Behind the Slides, our ongoing feature, is where we meet up with an artist who presented at a PechaKucha event and find out the deeper story beneath the images they chose to portray. Dave Morrison was one of the presenters at the most recent PechaKucha Night held at Rockport Opera House January 27.  His presentation was about the art of building an electric blue guitar. Morrison has published 11 books of poetry including Clubland (poems about rock & roll bars in verse and meter, Fighting Cock Press 2011) and Cancer Poems (JukeBooks 2015), plus a CD (Poetry Rocks - Mishara Music).

Note: Morrison’s slides appear in the right column. Click on the photos to match them with the actual slide notes (in italics). Beneath the slide notes will be the deeper story.

Boston

I worked hard, I wrote lots of songs, good songs, and played pretty much every club and college in New England. But at some point I lost the simple joy and replaced it with the compulsion to 'make it', which proved to be a fatal shift. Bands broke up, friends moved on, and I dragged my dream from town to town.

I started playing in clubs around Boston when I was 17, and I thought I had found the one thing that I was equipped to do, so I put all my eggs in that one flimsy basket. It was, I discovered, a lot easier to do when one is young.

 Poetry

So, I began to write, which had its advantages; I didn't need much gear, or a van, or rehearsal space, I didn't have to keep a band together. I became a 40-year old freshman at the New School, nights. I wrote novels and short stories and finally, at the gentle urging of my much smarter wife, poetry.

Works with a long arc were hard for me, but poetry was more like songwriting, or even photojournalism— it was about capturing a moment.

New Direction

And then the poems...stopped. I was so tired that I don't know if I cared, I didn't know if it mattered. I questioned my reasons for writing poetry; I questioned its value. This left me with no creative outlet, until the day I saw an ad on Facebook for an Australian company called Pit Bull that said the magic words— build your own guitar.

During being treated for cancer I wrote, but it felt like it used up whatever poetry was in me. I knew that I needed some sort of project to keep me from howling at the moon.

Wonderboy

By embracing this project I would overcome years of being impatient and compulsive, I would learn care and craftsmanship, I would be deliberate. I realized that the logical and satisfying conclusion to the story had to be me playing Wonderboy, onstage, with a band; the circle completed, me back in my element, just like Roy Hobbs returning to baseball as an older man.

As my father used to say, 'you can talk yourself into anything'. I wanted to get un-lost, and I wanted a single thing to accomplish that, I wanted my own mythology.

 Guitar Parts

At last, the kit arrived. It did not glow with mystical power, like the Ark of the Covenant; it was a box of parts, the Hamburger Helper of guitars. The neck and body looked pretty good, the hardware on the cheap side. It contained everything I would need, except tools and patience and skill. It was time to begin.

Reality was delivered to the Camden post office. I'm not sure what I was expecting, but this wasn't it — it was a sort of kit, like the models we used to build as kids. It would only be as good as I made it.

The Blue Guitar

I had an idea for the head stock shape — I made a template on paper using a cat food can and a nickel to draw the curves. I cut it out with a coping saw, smoothed it with sandpaper wrapped around a broomstick. The first coat of stain brought out the wood grain nicely. The whole process took less than two hours. It was very satisfying, and I learned nothing.

I learned much more when things began to go wrong, when things became difficult. Reality is funny like that. the notion was to write a sort of memoir about the process, both interior and exterior.

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Kay Stephens can be reached at news@penbaypilot.com