In August 2000, once I was 2 years outdated, my mom put me in a maroon velvet gown and caught foam earplugs in my ears. She carried me by the backstage corridors of the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium—the identical venue the place, in 1964, James Brown gave one of the crucial ecstatic performances of his profession. It’s the place, in 1972, George Carlin first listed the “Seven Phrases You Can By no means Say on Tv.”
My mom remembers the evening in flashes. David Crosby—walrus mustache, smiling eyes—telling jokes. Bonnie Raitt’s aura of purple hair. Within the distance, the sound of Linda Ronstadt warming up. Sitting in a dressing room with Michael McKean and Christopher Visitor, already in costume as Spinal Faucet’s entrance males.
That evening, the auditorium was internet hosting the Buddies of Fred Walecki profit live performance. These pals included Crosby, Raitt, and Ronstadt. Additionally Jackson Browne, Graham Nash, Emmylou Harris, and Warren Zevon. Three of the 4 unique Eagles, who on this room in 1973 had carried out their new album, Desperado, have been there too.
One of many Eagles, Bernie Leadon, had helped put the occasion collectively. He had identified Fred Walecki, my father, since they have been youngsters, when Leadon began coming into Westwood Music, Dad’s musical-instrument store in Los Angeles.
Dad had lately been recognized with Stage 4 throat most cancers and had undergone an entire laryngectomy. Surgeons eliminated his vocal cords and created a gap in his throat that he used to breathe; to talk, he pressed an digital buzzer in opposition to the aspect of his neck. If folks gawked at him, he’d joke that everybody on his house planet gave the impression of this.
When Leadon had discovered that my father was sick, he known as Glyn Johns, one other of Dad’s shut pals and a groomsman at my mother and father’ marriage ceremony. Johns is the English sound engineer and producer who labored with just about each main rock band of the ’60s and ’70s—the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Who, the Eagles. He and Leadon suspected that my household was struggling to pay Dad’s medical payments, so that they contacted his different pals and requested in the event that they’d play a profit live performance for him. Everybody mentioned sure. Dad’s classmate from Emerson Junior Excessive Faculty, Jeff Bridges, who’d lately starred as “The Dude” in The Huge Lebowski, can be the night’s emcee.
I want I had been sufficiently old to recollect this evening of thank-yous to my father. He was 51 once I was born; I’ve solely identified Dad with grey hair, and I’ve no reminiscence of his unique voice. However Browne remembers my father’s impeccable Jimmy Stewart impersonations; he remembers Dad because the man who turned him on to Gibson guitars. On the live performance, he carried out “My Opening Farewell” on a guitar that had been assembled at Westwood Music. Dad had spent hours sprucing it to present it the wealthy hue Browne wished.
Crosby considered my dad as his “guitar guru,” and like lots of the performers that evening, he praised my father for his friendship. “Fred’s helped lots of people after they actually wanted it. Actually wanted it,” he mentioned. He and Nash then performed their track “Déjà Vu.”
Earlier than the evening might get too sentimental, Spinal Faucet—who claimed that Dad had been the primary individual within the music enterprise to ask them, Do you need to play so goddamn loud?—took the stage and gave an enthusiastic rendition of “Huge Backside.” I’m advised I fell asleep someday earlier than the Byrds reunited.
After the live performance, Rolling Stone declared that Fred Walecki had been “answerable for an evening of music historical past,” although his title “won’t imply a lot, if something in any respect, to music followers.” However my father has been there because the Nineteen Sixties—doing his work in order that a few of America’s best artists can do theirs.
I. The Retailer
Dad by no means wished to enter the household enterprise, and his father, Hermann, didn’t need him to both. Hermann opened Westwood Music, a classical-instrument store, in 1947, the yr after Dad was born. However whilst he taught my father to use skinny layers of shellac to wood devices till they have been as reflective as nonetheless water, he’d say, This life is simply too small for you.
Perhaps as a result of no Walecki earlier than him had lived a small life. Dad’s grandfather had been a cabinetmaker by day and a socialist revolutionary by evening. His opera-singer aunt was the buxom blonde on The Three Stooges, and his sister, Christine—generally known as the Goddess of the Cello—was the primary American musician to carry a live performance in Castro’s Cuba. Dad’s brother, the one member of the family who wasn’t within the music trade, was one of many engineers behind the quickest jet-propelled plane on the earth. Then there was Hermann, who spoke 5 languages, had a photographic reminiscence, and was a world-renowned professional on and seller of uncommon classical string devices. As a younger man, he’d educated to be a priest earlier than getting recruited to play hockey for the Chicago Blackhawks.
