We’ve been wandering the beautiful stone flower that is Paris for almost a week, ten miles a day, often without a destination, until our feet ache and we have to cry uncle, buy a warm baguette and a piece of French cheese and a bottle of Bourgogne or Gigondas. We’ve treaded the beaten paths of museums and markets and monuments along with hordes of October tourists. This included visiting the Père Lachaise Cemetary where Doors founder and front man Jim Morrison is buried.
The cemetery spans a hill with lots of trees and shade and tombs and graves of various sizes and eras and stature and weatheredness and unevenness. There are numerous gates with high stone walls and razor wire so it seems that grave robbing is still perhaps alive and well in Paris. We wound our way around the different neighborhoods of graves and mausoleums, crooked and moss covered, others brand new and eerily shiny, until we noticed a lot of people with guide books in hand stumbling in a similar direction. Morrison’s grave is crowded in amongst others. It’s small and unassuming but covered with fresh flowers. Some people listened to music while they stared at the rectangular stone with its simple bronze plaque. I wondered if I’d been there before and definitely remembered liking the Doors’ music growing up. Their deep bluesy grooves and Morrison’s soaring lyrics and the band’s instrumentation were amazing but maybe most of all I liked their name being a direct reference to Aldus Huxley’s ideas around LSD and the doors of perception — really completed the package. I think my cousin, the excellent painter, Peter Schaumann, illustrated their Soft Parade album when he was a young artist. It must have been an unimaginable loss for the band to lose their leader in a country and city so far away so suddenly.
At the bottom of the plaque is a Greek saying:
ΚΑΤΑ ΤΟΝ ΔΑΙΜΟΝΑ ΕΑΥΤΟΥ, apparently meaning “according to his own daemon” often interpreted as “true to his own spirit.” Amen. Leave it to the Greeks (and Google).
On a previous visit I happened upon a three block stretch of music stores on Rue Victor Massé in the ninth arrondissement. This is where junkies get their fixes. There are shops specializing only in drums or basses or microphones or amplifiers or guitars or you name it. One store just sells effects pedals. Inside is a plexiglass sound proof room where you can check out delays, distortions, overdrives and all kinds of altered sounds to your heart’s content. The pedals are merchandised like the best fashion shops and vegetable stands in the open markets. Most are from the United States. The colors of the metal boxes, the gleaming quality of the workmanship and graphics allure like sirens: you need more effects, more tricks up your sleeve!
Many shops sell high quality vintage electric and acoustic guitars as well as new models. This has to be one of the places that touring pros stop because they certainly have some good stuff. I spent a few solid hours moving from shop to shop, playing guitars, talking with the owners and never really found the end of the district. There are Fenders and Gibsons and Martins and other fine guitars to be had, but you will probably pay through the nose.
To my great surprise, the hostess of the apartment where we are staying has her late husband’s Guild M20 acoustic guitar. It’s a lovely instrument made with mahogany sides and top. The neck is thin and fast. Both the fingerboard and bridge are of a rosewood you probably can’t legally find anymore and the small OM fits perfectly into the body. This guitar model apparently was the favorite of Nick Drake. There is a surprising brightness to the sound and a richness in the mids and bass, not thumpy at all. If you can find one from the late 1960s or early 1970s for the right price, you’re going to be a happy camper.
At one of shops I played a brand new modern M20 and it was nice enough with a new pickup system. You could dig into it all over the neck with a pick and fingerstyle and I had a feeling that it might age quickly and nicely. The owner plugged it in to a crappy Marhsall acoustic amp and it sounded professional enough. But the 21st century models are a completely different species. This beautiful 50 year old guitar is nicked and scratched and scuffed in the best possible way, aging in an old apartment looking over a brick and stone schoolyard with church bells chiming in the background.
Before I die, maybe I can get my collection down to just one well loved instrument like “The Old Guitarist” in Picasso’s blue painting. Until then, there are a few that I’d still like to have around and a tight wasted mahogany Guild steel string acoustic may be one of those. It could make a good travel guitar and Lord knows, we all need a little magic dust on the road.
I just found out about what may be the best Parisian guitar shop of all, François CHARLE, so I will most definitely have to be back to do a little exploration.
