New York
an Art of Dying fragment
The overture to my Los Angeles life was an eighteen-month apprenticeship called New York City.
Not that it prepared me for Los Angeles. All New York City will ever make you ready for (or acclimatize you to) is New York City, and I wonder if the City, amazing though it is, ever finishes that job, with anyone. As for me, I bailed before I concluded one way or another.
And what was I doing in New York? Good question.
I left England late 1978 on a mission to spread the Fylde word in the United States (see the Fylde fragment for more on this). Fylde Guitars was (and still is) Roger Bucknall’s shop of magic were he (and a handful of Roger’s helpers) make the best acoustic instruments I had ever heard — mainly guitars, but also mandolins and bouzoukis.
Even on meager (and irregular) Sea Org pay, with the help of some extracurricular sources of cash, I had managed to acquire a Fylde Ariel which I just loved to play. So good it almost played itself. What a tone, and what a sustain. Also, I got to know Roger quite well.
I am now on a brief leave of absence from the Sea Org in order to pay some debts (that I had decided that I had) and knowing that my then wife Deven and I would soon go to the United States I was casting about for what to do in America to make some money.
Guitar on my knee and her beautiful sound in my ear, I hit upon the idea that perhaps I could represent Roger and his amazing line of instruments over there.
Well, come to find out that Roger was amenable. Deven, too, thought it was a good idea. Deal then: I’ll be Roger’s agent in the States, and shortly before Christmas, with four or five sample instruments in tow and some promotional materials on hand, we touched down at JFK.
However, we didn’t go directly to New York but spent the next two weeks with George and Louise Foot, good friends of Deven’s from her Boulder, Colorado days, who lived in this amazing house just outside Amherst, Mass.
Louise apparently came from old New Orleans money, and they were spending it well, she and her husband. Staying with them was a very cool experience. They treated us to a great Christmas, and a lovely New Year as well. Then, now well-established on East Coast time, we — and our small mountain of luggage — took the train to NYC.
As luck (or fate, I guess) would have it, Deven’s very good friend Darby Simpson owned and operated a Scientology Mission called Celebrity Center New York housed in a beautiful brownstone on east 82nd Street (today it is an official Church); it had a small apartment on the top floor where Darby said we could stay a while; i.e., until we found something else.
So, with our little family of samples we settled in and this is how and where Fylde Instruments, U.S. began operations.
Come to find out that Deven knew more good-to-know people than I had originally thought or even hoped, including Al Di Meola (amazing guitarist of Return to Forever) and Rick Laird (ditto bass player of John McLaughlin’s Mahavishnu Orchestra). Al ended up buying several guitars and used his Ariel on the album he was currently working on. Rick’s rolodex contained what seemed to be the cream of the crop of NYC’s studio musicians, and he had no problem sharing contact numbers with us, bless him.
Within days, we were truly up and running with people coming to our little top-floor apartment on 82nd Street to see and try the Fyldes, or with us hopping into cabs to meet musicians in their studios or lofts (they all seemed to live in lofts).
We had been in New York a week or two when we get this amazing endorsement letter from Pete Townshend; to say that he was happy with his (my ex-) Ariel would be an understatement — it was so glowing that it now appeared that our success was virtually inevitable. We were going to boom Fylde Instruments in America.
That’s when, in hindsight, I made a huge mistake.
Originally, business-wise, Roger and I operated on a hand-shake. Using the samples Roger had provided, we would take orders from U.S. buyers and pass them on to Roger who would then build and deliver.
We would pay Roger at his cost (or a small markup), and then sell them at whatever the market would carry in the U.S. — the difference being our profit. Since we could mark up what we paid Roger about 400% we stood to make a good living if not, eventually, a fortune.
I was very happy with this arrangement, and had not given it a second thought but not so Deven and Mike, a friend of mine from the Apollo (at this point Darby Simpson’s boyfriend) who apparently, unbeknownst to me, were giving it both second and third thoughts. Seems Mike, who both dressed well and harbored worldly business man pretentions, had convinced Deven that we needed to, for one, incorporate, and for two, draw up a legally binding agreement between ourselves and Roger to make sure that, once the business took off, we would retain our exclusive Fylde representation in the United States.
Bottom line here (I think) was some sort of misplaced greed: from the initial feedback and with the Townshend endorsement, it looked like we were going to make a killing, and much-more-business-savvy-than-I Mike and Deven wanted to make sure that Roger would not (he never would have, I’m sure) pull the rug out from under us, and give the exclusive to someone else.
We drew up the agreement and Roger, bless his heart, did sign; however, this was an agreement that helped drive Roger out of business. Yes, he returned to making guitars about a decade later, but we sure pulled the rug out from under him rather than he from under us.
Why? Basically, it was because in this agreement, in order to entice Roger to give us the exclusive, we committed to a certain schedule of increasing monthly sales (which we saw no problem meeting). This, we reasoned and pointed out, would also allow Roger to plan ahead and stock up on wood and man up on help in order to meet our sales.
Based on this agreement and its projected U.S. expansion, to meet demand, Roger in essence over-extended financially, borrowing a sizeable amount from his bank for more wood and other necessities.