However as I might half a century later, Dad grew up in Westwood Music. He cherished it as I might; he memorized its odor of outdated wooden and lacquer. When prospects got here in to have their violin bows rehaired, they’d sit beside Hermann and confess their issues whereas he labored. Hermann, nonetheless a religious Catholic who prayed on his knees each evening, would pay attention, nod, and infrequently supply non secular recommendation. The Walecki tract house close by was adorned with harps and baroque devices, and served as an artist’s salon of types: For a summer season, the harpist Marcel Grandjany gave grasp lessons in the lounge and slept within the further twin mattress in Dad’s room. When my father was born, his mother and father obtained a year-long diaper service as a present from their good friend Harpo—whom Hermann knew extra as a harp participant than a Marx Brother.
Dad began engaged on Westwood Music’s gross sales ground in grade college. As soon as, he bragged to his father that he’d persuaded a person to purchase dearer strings than his low-cost guitar required. Hermann made Dad chase the man to his bus cease together with his change and the strings he really wanted and will afford. When Dad was 12, he ran the store whereas his mother and father traveled to Europe to seek out uncommon devices. Bought $123 value in the present day, he reported in a letter to his mother and father, and added that he’d beforehand bought a piano, 9 flutes, and a $350 drum set, and talked a guitar pupil into shopping for a banjo and studying that, too. As a teen, he began a guitar-polish enterprise, mixing his concoction within the storage with an eggbeater and a espresso percolator from Goodwill.
Westwood Music again then was a mix of old-world craftsman’s studio and museum. By the entrance door: a grandfather clock constructed by Hermann’s woodworker father. On the gross sales ground: trumpets displayed in vintage jewellery instances, wonderful violins in velvet-lined cubbies. On the wall: violas da gamba (baroque cousin of the cello), violas d’amore (baroque cousin of the violin), an oil portray of Christine taking part in the cello as a baby, a uncommon oud constructed when Istanbul was nonetheless Constantinople. And in a body above the gross sales counter was one in all Hermann’s favourite quotes, attributed to Goethe:
A person ought to hear a bit of music, learn a bit of poetry, and see a wonderful image daily of his life, so that worldly cares could not obliterate the sense of the attractive which God has implanted within the human soul.
The shop was the exact opposite of Ledbetter’s, the folks membership that opened subsequent door within the Nineteen Sixties. Its concept of decor was placing a classic Dodge truck on the roof. On its stage, in opposition to a brick wall, the then-unknown Steve Martin did his banjo-and-comedy routine and Henry John Deutschendorf Jr. gave one in all his first performances in L.A. It was the proprietor of Ledbetter’s who recommended that Deutschendorf wanted a stage title, which is how he grew to become John Denver.
Chris Hillman, later of the Byrds, purchased mandolin strings from Hermann when he was taking part in in what he described to me as a “horrible fake bluegrass band” for $100 every week at Ledbetter’s. Sixteen-year-old Bernie Leadon was on the town to see Hillman rehearse when he noticed a Nationwide Tricone guitar within the window of Westwood Music. (These guitars, which have our bodies product of steel, seem like they belong to very hip aliens, however are a favourite of blues musicians.) My dad, additionally a teen, was behind the counter, and Leadon thought he seemed like a complete prep: oxford shirt buttoned on the cuffs, gown slacks, penny loafers, brown hair neatly coifed. Leadon didn’t purchase the guitar (he couldn’t afford it), however Westwood Music had made an impression.
Dad wished to welcome the Ledbetter’s crowd drifting in and advised Hermann that folks and rock have been going to be massive. However Hermann was hesitant about including “that component,” as he known as it, to the shop whereas nonetheless accommodating violin consumers with white hair and season tickets to the symphony. He allowed Dad the Nationwide Tricone and a few acoustic and electrical guitars if he largely tucked them away in a little-used music-lesson room. Dad paid Hermann hire for the area and furnished his mini guitar salon with an vintage clock and desk in order that, he advised me, “it seemed type of groovy.”
Dad ran Westwood Music alongside his father, with no designs to take it over. However then Hermann received lung most cancers. Quickly, suppliers have been calling, asking why Westwood Music was so late on cost. Eighteen-year-old Dad advised them that Hermann was on an prolonged journey to Europe. He ran the store solo, and at evening, he repaired devices for more money. He’d take money straight out of the register to pay his father’s house nurses. The most cancers unfold to Hermann’s mind, and he died in 1967, when Dad was 20. Westwood Music was now his to run alone.
When he’d open the store within the morning, Dad had no bother with the lock on the high of the door. However when he’d bend right down to undo the latch on the backside, he’d get hit with a wave of nausea. The neon signal above the door nonetheless mentioned Westwood Musical Devices—Hermann Walecki, however the decal on the window now learn Hermann Walecki & Son. He requested himself, How do you are taking your father’s place?
