I like to look at them.
I was at an ag fair in Vermont maybe ten years ago, watching the horse pulling competition. The two-horse team was so keyed-up, they lunged and broke free just before their driver hooked them to the stone boat. It was really terrifying to see them, yoked together and frantic, tearing around the field. They eventually hit the chainlink fence at a funny angle and knocked it over, nearly crushing a poor onlooker in a folding chair before tearing out into the parking lot. Incredibly, nobody was hurt – just like the Glarnk-stepped-on-my-foot event.
My mom got trampled pretty badly a couple of times. That always had me worried. She lived alone and got really beat up by excited horses out in the field in the snow in the middle of winter with nobody around.
See? You start talking about horses and there’s always more to say.
Have you ever been thrown off a horse?
Many times. The first time when I was three or four and really too small to be trail riding on my own [thanks, Mom]. I can still clearly remember some smooth rocks I saw in the dirt while lying on the ground. The last time, when I was about seventeen, was the most humiliating. I was riding at a stable in Union Village, VT. I’m not sure why I was there, but a girl from my high school was there, too. I had a monster crush on her, though I only knew her from math class. My horse stepped on a bees’ nest, got stung and threw me pretty violently. I landed on the same nest and got stung a half-dozen times.
What inspires/inspired your guitar making?
These days, now that I have the construction and sonic stuff pretty figured out, I get excited by color combinations more than anything else. There’s a garden shed near my house that has five perfect colors – the clapboards, the door, the casings and jambs, the sashes, and the roof. Every time I see it, I try to think of how I could make a five-color guitar that would still look simple.
Who are your heroes?
Bo Diddley is my hero – musical pioneer, guitar design pioneer, sense of humor, great songs, great suits, The Duchess. Ever seen that footage of him on the TAMI show? He’ll make you his hero.
Larry Brown is my literary hero, but it’s hard to say that out loud now that he’s dead and everybody, especially musicians, wants to claim him. That’s a stupid thing to say, of course. In Iowa City, I met a woman from Oxford, Mississippi shortly after I read Joe and Big, Bad Love for the first time, told her how much I liked them. She found a pen and wrote down his address, told me he needed to hear that from a stranger. So we traded letters off and on until he died. I was in New York for Thanksgiving in 2004 and my wife woke me up from a nap to tell me the news. I get sad every time I think about it and he’s somebody I never met or knew at all except through books and letters.
What is your favorite place in Burlington, VT? Something you see everyday
and feel comfort knowing it will be there tomorrow.
I like the Masonic Temple building at the top of Church Street – it has fantastic windows and a mountaintop of black slate roof. Senator Bernie Sanders’s office is in there and I’m always happy to see him walking down the street. There’s a huge cottonwood tree across the street from my daughter’s preschool that’s just so enormous, I like to look at it. The view across Lake Champlain to the Adirondack Mountains is endlessly beautiful. Those are big mountains over there and a lot of wilderness. It’s right across the lake, but who knows what goes on over there? Not me.
What's your favorite amp and guitar that you own?
The first guitar I made for myself, styled after a Fender Esquire, means a lot to me. It’s the only one I’d be devastated to lose – partially because of its significance in my own professional life, but more because it really is a great guitar. But I don’t have the same kind of visceral attachment to guitars that I did twenty years ago – maybe just because of acclimation or maybe just because I got older. I have some cool ones – a couple 50’s Les Paul Juniors, a Duo Jet, a great Les Paul goldtop with P-90s. I made myself a pretty deluxe guitar that I sent to Gene Parsons for b-bender installation. I’m still getting to know that one. I have a wonderful tweed-covered 1956 Fender Deluxe amp that a guitar client traded to me for his guitar. That’s the coolest amp I own, but I mostly play a silverface Princeton Reverb at home and a silverface Deluxe Reverb on stage. The truth is, I hardly ever play guitar. Maybe when my kids are older. I generally have to relearn while I’m standing on stage doing a show with a band. I sometimes play the $5 junk shop acoustic I bought for my wife in Cedar Rapids, Iowa in 1995. That’s the guitar I’m playing most these days. It has cardboard kerfing! I put my son in his Johnny Jump-up and provide musical accompaniment while he hops up and down.
Thanks for your time.
http://www.crestonguitars.com/
http://www.crestonlea.com/
http://www.andersparker.com