I happen to come from a long line of tinkerers and mechanically-inclined folks on my father’s side, through whom I’ve been endowed with a powerful urge to renovate things and take on DIY projects.  Unfortunately for me, some familial traits get diluted over time or skip a generation entirely.  Thus, unlike my extremely capable father (who can dissect engines and readily envision the solutions to complex mechanical puzzles), I have developed just enough capability to have a dangerous degree of handyman hubris and a concomitantly mixed record of success where projects are concerned.  Of course, venturing into uncharted territory is alluring for folks of all degrees of skill.  With this in mind, I take some solace in the fact that my paternal predecessors were all known as adept improvisers—our family has long observed that a person usually understands how to properly execute their design right about the time they’ve finished building it.

Yet, the penchant for projects inherited from my father is only part of the backdrop for my cautionary tale.  In many ways, I am governed more by the romantic, artsy impulses common in my mother’s family.  This is not to ignore the creative and artistic gifts of my father (which are substantial!); but, it was my mother who exposed me to so much of the literature, visual art, poetry, storytelling, and folk music, that took deep root in my imagination. One odd byproduct of my active imagination is a proclivity for personifying all manner of inanimate objects.  This, combined with the innate urge to fix things, yields an interesting psychological phenomenon.  Take, for instance, the case of the malfunctioning coffee grinder: I do not just want to fix the coffee grinder for practical reasons (the greatest of those being, I NEED COFFEE!!!), or to better understand how the grinder functions, or to achieve the satisfaction of repairing it myself. No, in addition to these reasons, I have a perverse desire to fix the broken coffee grinder because, on some level, I feel sorry for it!  It is just this sort of thinking that frequently gets me into trouble with salvaging neglected guitars; and, accordingly, the story of the guitar that I’ve dubbed the “Cosmic Fern” begins with a neglected and forgotten Lotus.  

We here at Maple Street Guitars have seemingly always operated in cramped conditions. For a number of years leading up to our first expansion, we were forced to rent a storage space near Piedmont Park. It was there that the 20-year-old me discovered a dusty chipboard case containing a ‘70s-era Lotus Les Paul Custom Black Beauty copy while rummaging through a pile of former rental guitars.  Maybe it was my urge to expand my collection, maybe it was my desire to have a backup guitar to use in my fledgling band, or, more likely than not, I simply felt sorry for the lonely Lotus—but, whatever the reason may have been, I elected to adopt the guitar.  Little did I know that this act would set events into motion that would become an ongoing project spanning nearly twenty years! 

Now, these days there is a lot of value assigned to Japanese “lawsuit” guitars, like the Lotus I’ve described.  Some of this reverence is actually warranted; but, in point of fact, a great many of these guitars were inexpensively produced and are marginal at best when compared to modern alternatives.  Sadly, my old Lotus falls into the category of mediocre, an inescapable fact that I realized soon after becoming its guardian.  Subsequently, the Lotus went largely unused in its first years with me, being toted to and fro while serving mostly as an ornament or the occasional loaner to a friend in need.  

Then, one fateful evening around 2003, things took a dramatic turn as my life and that of the Lotus became powerfully intertwined.   For the sake of embellishment, we will say it was a stormy night when revelation struck me, complete with howling winds, lighting, and thunder—in reality, it was probably a normal weekday evening for an early 20-something (in an altered state) who was disinterested in whatever his roommate was watching in the other room.  Having only dabbled in minor guitar repairs, and having spent a little time engraving with a Dremel, I suddenly had a vision of a guitar carved in neo-Victorian floral-themed relief… and then my gaze fell on the Lotus.  Much to the enjoyment of both my roommate and the neighbors, I fired up the Dremel and began to cut.

With the benefit of hindsight, it is at this stage in the story where the 40-year-old me would have interceded: “Whoa, hold on a minute there, bubba! What on earth do you know about what you are about to do? What’s underneath that finish?  What sort of equipment is required for this? What’s the final product actually supposed to look like? Perhaps you should maybe try a test area first? IS THIS EVEN WORTH YOUR TIME?!”   Yet, the uninhibited 20-year-old me was in the driver seat, and by God he had a vision!  

Working with only a rough concept sketch, my carving was done freehand in an impulsive stream of consciousness. Unfortunately, what I had envisioned as a simple matter of carving through existing finish to create cool fluid floral shapes quickly turned into a real quagmire!  With no experience to guide me, and having dedicated precisely zero time to preparation, I was met with myriad frustrations:  the existing polyurethane finish was really hard and prone to chipping, but the sealing coats beneath it were even harder and much thicker; I didn’t have (or know of) the right Dremel bits, so my cuts were rough and unrefined;  the combination of improper bits and hard finish would cause the Dremel bit to skate across the finish or suddenly sink too far; my fatigue and impatience caused even more mistakes; my hands would tingle for days from the excessive use of a high-speed rotary tool;  and then there was the discovery that the guitar’s body wasn’t even solid wood, but rather a big ol’ hunk of laminate (a not-even-pro tip: a quick inspection of the control cavity would have revealed this to even the most inebriated of guitar tinkerers).  In the face of all this, I still summoned some uncommon levels of delusion and wishful thinking and continued to carve away at the finish.  However, after a month or so, I had only managed to create a roughed-out semblance of my vision and a room covered in a healthy layer of toxic dust.  Confronted with the enormity of the task ahead, I ultimately succumbed to my frustrations and impatience and set the project aside.