Sooner or later, a tour bus pulled up in entrance of the shop and out walked the nation singer Merle Haggard. He was a real-life outlaw who’d completed time in San Quentin and a pacesetter of the “Bakersfield Sound,” gritty country-western music that sounded nothing just like the overproduced schmaltz Nashville was promoting within the ’60s. “I’m right here to get a very good violin,” he mentioned. Dad took him to Hermann’s protected and introduced out a centuries-old Carlo Antonio Testore. “Can you place metal strings on that?” Haggard requested. Hermann would have thought the request blasphemous, however Dad obliged. The violin went for $16,000; this one sale would cowl a lot of the household’s remaining medical debt. Haggard was fiddling on the brand new strings when Marian, Dad’s mom, who’d taken over as the shop’s bookkeeper, walked by.
“It feels like that violin has metal strings on it,” she mentioned. An completed classical violinist and wool-skirt lady of the old fashioned, she was scandalized. However then Dad advised her that Haggard was going to purchase it. “It sounds marvelous,” she mentioned.
Each time he bought one in all his father’s violins, Dad would reinvest in new stock—handmade guitars by the Spanish luthier José Ramírez; Traynor amps imported from Canada; and, for musicians who wished their very own sound system, Lamb Laboratories mixing boards from England (as a result of Dad discovered that if he adjusted the board’s settings good, it might “get you a very good Rolling Stones sound stay”). Martin guitars, a favourite of people musicians, had solely a handful of licensed retailers in Los Angeles; Dad was one in all them. As musicians began touring increasingly more by aircraft, he discovered a person named Mark Leaf, who constructed fiberglass guitar instances on his kitchen desk in Virginia. Dad advised Leadon {that a} guitar in that case might fall onto an airplane tarmac and not using a scratch. (Leadon later discovered this to be true.)
Dad would inventory something that delighted him—people, rock, or in any other case. Dolmetsch, an organization in England, made “the final word baroque recorders,” in his opinion, so he carried a full line of them. “If one other music retailer bought it, then overlook it, you already know? But when it was the very best and the good, then I might get it,” he mentioned. He remembers a younger man wearing denims and a swimsuit jacket coming into the store in the future and making an attempt out the recorders. He’d take one out of the show case, play it, then slip it in his suit-jacket pocket earlier than returning it. Many times: out of the case, within the pocket, again within the case.
“Hey, man,” Dad mentioned, and requested what the man was doing.
“I wished to see how comfy it’s, as a result of I wish to use it as a bit of touring instrument,” Jackson Browne replied.
I met Browne at his recording studio in Los Angeles final summer season. One of many first issues he mentioned to me was “You’re tall!” The final time we’d seen one another, I used to be 3 toes and nonetheless struggling to pronounce my r’s. He confirmed me his studio of classic recording gear and the ailing sunflower seedlings he was making an attempt to develop on the windowsill for his grandson. “You will come again,” he advised the slouching shoots. “Sorry I let this occur once more.” We sat at a desk within the studio’s kitchen whereas he made us a pot of espresso.
Browne has no concept what his youthful self wished to do with that recorder. “That was fairly harebrained,” he mentioned. “I didn’t actually be taught to play recorder in any respect.” However again then, music was “the coin of the realm. The songs you can play or what you can do on a guitar was a type of introduction to folks and pals.” At little golf equipment like Ledbetter’s, musicians might pay attention to at least one one other and ask, How do you do this?
All of them have been so younger. Browne was solely 18 when he wrote “A Youngster in These Hills.” Linda Ronstadt was the identical age when she moved from Tucson, Arizona, to Los Angeles. Crosby and Hillman have been of their early 20s when, in 1965, the Byrds primarily launched the folk-rock style with their cowl of “Mr. Tambourine Man.” By 1970, Hillman and Leadon had fused nation and rock collectively within the Flying Burrito Brothers. (Their pedal-steel participant used Jimi Hendrix–esque fuzz distortion and was additionally an animator for The Gumby Present. His title was Sneaky Pete.)
Dad’s retailer had turn out to be a part of a scene that was reshaping American well-liked music. However Dad was nonetheless making an attempt to run a store appropriate for his father’s remaining violin clientele. Leadon took him apart. “Fred, you don’t want to decorate like that, sporting a tie and white shirt and slacks,” he mentioned. “These folks that you just’re dressing for usually are not those which might be bringing in cash. We’re.” So Dad stored his father’s outdated devices on the wall, his grandfather’s clock by the door, and the Goethe quote above the gross sales counter, however he positioned his Martin guitars on stadium bleachers within the entrance window and began sporting Levi’s like the remainder of them.
II. The Instruments
In one in all my favourite images of my father, he stands behind the counter of Westwood Music. A lute, a violin, and a couple of dozen guitars cling on the wall behind him, and the counter and cupboards overflow with papers. In his Levi’s and Waylon Jennings T-shirt, he’s now the king of cool. After which there may be his smile—the one I inherited—which takes up half his face. He seems at whoever is on the opposite aspect of the counter as if they’re the middle of his world.
