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Stan Miller Mandolins Stan Miller grew up in eastern Iowa in the 1950s and 1960s surrounded and inspired by his father’s various woodcrafts: a reproduction of Rodin’s "The Thinker" carved in walnut, a large cedar chest filled with aromatic blankets and sweaters, and a chess set in which white oak pieces vied against the walnut pieces. With woodworking in his veins and a drive to avoid a conventional life, Stan forwent college and worked in various cabinet and furniture shops in Colorado and California, settling eventually in the early 1970s in Nevada City, a small, former gold-mining town in California's Sierra foothills. Inspired by Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and other folksingers of the early 1960s, Stan had taken up guitar during high school. But his playing languished over the years, until it was unexpectedly revitalized in the early 1970s, when he was introduced to bluegrass music and the big "G-run" in Bill Monroe’s "Uncle Pen." Hoping to form a bluegrass band of his own, Stan knew the likelihood of finding a mandolin player in the small community around Nevada City was all but nil. So he bought a funky A-Model mandolin for $60 and, like every other aspiring bluegrass musician, began spending hour after hour with his ear glued to the phonograph, trying to decipher the riffs and breaks of Bill Monroe, John Duffy, and Frank Wakefield. He supported himself at the time by working mornings at a print shop in the nearby town of Grass Valley. And in the afternoons, when not swimming and sunning himself on the South Fork of the Yuba River, he began hanging around the Baroque Music Shoppe in Nevada City. Learning of Stan’s background in woodworking, Mark Vance, the young store owner, persuaded Stan to try his hand at restoring several old instruments. A few months later, Mark also suggested that they try their hand at building a dulcimer. Stan owned a band saw and drill press at the time, but had no place to set them up. So Stan made Mark an offer: if Mark would provide space for his tools, he would help build a dulcimer. The two built one instrument and then several others, learning the rudiments of bending wood, mounting tuners, and fitting nuts. And the results were several sweet sounding instruments, which they sold to friends and family or simply enjoyed playing among themselves. Meanwhile, Stan had located a guitar player, fiddler, and banjo player, and the four began woodshedding, trying to recreate the sound of the Bluegrass Boys, Flatt and Scruggs, and the Kentucky Colonels. But it soon became obvious to Stan that his cheap mandolin was not up to the task of reproducing the sounds of Bill Monroe and Frank Wakefield. He needed a better instrument. Browsing through the latest edition of Bluegrass Unlimited one day, he came across an advertisement by Roger Siminoff, who was offering to sell all the components needed to build an F-model mandolin. Intimidated by the prospect of tackling such a complex instrument, Stan was nevertheless intrigued. Vacillating back and forth for several weeks, he eventually placed his check in the mail. Stan was excited by the tuners, tailpiece, and mother-of-pearl "Gibson" inlay that arrived in the mail several weeks later. But he was disappointed in the crudely milled pieces of low-grade lumber. Nevertheless, he began trying to shape and fit the pieces together in some manner that might create a viable instrument. With no real instructions or plans to go by, or even access to a similar instrument, he relied heavily on photographs of various artists’ mandolins on the covers of the record albums he owned. The project very quickly turned into an obsession. Stan forewent his trips to the river and spent every afternoon toiling on the instrument. He lay awake then each night, reviewing the day’s work and pondering what steps in the process should come next and how he might accomplish them. Though the effort wore him down, day-by-day, over a period of two months or more, the instrument began to take shape. Stan reveled in the result. Shortly after finishing the mandolin, Stan met up with Vern Williams while performing at a bluegrass festival in Redding, California. Vern was very complimentary of the instrument and doodled around on it for a time, leaving traces of aftershave that lingered on the neck for weeks. Vern’s praise served only to heighten Stan’s pride in the mandolin, but in truth, it had little to offer. The tone was thin, the scroll was only partially "scrolled," and the finish lacked the hue and warmth of a vintage instrument. Over the ensuing months, as Stan grew increasingly aware of the instrument’s shortcomings, Vern’s kindness became all the more evident. The building project was so intense that Stan vowed never again to repeat the experience. But as time passed, he found his thoughts drifting more and more toward different aspects of the construction process, devising better ways to perform them and, ultimately, divining how to build a better instrument. Around this time Stan was introduced to Todd Phillips by several mutual acquaintances living in the Nevada City area. Todd was playing mandolin with a bluegrass band in the South Bay at the time and was taking lessons from David Grisman. Impressed with Todd’s talents, David had recruited Todd to play bass and second mandolin with his new musical venture, the David Grisman Quartet. Todd was caught up in a mandolin frenzy of his own and had also built an instrument, only his was made from Brazilian rosewood. The notion of using rosewood caught Stan’s fancy. Being first and foremost a guitar player, and still with no exposure to the classic Gibson F-models of the early 1920’s, Stan revered the Martin D-28 as the epitome of acoustical instruments. When after nine months the urge to build again grew strong, Stan and Mark Vance drove down to the Bay Area to sort through stacks of lumber at several wood dealers. He purchased a few slabs of Brazilian and Indian rosewood, and several lengths of Sitka spruce. It was not until some years later that Stan learned that the white, crystalline-looking wood he bought that day was actually Engelmann rather than Sitka spruce. But he came to regard the "mistake" as fortuitous, as the Engelmann provided a clarity that he was never able to duplicate with Sitka. On the same trip, Stan and Mark stopped in at Jon Lundberg’s music store on Dwight Way in Berkeley, where Stan had his first opportunity to hold and play a vintage instrument. It was an early 1930s Gibson F-model with mother-of-pearl block inlays. Whether the mandolin was special or simply mediocre mattered little; it looked, sounded and felt wonderful. But at $1,700, purchasing the instrument was out of the question. Back in Nevada City and filled with renewed fervor, Stan spent the next several months tooling up and building a second instrument. The result looked and sounded so much better