Mule Resophonic Guitars

I showed up to the steel Quonset hut reflecting the 118 degree air back hotter yet. 15 yards past the spray booth were piled up junk cars. Surrounding the yard were rusty barbed wire fences too high to climb.
I was 19 years old and I had flown from Michigan to the distant planet of Phoenix, AZ. In Michigan we have a mere 200 miles less of coastline than California and all of it is drinkable. In Phoenix sometimes you couldn’t get water from the tap. Here they told us to check our shoes for bugs that might kill us. In the Mitten the air hurts our face from October-March, here during summer you couldn’t hold the steering wheel.

I couldn’t try to capture the spirit of the man before my time, John Roberts, aka “Juan Roberto”, the school’s founder. The alias picked because it sounded more suitable for a luthier. The wood to start the school was apparently torn from old boats. His multi-neck, turquoise inlaid acoustic guitar is a folk icon to the spirit of this place - the headquarters for the motorcycle club of the guitar making world - The Roberto-Venn School of Luthiery. I could, however, attempt to capture the spirit of the place through it’s past and present leaders.

I was 19, keep in mind, and had never been anywhere except Chicago where everyone is from Michigan or Wisconsin anyways. My bench at Roberto-Venn was next to a pagan, a jew, and an atheist who read Bertrand Russell at lunch. The director of training spent more time telling us about spirituality,, the cyclical nature of all things, and the times he’s had his friends leave him in the desert to walk back home than he did how make instruments. The main instructor, John, is the football coach of the place, and has played in the best Grateful Dead Cover band on the planet for 30 years while missing the same finger Jerry Garcia was plus another. Rob is the Pedro Pascal of the place, cool and kind and when I went back 20 years later was still listening to classical music all day. Vibrant characters you couldn’t make up. As varied as they are wonderful. The perfect introduction that making instruments is as much about the humans involved as it is the instrument itself.