“Folks would are available and it was increase, that floodgate of tales would open,” Christopher Visitor advised me. Perhaps Dad would launch into the one the place he discovered himself in a Las Vegas greenroom with Elvis and girls he took for “girls of the evening,” as he put it; or the time he dropped off a 12-string guitar at a recording session for Crosby, together with some regifted weed from a member of Ricky Nelson’s highway crew, who’d cautioned that it was “one-hit dope.” The recording engineer known as the following day to say they’d all ignored the warning, and when he drove house afterward, he couldn’t consider how lengthy it was taking to get to his home, just a few neighborhoods over. Then he noticed the signal: Welcome to San Diego. Dad would observe prospects to their automobile, simply to complete a narrative.
My father was a reliable musician, although by no means thought of doing it professionally. He discovered some songs, together with Browne’s “My Opening Farewell,” so he might present prospects completely different points of a guitar’s tone. “He at all times actually favored to indicate me that he might play it, which I felt very honored by, you already know?” Browne mentioned. “And that goes proper together with him pulling out a guitar and saying, ‘I’ve to indicate you one thing. Examine this out.’ And he would present you what invariably can be an outstanding guitar.”
Examine this out : the three-word portal into the Fred Walecki Expertise. Examine this out, and he’d hand John Entwistle his first-ever Alembic bass, a model he would go on to make use of for a few years with the Who. Examine this out, and he’d pull out a guitar by Mark Whitebook or David Russell Younger, luthiers he’d found within the mountains of Topanga Canyon, and whose devices he bought to James Taylor and Gram Parsons. Glyn Johns purchased a David Russell Younger so he’d have a great acoustic guitar for the rock bands he labored with. (Johns confirmed me that guitar once I visited him at house final fall; he apologized for all of the scratch marks. “All people’s performed this,” he mentioned. “Eric has performed it; Jeff Beck’s performed it; Jimmy Web page has performed it.”)
Visitor does an imitation of my father rummaging round in his store for the merchandise he wants you to see. Wait, what’s this factor? he’ll say, as he reveals some treasure. My dad has been doing this for so long as I can bear in mind. It was simply over right here [Dad lifts up a touring case, printed with B.D., from a Bob Dylan tour]. Perhaps it’s beneath [peers behind a platinum record the Eagles gave him for One of These Nights]. I believe it’s simply [moves aside a priceless Spanish guitar by the 19th-century luthier Antonio de Torres Jurado]. Oh, right here! The enjoyment for my father is in watching different folks verify this out. This is the reason when he seems at me with pure pleasure and asks me to attempt the soup he has created from three various kinds of Progresso, I settle for the spoon from him.
I’ve tried to get my father to wax poetic in regards to the music that his prospects have been making within the ’60s and ’70s. He was there for the beginning of what’s typically known as the California Sound, a mix of nation, bluegrass, people, and rock that’s totally distinctive and practically unimaginable to categorize. How one can comprise the Seaside Boys and the Byrds, the Doorways and the Mamas & the Papas, Bonnie Raitt and Joni Mitchell? Gram Parsons known as his personal sound Cosmic American Music, and possibly that’s a greater time period for the complete Los Angeles scene. The music, he mentioned, would unite “longhairs, shorthairs, folks with overalls, folks with their velvet gear on.” Cosmic American Music, a minimum of, captures the motion’s non secular aspirations, whereas gesturing to the space between its stars.
No matter you name it, this music outlined an period, and it has caught round since. On highway journeys, my pals and I, all beneath the age of 30, nonetheless roll down the home windows and blast the Eagles. We act like Joni Mitchell wrote Blue only for us. I’ve requested my father to elucidate it to me, to supply a principle for why there, why then. How did a lot good music come out of 1 place?
However he simply shrugs. “I’m extra of a jazz man,” he says. That is true. My whole childhood, our automobile radio was beneath the tyranny of KJAZZ 88.1. His heroes are Bola Sete, Kenny Burrell, Johnny Smith, and Baden Powell. If I wish to discuss in regards to the California Sound, he tells me, I ought to ask his pals who really made it. So I introduced the query to Browne, the bard of ’70s Los Angeles. What do you suppose did it?
“It was the guitars,” he mentioned. “Anyone will let you know it’s the devices.” He smiled and we each laughed. However then Browne stopped himself, thought-about. “I’m joking once I say it’s the guitars. However I’m additionally critical.”
Every instrument incorporates unwritten melodies and lyrics, he mentioned. “They’ve personalities, and they’re going to communicate to you with these personalities.” (Dad likes to say that devices have their very own little souls.) Browne mentioned, “Particularly for a author, you’ll get to play stuff that may unlock a method of taking part in, or a track that’s in that guitar that you just won’t write on one other.”