than his first effort that he hid the first one away in embarrassment. He strung up the mandolin without a finish, and performed with it for several months, reluctant to let go of the strong sound and full tone. No sooner had he strung it up than he cut into more wood for a third instrument, thus establishing a pattern that persisted throughout his early building career. Each instrument was built for himself, in a continual pursuit of finding a better instrument — or at least one more suited to his playing. Completing one mandolin, he would play it unfinished for a time, testing it out and breaking it in, while he applied a finish to the previous one, thus giving himself a chance to evaluate which one to keep. Applying a finish to the third instrument, Stan found himself with an extra mandolin. Unsure what to do, he eventually drove down to the Fifth String, a music store in San Francisco that catered to the various bluegrass musicians patronizing or performing at Paul’s Saloon, the bluegrass venue next door. Hesitantly entering the store, Stan approached the owner and asked if he had any interest in putting a homemade mandolin in his store on consignment. Stan opened the case and handed over the instrument. The owner’s eyes widened, surprised by both the craftsmanship and the rosewood back, neck, and sides. He immediately began rambling on about how there had been no mandolin builders of note on the West Coast, since Ed Neff bought Mike Kemnitzer’s first instrument and Mike had moved back east. Back in Nevada City, hardly a week went by before Stan received a phone call, telling him the mandolin had sold. He could hardly believe it; the check that eventually arrived in the mail seemed almost like a windfall. Not only had the instrument sold, but someone else had been interested in it as well: Alan Bond. Alan called shortly thereafter, wondering if there were any other Stan Miller mandolins for sale. *
* * * * It was an odd phenomenon. A passionate but obscure builder in the remote hamlet of Nevada City suddenly found himself embraced by the thriving bluegrass/acoustic music circles in the Bay Area. John Reischman of the Good Ole Persons called Stan looking for an instrument, as did Tom Bekeny of the Done Gone band. Todd Phillips shepherded him into the recording studio in Berkeley where Dave Grisman, Tony Rice, Darol Anger, and Todd were recording their seminal album, The David Grisman Quartet. People he had previously revered from a distance were suddenly eager to meet him and pick his brain. He held onto his day job at the printing press in Grass Valley; he had no interest in making his mandolin building anything more than an avocation. The attention to detail and amount of patience required to create an instrument was so demanding that he could not imagine working at it full-time. He used a band saw to cut out the pieces of wood for the back, sides, and neck; a drill press to drill holes for the tuners; and a Dremel tool to route out for the inlays, but essentially every other step of the process was done by hand with special hand made planes, knives, and files. He eventually purchased a router, but used it only to rabbit out a portion of the groove for the binding on the body. The thought of using anything but a small, homemade round-bottomed plane to carve out the subtle curves and fragile resonance of the top and back was out of the question. Being intimately in touch with each piece of wood in his instruments, shaping and carving them to his liking, was his greatest joy. The thought of giving over the process to some machine was anathema. While continuing to build, Stan pursued his own musical interests. In 1979, Laurie Lewis approached him and his guitar-playing partner Greg Townsend about the notion of performing with her. Greg balked at first at the notion of moving down to the Bay Area, but Stan was ready to leave the rather insular communities of Nevada City and Grass Valley, and they both eventually made the move. As Stan grew busy playing music with Laurie, the Grant Street String Band, and other musicians around the Bay Area, his building took a back seat. After bouncing around the East Bay for a time, he finally settled in Marin County on the backside of Red Hill in San Anselmo, where he shared a house with John Reischman and Dave Balakrishnan. Dave left after a time to move in with his future wife, and Sally VanMeter took over his room. Feeling stable, Stan’s urge to build re-emerged. Around this time, Tony Rice left the David Grisman Quartet and asked John Reischman to join his new group, the Tony Rice Unit. A few months later, John purchased his Lloyd Loar mandolin. It was an exceptional instrument, and it provided Stan with his one and only meaningful exposure to how a classic mandolin should look and sound. Stan fondled it, traced its outlines, and peered at it from all angles, trying to imagine the workers in the Gibson factory of the early 1920s, whose craft contributed to the music John played. People were always eager to learn something about Stan’s instrument building, assuming he had some secret to his craft. But when asked, more often than not, he would simply shake his head, shrug his shoulders, and say: "I don’t know; it’s magic." If
Stan had a secret, it was his focus on the aesthetics of building. He
tried to make each instrument as beautiful and as special as possible
— something that people would gravitate toward, something people
would want to hold, fondle, and gaze at endlessly. He worked diligently
to create a powerful yet sweet sound, but in the end, he left it to
the "gods" as to whether an instrument came out sounding good
or not. He believed that creating a fine instrument had much more to
do with the mindset of the builder and his/her affinity with the wood
than it did with discovering and replicating some scientific formula. Years
went by, and Stan remained in seclusion, staying in contact only with
John Reischman. But as time passed, and various West Coast bands —
Grant Street, the Good Ole Persons, and High Country — began touring
the Pacific Northwest in the early and mid 1980s, Stan reappeared from
his new home in Bellingham, Washington to hear his old friends perform. With no patterns, tools, and wood, Stan started over from scratch. He even tried deciphering the geometric pattern behind the design of the F-Model mandolin. Whether he found it or not, he began to build again on a small 1 x 3-foot workbench set up in his one-room furnished apartment in Bellingham. With more limited resources and space than he had before, his building reverted to an even more handcrafted approach. Owning no vise, he would hold the wood with one hand while milling it with the other. Owning no spray equipment, his finishes were rubbed and brushed on. It
was also during this time that Stan branched out to build several A-models,
including one purchased by Jody Stecher. |
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