My employee explained that Nickel Creek was a very hot acoustic group featuring Chris Thile on mandolin. Ok, great, I had never heard of them, but they sounded pretty good based on what I heard coming out of the practice room. I went up to say hello, introduce myself, and see if I could be of assistance. The fiddle player, Sarah Watkins, was trying out violins. The more I heard, the more I liked! Nice people too. I spent almost an hour in the room with them.

Before they left they invited me to their show at the Calvin Theater in Northampton, Massachusetts that night. I gave them a CD of a great fiddle player who worked at the shop at that time and whom they had heard of.

Sarah took a violin on trial as well.

When I got to Northampton that night, it looked like the Grateful Dead was in town; there were people in tie-dye all over the place. Buses were parked outside the theater. The city was alive and electric with the expectation of Nickel Creek.

Man, where had I been? Clearly this was a popular band with a huge following.

I got a seat right in the middle of the floor seating. Finally the band came out to ruckus applause.

Chris Thile spoke:

“Hello Northampton! We’re so glad to be here! We had a wonderful day in Amherst! We found this great place….. it’s called Rao’s Coffee!”

My heart nearly skipped a beat. I still loved the concert and came to really appreciate what Chris Thile does with a mandolin. Check out his record of Bach Sonatas and Partitas for solo mandolin.

Sarah returned the violin she had on trial.

Matt Stamell

On November 5, 1985, I was working as a luthier at Johnson String Instruments in Newton, Massachusetts, when the phone rang...

It was the manager of the Grateful Dead.

"...if someone could bring some rosin to the Worcester Centrum as soon as possible, I have 2 backstage passes waiting for them..."

Roger Johnson (the late co-founder of Johnson Strings and luthier) asked me if I would go to deliver the rosin (Mickey Hart needed rosin for extra grip on his drumsticks). I certainly was not going to say no!

Roger then proceeded to tell me that back in 1964, Jerry Garcia and someone named Sandy Rothman stopped by his and his soon-to-be-wife Carol's guitar shop in Columbus, Ohio. Roger and Carol were supposed to be married the next day. Instead, they delayed the wedding so they could spend more time with Garcia while he was in town. They went to bed that night with Garcia sitting in a chair playing banjo (this was around the time Old and in the Way came out). When they woke up the next morning, he was still there, still sitting in the same chair, still playing.

Roger then said that if I saw Garcia while delivering Mickey's rosin backstage, I should ask if he remembered visiting the shop in Columbus with Sandy Rothman. Roger also mentioned that Garcia was driving a blue Camaro.

I took my great friend Roofus to the show. We hung out backstage; also backstage was Bill Walton, the basketball player, who was celebrating his birthday that night ("Happy Birthday to Bill" just so happened to be the opening song of the show). It was intermission and I was standing near the curtain to the stage. Suddenly to my right, there he was, Jerry Garcia, standing so close I could I could whisper to him and he would have heard me. I looked into his eyes and said:

“Roger Johnson wanted me to ask you if you remember going to his shop in Columbus Ohio with a woman named Sandy Rothman in a blue Camaro”.

Without missing a beat, almost instantaneously, Garcia said:

“Sandy Rothman is a man....and the car was green”.

At that moment Bob Weir came up and said to Garcia “what do you want to play, man?”

The encounter was over, but I’ve never forgotten it!

-Matt Stamell

1st photo is of Matt Stamell back in the 70's
2nd photo is a stock photo of Jerry Garcia playing the banjo

It was the summer of 1975. I was done with my freshman year of college at Hobart College in Geneva, NY. I stayed around that summer, picking fruit during the day and playing guitar in restaurants and bars at night. Bruce Springsteen was ascending in the rock n roll world, and he was coming to town! On July 22, 1975, he performed at the Geneva theater, now called the Rose Opera house in downtown Geneva. I was going to usher at the concert.
 
That afternoon I went downtown to do some errands and saw Bruce with some of the band walking somewhat erratically on Seneca St. Ok, it was a beautiful day and he was clearly celebrating something. Later that afternoon I went to check in at the theater. Bruce was with the E Street Band in the lobby of the theater and a photographer from the Geneva Times was taking photos. I happened to have a pair of Mickey Mouse sunglasses on my face, and when Bruce saw them he called out to me: “hey man, come get in the photo!” I did! Bruce had an arm around me, as did Clarence. Then Bruce took off my glasses and put them on as the photographer continued to take pictures. Clarence Clemons also wore the glasses, and they were passed around the band.

I went up to the photographer when he was done and he assured me that I could get a copy of the photo. I never did.