Chris Hillman described Westwood Music to me as “the ironmongery shop” of the L.A. music scene. Visitor had a extra romantic metaphor: Dad, he mentioned, “was like a matchmaker,” a conduit between the human soul and the instrumental one. The place different salesmen may simply let you know the worth of a guitar, with my father, “it was about going a lot additional than that and considering, I’m listening to you play, and it feels like this is perhaps a great guitar for you.”
When Joe Walsh introduced in his Gibson J-200 to promote, Dad known as up Emmylou Harris immediately. “It’s good to have this guitar,” she remembers him telling her. It had that heat nation sound he knew she’d like. “You play an A chord and it’s identical to, pwah! ” Harris advised me, miming fireworks. J-200s have been her signature guitar ever since. She added, “I kind of grew to become the unofficial Gibson Woman.”
Early in her profession, Bonnie Raitt was taking part in in little golf equipment and “wasn’t even anticipating to do that for a residing. It was type of a passion for me,” she advised me. However Dad, she says, “confirmed me round and confirmed me the entire world of issues that I might have.” He defined how completely different amplifiers might change her sound, and he took her to a commerce present the place he launched her to the genteel, moderately historical chairman of Martin Guitar, C. F. Martin III.
Raitt has a mischievous, bawdy humorousness. (As a child, I understood I used to be by no means to repeat a Bonnie Raitt joke.) Dad advised C. F. Martin that Raitt was a rising star and could also be in want of a custom-made guitar. “What I really want is a custom-made IUD,” she mentioned. Martin had no concept what she was speaking about, so Dad jumped in: “Uh, it’s loads like a Martin D-35.”
None of this might occur now. At this time’s musicians don’t want Fred Walecki to name them up a couple of J-200 or dealer a deal for a bespoke Martin. Like skilled athletes, they’ve sponsorship offers and may get their gear free of charge. However Dad “made it his enterprise to know the newest on each single enchancment of each keyboard, each amp, and each guitar,” Raitt mentioned. “It’s not one thing I take with no consideration. We have been all extremely fortunate to have somebody on our aspect that had a lot integrity.”
Dad by no means forgot having to chase down the person he’d upsold on fancy guitar strings; as soon as the shop was his, he stored costs affordable—if something, he charged too little. Warren Zevon as soon as noticed an vintage harmonium in Westwood Music and requested Dad how a lot he wished for it. “Fifty bucks,” he mentioned. “Or nothing! Take your decide!” Zevon used to name them “Freddie’s Zen Costs.”
My father grew to become an angel investor of types. When the longer term Eagle Don Felder first got here to L.A., he wanted to be taught mandolin for an audition, so Dad loaned him one. As Felder writes in his memoir, my father advised him to take it “in case you have an opportunity for a job,” and wished him luck. He received the gig. The Eagles landed their first tour earlier than that they had the cash to purchase all the required gear. Dad gave them a cost account.
III. The Scene
As traditional, I’m staying within the Blue Room, named for its cerulean rug and robin’s-egg partitions. And as traditional, once I come down the staircase, Linda Ronstadt is in her favourite armchair.
Her San Francisco front room looks like the within of an Impressionist portray: pastel-hued, mushy on the edges. It smells of lower flowers and the black tea she prefers to espresso. An icon of Our Woman of Guadalupe retains watch from the mantel; a portray of her cat sporting a crown overlooks her cabinets and cabinets of books. Exterior within the backyard, fog cradles the roses she introduced along with her from one in all her grandfather’s ranches within the San Gabriel Valley.
She has identified me since I used to be born, when my mother and father have been nonetheless making an attempt to make my double title, Nancy Kathryn, catch on. After I started singing as a baby, Linda launched me to Brian Wilson’s harmonies and Maria Callas’s vocal placement, and, unbeknownst to me, paid for my classes. Each time I go to, we speak about books (most lately, Anna Karenina) and boys (I discuss, she listens). We watch TV and go to mattress early. I’m simply Nancy now to most individuals, however to Linda, I’m nonetheless Nancy Kathryn.
She has identified my father because the Nineteen Sixties, when she began coming to his store because the lead singer within the considerably bumbling folk-rock group the Stone Poneys. In a feeble try and sound like a rock band, they purchased electrical pickups for his or her acoustic guitars. Dad, she recalled, “gave us the identical consideration he gave to the Byrds.”
The 2 grew to become pals, and whether or not she was searching for a brand new guitar or simply some firm, “he at all times confirmed up when he was wanted. And he was at all times wanted.” Within the late ’70s, a strong storm hit Malibu, washing away the glass-enclosed tearoom connected to Linda’s home. Dad arrived with sandbags, quick-dry cement, and a stockpile of Mexican meals from Lucy’s El Adobe. Years later, he was the one who drove her house to Tucson after her breakup with George Lucas.
