She played it for over a decade and recorded with it.ĭW: It was a Sitka top, and I believe I used Brazilian. She gave me all the specs that she wanted and I made that guitar. I loaned her a guitar to finish the tour. None of the guitars I had were exactly what she wanted, ’cause she was used to a little Martin New Yorker. So let’s just get that out of the way so we can move on and talk about the details of the guitar.” I thought, you know, that’s pretty nice. My manager is telling me I should be getting a guitar from you for cheap, for free, or whatever. I walk in and she said, “Let’s get this out of the way right now. Can you come over… my flight leaves tomorrow at 4:00?”Īt that point, I didn’t even own one of my own guitars, so I went to a guitar store that had a couple of mine, grabbed those guitars and took them down to her. I wonder if you could come back stage afterwards?” So Deb and I go back stage, and she said, “You know, I love this thing. She does the concert and at the very end of the concert she says, “I understand the person who made this guitar is in the audience. So we go up and we’re waiting around and then she finally comes out on stage, and sure enough she’s playing my guitar. So he said, “Give me the guitar anyhow and we’ll see what happens. I said, “Wow, I came all the way down here fighting traffic.” We show up and the guy comes out and says, “Oh, Steve’s Music just brought seven guitars down…” We had contact information to see so-and-so. So I go over, grab my wife Deb and the guitar, and we go down to Roy Thomson Hall. The music store owner owned one of my guitars, and said, “Yeah, you can borrow my guitar.” They phoned me because it was a busy Saturday – they couldn’t spring anybody loose to take it down there. They phoned a music store to see if she could borrow a guitar. She came to town and the airline trashed her guitar. So I have these two smaller guitars that are quite different looking and sounding, but both are on my bench right now.įJ: Let’s talk about the Joan Baez guitar. He said, “I want one exactly like this, and I want it to sound exactly like this guitar,” but he had some different neck specifications because he’s a small guy. He did some fantastic audio files and the small guitar really seemed to like the microphone. I took the three guitars and we met at Inception Sound. When I got back into guitar building about four years ago, he just called me up and said, “Listen, if you ever want me to do any audio files for your website, I can call in a favor at one of the studios and we’ll do it.” So I said absolutely.Īt that point, I had three models. It coincided with another small guitar that I’m making for Mike Francis, who is just an unbelievable guitar player who has played with virtually everybody over the last 40 years.ĭW: He wanted a little Nick Lucas sort of body style. We got all that figured out, and I put it together and we’re really happy with it. There were all sorts of aspects of it I had totally forgotten about. That’s pre-internet! I tried to go online and Google her, and I came up with a bunch of photos of her playing the guitar. It was fun because I didn’t have a photograph of the guitar or anything. I agreed to do it but I didn’t agree to duplicate her inlay work because there were some personal aspects of it that meant something to her. He wanted a copy of the guitar I made in the late ‛70s or early ‛80s for Joan Baez. We’re happy that Wren is taking orders once again and we were floored when he told us on the phone about the guitar he’s working on right now – a recreation of an instrument he built for Joan Baez decades ago.ĭavid Wren: I just put the strings on a guitar for a guy in France. But in 1990, Wren left the world of building to became a partner in Toronto’s 12 th Fret music store. In 1977, he opened his own shop and established himself as one of North America’s best guitarmakers. Like so many Canadian luthiers, David Wren honed his craft working under guitarmaking legend Jean-Claude Larrivée.
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