A month or so later my brother Gene was looking through Newsweek magazine (or was it Time?) and there was a close up photo of Bruce wearing my Mickey Mouse glasses! No one else was visible in the photo, just Bruce wearing my glasses.
 
Over the years many people, including myself, have searched for the photo. One of my daughters, an old professor friend of mine, and other friends have all tried to no avail.

Therefore, if anyone can find a copy of that photo, I will give them a $1,000 reward! That is my Springsteen challenge to you all!

Matt Stamell

​These words were spoken by Henry David Thoreau, the great writer, thinker, and activist who lived in Concord, Massachusetts. Thoreau was born in 1817 and he died in 1862. He is known primarily for writing Walden about his time living at Walden Pond. He said that he went to Walden Pond to “live deliberately” and to discover what was needed to live a full and happy life without the modern amenities of that time.
 
What did Thoreau mean that he had “traveled extensively in Concord”? I believe he meant that he paid close attention to everything around him, that he experienced the larger world though the specific minutia around him. If things are interconnected, as I believe they are, then it makes perfect sense that one may experience a greater reality by paying close attention to what is right in front of you

I believe that this philosophy applies to the world of stringed instruments. My days are filled with violins, violas, cellos, and bows of all kinds that come to my desk and workbench. These instruments and bows are sometimes new, sometimes old, and from all corners of the earth. These instruments contain the history of their times. Someone made them, under certain historical conditions, with materials they acquired from various sources. By paying close attention to the details of these instruments I am often able to determine where they were made and who made them. I call it “instrument forensics”. Through further research I learn about the history of times when they were made, the politics and social circumstances of those times. In this way, I’ve traveled extensively in Amherst! I’m no Thoreau, but to me, the world can be an interesting place without having to go anywhere.
 
Matt Stamell

Stamell Strings moved into our current location in Amherst, Mass, in 1995. The building had been a yarn store for many years. Before that it was a dental office and a rooming house. The building was built c.1900. The yarn shop used to have weaving classes upstairs in what is now our workshop. When we moved in there was a gray carpet on the floor, wall to wall. While not ideal for a woodworking workshop, we made it work for the past 31 years. Just this month, we pulled out the old rug and put in a new floor, one we could easily sweep and keep clean.

I’ve always been attracted by the Transcendentalist writers.

Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau, Whitman: these writers spoke to me and seemed to have paved the way for later 20th century writers who influenced the Civil Rights movement and the counterculture of the 1960s. When I went to Hobart College in 1974 I discovered a plaque on the steps of the main quad of campus with the quote “the ends pre-exist in the means”. I knew I was in the right place.​

The quote is attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson. For a while I wondered what that meant. What are the ends, and what are the means? What did it mean that they “pre-exist”?

While in college I started to make string instruments. Nothing was quite so exciting as taking a piece of wood and turning it into an instrument that could make music.
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There were steps that needed to be followed: creating a drawing, making forms, assembling the materials, sharpening tools, joining plates and making sides, making the top and back….it was a long process, and the final product took quite a bit of time to produce. But the process was fun, interesting, and challenging.​

The process was so engrossing and rewarding I realized that it was the process, not the end result, that mattered most. The end result would flow from the process.

I believe I found the meaning of the Emerson quote. If you concentrate on the present and apply yourself to the present, the “ends” flow from that attention and effort you give. Of course, life is not always fair, and the “ends” are never guaranteed.

In my case, I’ve tried to live by the famous Emerson quote. My goal in working with stringed instruments was never to get rich or famous. My goal has always been to learn as much as I can and to practice a craft that brings so many wonderful disciplines together: music, craft, history, sociology, geography, politics, and even religion.

For me, the ends continue to pre-exist in the means.​

Matt Stamell

When I was in my early teens I started to play guitar. My brother Gene was in college, it was the late 60s, and the Vietnam War was in full swing. The resistance came mostly from college students who opposed the draft and the war, and music was a major medium of the resistance. Folk music became my teacher and my life.​

When I went to college I was singing, playing, and writing songs. I loved the music of Bob Dylan, Jackson Browne, Bonnie Raiit, Tom Rush, Simon and Garfunkel, Joan Baez, Tom Paxton, and many more. I then started to listen to jazz, stringband music, blues, more folk like Bill Staines, Dave Mallett, Cindy Kallet, and classical.

My journey with classical music was mentored by my beloved professor, Marvin Bram.