When Linda footage Westwood Music, she thinks of an outdated line she loves: “Music is a conspiracy to commit magnificence.” Somebody was at all times fingerpicking, an electrical guitar was at all times buzzing—musicians have been at all times conspiring.
Folks didn’t essentially come to purchase one thing. Westwood Music was a daytime clubhouse of the L.A. scene, Bernie Leadon mentioned. Emmylou Harris known as it “the watering gap.”
It “was a spot the place folks noticed folks, made friendships, made connections, and it was all by your dad,” Harris advised me. “He simply put out that vibe—that sense of it was at all times about music, the musicians.”
This was an analog world, a world during which serendipity was nonetheless doable. “Generally you’d go in and also you’d see Jackson or Ry Cooder and all these completely different folks that have been hanging on the market, and out of the blue it might flip into half a day, and also you’d go within the again room and you can simply kind of sit and jam collectively,” Leland Sklar, a bass participant who has backed artists together with Linda, Browne, and James Taylor, advised me. Artists would catch up, speak about what they have been engaged on, after which head off to their respective recording classes, possibly on the Complicated or Village Recorders close by. Cooder, a slide-guitar virtuoso, would deliver a six-pack and jam. Joni Mitchell popped by for pizza. Even Neil Younger, generally known as one thing of a hermit, stopped in.
The shop got here with a bemused den mom, Marian, identified to all as “Mrs. Walecki.” She’d do the shop’s payroll whereas musicians within the adjoining guitar room tried out new devices by taking part in “Stairway to Heaven.” (It was at all times “Stairway to Heaven.”) One time, Mick Taylor, the bony, long-haired guitarist for the Rolling Stones, requested Marian the place the john was. That relies upon, she mentioned, with whole sincerity. “Are you a boy or woman?”
Mark Bookin, the shop’s senior salesman for many years, described Dad because the “grasp of ceremonies” at every day’s gathering. However Dad says he considered himself extra as the shop’s maître-d’hôtel. Let me sit so-and-so right here, close to the producer from Asylum Information, he’d suppose. Or: These two guitar gamers may sound good collectively; let me introduce them. He linked Linda and Johns as a result of he thought they could make a great file, and shortly after, they did—We Ran. “Music-store house owners don’t do this,” Johns advised me.
My father and his retailer, Visitor mentioned, “accelerated every little thing. It made every little thing higher, as a result of it offered a second house and a spot the place folks might really feel appreciated, and that’s a giant factor.” After I requested Dad what time Westwood Music would shut at evening, he shook his head. It closed when its crowd wandered elsewhere—often to the Troubadour, a West Hollywood membership and the scene’s nighttime nexus. Dad remembers leaning in opposition to the bar and working by his movie star impersonations: Jimmy Stewart, John Wayne, Kirk Douglas. “You understand, actually humorous shit,” Browne mentioned. Dad needed to stand up early the following morning to run a enterprise, whereas the remainder of them slept in. However Ned Doheny, a singer-songwriter and Browne’s former musical accomplice, mentioned, “He was as a lot part of that scene as anyone who ever made a file throughout that time period.”
By the mid-’70s, “it was all taking place,” Dad says. The Eagles and Jackson Browne have been taking part in arenas around the globe. Linda would rush house from one string of live shows, dump out the contents of her suitcase, pack for a wholly completely different local weather, and head out on the highway once more. Dad bought her a conveyable, battery-powered Pignose amplifier, in regards to the dimension of a lunch field, that she and her band might use for jamming between gigs. He despatched the Seaside Boys instances of Ricola cough drops to protect their voices on tour.
As his pals’ music moved deeper and deeper into rock, Dad phased out his remaining pure-folk stock—ceding the folkies to a music retailer he’d been competing with close by. Not lengthy after, a roadie for the Rolling Stones known as and requested Dad if he might come to a Warner Bros. soundstage, the place they have been recording. Keith Richards wished a guitar with a B-string bender—a tool that musicians put inside their guitars to emulate the sound of a pedal metal. Dad’s automobile was within the store, so he hopped in his mom’s station wagon. When he received there, he talked about that he was going to see the blues duo Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee on the Ash Grove, and requested if the Stones wished to come back. They piled into Marian’s station wagon. After they walked into the membership, Dad noticed that the opposite music retailer had arrange a kiosk inside. “And right here I include the Rolling Stones,” Dad says, with that smile that takes up half his face.
IV. The Confidant
How do I describe my father, a person who, if he might, would crawl out of those pages and meet you himself? In my head, he comes together with his personal theme music—a rollicking kazoo melody with a boogie-woogie bass line. If he finds himself round somebody he feels is taking themselves too critically, he’ll hover his finger about one inch from their face and singsong, I’m not touching you! till they’re disarmed into being nothing however themselves. When confronted with adversity, he’ll say, God’s not on a espresso break. And if presenting a plan, work-around, or detour that may encourage the concern of dying in his companion however in the end be plenty of enjoyable: Let me present you a cheatsy method to try this.