The sad bottom line is that for various reasons we did not meet the projected sales, nor did we keep current with payments to Roger: in the end he had to declare bankruptcy and close shop.
Now, in our defense, one of these reasons was that the guitars — built for the relatively high year-around humidity levels in England — did not fare well in the much drier environment of a New York apartment when the central heating comes on; desiccated, both backs and fronts of our samples actually cracked, the same with many customers’ instruments; and since we gave a lifetime warranty with each instrument, we ended up paying back a sizeable number of buyers who, by rights, were dissatisfied with the product. Yes, the guitars were great, but they were built for the U.K. not for the American East Coast.
That said, my retrospective take is that had we not incorporated nor drawn up this what turned out to be pie-in-the-sky agreement, we could and would have expanded more organically and Roger with it — and he would more than likely had stayed in business. I am sure that we could and would have resolved the cracking issue as well, had not Roger by then been under such financial pressure (based on our non-performance).
However, this all took about over a year to play out. Meanwhile, before this tragic end, we did have a great run in the City.
Based on Pete Townshend’s amazing endorsement letter and Rick Laird’s many leads, we sold quite an impressive number of guitars, especially to studio musicians, for it turned out that these English instruments rather trebly acoustic qualities, which met the U.K. market demands perfectly, fit equally perfectly with what studio engineers wanted to hear — Al Di Meola’s engineer told us, “They’re really great. I just push up the feeders, then press record and get a great take. No need to compensate for the usual boominess of our American acoustics.”
As I said, Al Di Meola bought a handful of guitars, six in total I believe. Pat Metheny, another fantastic jazz musician (and quite fierce rival of Al Di Meola’s) bout three as I recall. His bass player, Mark Egan ordered a fretless Sir Toby bass which he was quite happy with. Other, originally very happy, customers included John Scofield, John Abercrombie, David Spinoza, Joe Beck, Tony Bird, Stanley Clarke, Sal DiTroia, Mick Jones, and Arlen Roth.
David Brown, of Billy Joel’s band, bought a couple and just loved is Ariel. We saw him and his wife a few times and I heard David play some of his own songs (not anything like Billy Joel) and they were simply beautiful. Why he did not make a name for himself as a solo artist, I can’t imagine.
Other great musicians (and a small crowd of amateurs) loved and bought guitars as well. It really was a good run, originally mainly by good word of mouth, and later, once we were featured in Guitar Player magazine, and we ran a few ads, but print as well.
There is no denying that the guitars, even if cracking, sounded great, and had it not been for the agreement debacle and the humidity issues, who knows where we might have landed.
One day in the fall of 1979 we got a call from my friend Suzie Watson-Taylor: that the Rolling Stones might be interested in some guitars. Suzie not only knew everyone worth knowing in London, but she also knew people in New York and was very good friends with Jane Rose, the Stones’ business manager at the time. My guess is that Suzie, to give us a hand, must have talked up the guitars with Jane. Outcome: we went to see Jane Rose in her 30 Rockefeller Plaza office, who in turn set up an appointment for us to see Mick Jagger in the first-floor Dakota apartment that he sub-let from Carly Simon (we found out later).
Jagger tried a couple of the samples, loved them and ordered three instruments on the spot. A Falstaff dreadnaught for himself and Keith Richard, and a Sir Toby acoustic bass for Bill Wyman.
These guitars arrived about a month later and we delivered them to Jane Rose who passed them on to the guys.
About a month later Jane Rose calls us up and said that Mick Jagger wanted to see me, as soon as possible.
Since by this time we were subletting on West 69th Street between the Park and Columbus — not too far from the Dakota as it happened — I said I could get over there right away. Hang on, she said, called Mick, and then asked me to drop around tomorrow, around eleven. Mick will be in and up and expecting you.
The next day I ring the doorbell and Mick (who is rather short, and was very skinny then) opened. Oh, come in, held the door open for me, and I entered. Not sure where Deven was at the time, but it was just Mick and myself.
I need another guitar, he said. Pete stole mine.
Meaning: Mick Jagger had thrown a party of some sort a week or so back, and Peter Tosh (ex-Wailer) who had just left Bob Marley and signed as a solo artist with the Rolling Stone’s Sticky Fingers label, had sat down with Mick’s Falstaff and began playing, and playing, and then asked if he could borrow the guitar for a day or so, and then, much to Mick’s chagrin, refused to returned it — i.e., Pete stole mine.
Great Peter Tosh endorsement that.
No problem, I said, and ordered Mick Jagger another guitar.
True story.
Weather-wise, New York was a nightmare. I had no trouble dealing with the winters okay, but the summers — hell on earth.
I suffered through the 1979 summer, but when the first really humid day dawned late spring 1980, I told Deven that I had had enough, we were out of there.
By this time, too, the jolly ship Fylde had more or less run aground.
We packed our bags, brought a couple of samples we still had, and (I had bought a car by this time) headed out west: to Los Angeles via San Diego (where we had friends that would put us up for a while)
Bye, bye New York.
© Wolfstuff
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