Marvin (pictured to the right and with me below, ) encouraged me when I started to make instruments. He introduced me to the music of Bach, Brahms, Beethoven. He loved the viola and made a few instruments himself. He knew a lot about instrument construction, varnish, history.​

He taught Intellectual History at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. He had a theory that tied the advent of stringed instruments starting with Gaspar da Salo to ancient ways of thinking. He often called Bach the greatest teacher that the world has ever seen; the many lines of music all converging to form a Fugue was, to Marvin, the embodiment of the workings of the pre-historic mind.

In class we listened to Bach Sonatas and Partitas, followed the score, and could see how the great composer made us hear 2 notes when only one was being played. That was the lesson that Marvin was imparting. He calls in “fusion”, filling in rather than separating the world into component parts.​

Why do we love old violins? We love them because they gather the past, the present, and the future into a moment of beauty. They embody history, craft, alchemy, and music into a thing of beauty, something that endures and elevates the human spirit.

I’ve always loved wood and wooden objects. My father (pictured on the left) was an amateur woodworker; he made furniture for all his kids and many of his friends in the evenings in his small workshop in our basement. For a while we owned a 2nd home in southern Maine. It was called The Mill because it had been a grist mill in the 1800s. It was a post and beam building with wood floors, walls, ceilings, doors: it was made entirely of wood with some brick walls thrown in as well. To walk into The Mill felt like walking into a warm hug. The smell of the ancient wood was overwhelming and the patina of the planks made you feel right at home.

The call of woodworking was also overwhelming for me. I was an English major in college, but I too dabbled in woodworking and I was playing guitar at that time. One night my father came home from work with an Appalachian dulcimer. My father was a building contractor in the Boston area, and he worked with many architects, one of whom was also a maker of dulcimers. My father presented me with the dulcimer, and by coincidence that night I went to a concert in Marblehead to see Lorraine Lee, the premier player of Appalachian dulcimer at that time. My future took a turn.

At Hobart college a professor was offering dulcimer making to freshmen as a side course. I took it and made my first instrument. I was hooked. My friend John and I started to make dulcimers in whatever crude workshop we could cobble together on campus. We worked out of small rooms or in the basement of a house where friends were living. By the time I graduated college I had made my first guitar, using books and gathering as much information as I could.

After graduation I enrolled at Boston University Program in Artisanry where a master maker of viola da gambas was teaching, Don Warnock. That was my introduction to professional instrument making.

I’ve never really looked back. After all these years, wood still calls to me. I have made around 25 guitars and 7 violins. I’ve made some furniture. I’ve done carpentry of all kinds. These days I do most of the cello set ups here at our shop. As I sit at my workbench with a lifetime of work mostly behind me, I realize that I made the right choice, and that the satisfaction of working with wood has been constant through my life.


Matt Stamell

Theoretically tariffs have historically been used to spur domestic production of goods and to protect American workers from foreign competition. That sounds like a good idea until you dig into the details. Take cars for example; most cars have parts that are made in many locations. Most American made cars have parts made in Canada and Mexico, or even China. The same applies to many products that we use every day. Sometimes the parts travel back and forth across borders during the production process.

Should tariffs be charged every time a part crosses a border?

The manufacture of string instruments is not so different from cars or other products. Wood grows in European or Canadian forests, is shipped to mills for cutting and processing, and is then shipped to the place of manufacture in Europe or China. Most student grade instruments are made in China. The United States does not have any manufacturing of student grade stringed instruments. All the “step up” or “rental” grade instruments come from a foreign country. The same is true of bow production.

Coffee is not grown in the United States, nor bananas. Will tariffs encourage domestic production of coffee or bananas?

Nor will tariffs encourage manufacturing of string instruments.

It’s a shame that the insecurity and anger of one man can sow so much chaos and anxiety in so many businesses.

Small shops such as ours have been absorbing the added costs for a while now. Soon, supplies of pre-tariff goods will run out and higher prices will start to hit. Prices will rise, and the American people will bear the added costs.

Please continue to support your local shops; it’s an important way to make your voice heard during these turbulent times.

Sincerely,

Matt Stamell

I just returned from a trip to Italy where I attended Mondomusica, a yearly event in the town of Cremona.

Everyone knows that Cremona is the center of the violin universe; it’s the town where the greats of our trade plied their craft: Stradivari, Guarneri, Amati, Bergonzi, Storioni, and many others. It is still a major center of violin making to this day.

It is home to one of the primary violin making schools in the world, as well as home to over 100 violin makers who have settled there producing instruments for players and shops from around the world.

I attended the yearly fair called Mondomusica. Suppliers of instruments, bows, cases, wood, and parts for the violin trade come from all parts of the world to exhibit their wares. This year I helped my Belgian supplier of Pierre Marcel instruments at their booth. 
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