Dad was by no means one to say no to an journey. Over time, he went snowboarding with the band Poco and tuna-fishing with the Doorways. Wix Wickens, the keyboardist for Paul McCartney, refused to affix my father on his frequent journeys to Mexico, as a result of, “it being your dad, jaunts would flip into escapades would flip into incidents.”
It was on one such journey that he met my mom, who was sitting on the subsequent desk at a seafood restaurant. She was a Stanford grad and a celebrated Western-style horseback rider who had grown up on a Nevada cattle ranch about 100 miles from the closest gasoline station. He was a really loud man sporting a hat that resembled a marlin. It had a fin.
Fred Walecki “incidents” weren’t essentially fueled by medication or debauchery. (Dad advised me he smoked weed solely between 1977 and 1979. He received it free of charge from Crosby’s seller.) As a substitute, his adventures have been impressed by what Wickens described as my father’s “benign chaos.” Dad’s coverage: “If it appeared to me {that a} good individual wouldn’t maintain it in opposition to me, I might do it.”
Jimmy Buffett as soon as known as and mentioned he’d been supplied a last-minute stadium gig. He requested if Dad might replicate his band’s whole stage setup—together with the congas—in file time. Buffett’s field truck couldn’t match all of the gear, so that they loaded up Dad’s station wagon with gear and strapped the congas to the roof. They paused lengthy sufficient to color Freddy and the Fishsticks World Tour ’81 on the aspect.
Folks flip to folklore to explain my father: He’s the Pied Piper, the maven, or, as Ned Doheny calls him, the trickster—a mischievous entity who “tracks pollen in all places, and all types of issues occur.”
Sooner or later in 1977, he confirmed up at Linda’s home in Malibu with some contemporary fruit and a few wonderful marijuana. Lulled by the sturdy weed, the solar, and my father, Linda stayed outdoors too lengthy and received horribly sunburned. The following day, she needed to take publicity pictures for her album Easy Desires. Within the iconic shot of Linda (her ex George Lucas’s favourite, she says), she seems over her left shoulder, lips parted, a white flower in her hair—however at any time when she seems on the picture, she sees the sunburn she received with Dad. My father and his pollen.
However then there may be my father, quiet, beamed again right down to Earth. After I was 18, I received a nasty concussion that took me out of faculty for my first semester. My physician didn’t need me to fly house for some time, so I known as Dad one evening from the opposite aspect of the nation, panicked that my mind would by no means return to regular. “What are you taking a look at proper now?” he requested. Pine bushes, I mentioned. Some shrubs. I’m sitting on a bench outdoors. “What’s the temperature like the place you might be?” It’s good. Cool however not chilly. It was early fall within the Northeast, a brand new sensation for a Californian. “What does the air odor like?” Wooden chips. “I do know it’s exhausting, however your solely job proper now’s to remain on this second and never future-trip. On this second proper now, the one God is providing you with, the air smells good, the temperature is nice, you’re someplace lovely.” We stored speaking and he slowly untangled issues that, earlier than I known as, had felt insurmountable. He signed off that evening, as he often does, by saying not I like you, however I’m loving you—love, energetic.
I do know now that he had dozens of conversations like this, with dozens of musicians, many years earlier than he grew to become a father.
Anybody “can really feel just like the stowaway within the trunk of an amazing enterprise,” Browne advised me. However an artist, possibly particularly, wants somebody who makes them consider that they’re worthy, that it’s all going to be okay, Mac McAnally, a singer-songwriter and longtime member of Jimmy Buffett’s band, advised me. “Fred could make you consider it’s going to be okay.”
Joni Mitchell stopped touring within the Eighties, and within the ’90s advised Dad she was going to do her last-ever public efficiency, on the 1995 New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Competition. Her songbook incorporates about 50 completely different tunings. “I’d tune to the numbers in a date, I’d tune to a bit of music that I favored on the radio, I’d tune to birdsongs and the panorama I used to be sitting in,” she mentioned in a 1996 interview. “I’d work out these fantastic contemporary harmonic actions, solely it was a ache within the butt to carry out and I felt like I used to be at all times out of tune.” She didn’t wish to do it anymore.
However Dad advised her he might need simply the appropriate software: Roland’s new VG-8, which might electronically alter a guitar’s sonic output and, crucially, memorize tunings. Mitchell might preserve her guitar in normal tuning, then push a button for “Huge Yellow Taxi,” say, and the VG-8 would convert the sound of every string to match that tuning. Dad knew Mitchell had had polio as a baby and nonetheless suffered from muscle weak point, so he constructed her a guitar from light-weight spruce (generally utilized in violin making) and positioned the VG-8 inside. He painted the guitar his favourite colour, British racing inexperienced. She named it “Inexperienced Peace.”
What she thought can be her swan track “was the primary efficiency in an entire new interval,” she mentioned in that 1996 interview. She used the VG-8 to make the guitar sounds on Taming the Tiger, giving her “entry to all types of potentialities in step with the best way I hear guitar, which is sort of a full orchestra, with the treble like a brass part and the decrease strings just like the viola, cello, and bass.” To a different reporter, she mentioned, “This instrument goes to be my savior.” She used my father’s title in one of many album’s lyrics—she calls him “Freddie”—and, within the liner notes, thanked him for “rekindling my want to make music.”
Dad has at all times been “genuinely fascinated with folks,” Linda advised me in her front room. “And after they got here in, he’d discuss to them, and so they confided in him.”
I leaned in, prepared for a flood of rock secrets and techniques. “What would they open up to him about?”
“Effectively, I don’t know! He stored it secret.” She smiled. “He stored my stuff secret. However he at all times knew the undercurrents that have been happening and band dynamics and stuff like that.”
And if mandatory, “he’d inform them after they have been stuffed with shit. He had no reservations about that,” Bookin, the shop’s longtime salesman, mentioned. As soon as, at a recording session, Crosby performed Dad a vocal observe he’d simply lower and was clearly pleased with. “Your voice is nice, however have been you studying it?” Dad requested. Unmemorized lyrics are the peak of laziness, in my father’s eyes.
“Oh fuck you,” Crosby mentioned. (The 2 remained good pals till Crosby’s dying.)
My father has a low tolerance for what he perceives as stupidity, and over time, drug use within the L.A. music scene received stupider and stupider. To listen to my father and his pals speak about it, the period might be divided into B.C. and A.C.: Earlier than Cocaine and After Cocaine. When Weed Man confirmed up on the occasion, that may very well be enjoyable. Mushroom Man, too. Even Acid Man. However when Cocaine Man began coming to events, Dad mentioned, he drained the scene of its remaining innocence. The music received self-indulgent. Folks would discuss over each other and suppose they have been having a dialog.
Doing a line with somebody “was like having a cup of espresso” with them, Mickey Raphael, Willie Nelson’s harmonica participant, advised me. It took everybody some time to note the scene darkening. In June 1979, Dad’s good friend Lowell George, of the band Little Feat, died of an overdose. Dad was an Eagle Scout by the scene’s requirements, however he realized that “we couldn’t preserve going at this tempo” and received sober that August. “He was one of many first folks I knew to essentially get sober and simply draw the road,” Browne mentioned. “The remainder of us, it was years earlier than anyone determined that was the issue.”
Dad nonetheless went to all of the events; he simply introduced IBC root beer to drink. As soon as, at a gathering at Crosby’s home, he was being so loud, so boisterous, cracking such terrible jokes, that one other occasion visitor, Neil Younger’s producer and recording engineer Niko Bolas, assumed he was excessive on some new drug all of them wanted to attempt. Raphael mentioned that Dad’s explicit model of abstinence “turned a bit of mild on with all of us, saying, Hmm, if Fred can do it, then possibly I can.” You could possibly be clear and “nonetheless capable of cling with the musos.” Dad would assist heroin addicts detox on the little nation house he and his father constructed collectively within the Nineteen Fifties, and began a weekly gathering of the alcoholics he mentored, who nicknamed it “The Gol Darn Dingy Deal,” after my father’s catchphrase when going through a setback. (“What’s the gol darn dingy deal?” he’ll ask when, say, the automobile doesn’t begin.)
In 1986, when Crosby was out of jail on drug prices and newly sober, Dad joined him on a white-water-rafting journey. That trip, Crosby’s spouse, Jan Dance Crosby, advised me, was “actually the primary time we really did one thing for enjoyable after working so exhausting to get sober.” Dad was proof that life didn’t finish—certainly, might turn out to be extra joyful—after sobriety. “He wasn’t shy about sharing that pleasure, and he additionally wasn’t preachy,” she mentioned. “All he was was a good friend.”
Dad grew to become a Christian round that point. This, too, began within the store. When Larry Myers, a musician and pastor, got here to Los Angeles, somebody advised him that if he wished to fulfill folks, he needed to go to Westwood Music and meet my father. The 2 grew to become pleasant, and Myers invited Dad to listen to his band on the Winery Church. At this time Winery is a world physique of church buildings, however on the time one in all its solely chapters met in Dad’s outdated junior highschool. Members of Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue made up the worship band; Myers had helped deliver Dylan himself to Christ. As Dad listened to the band play that Sunday, “I noticed I had tears in my eyes,” he recalled. “I noticed that I actually at all times—I at all times cherished God, and it was time to make pals” with him.
When my mother and father met, in 1990, Dad bragged that he was constructing an off-the-grid house in Topanga Canyon, within the mountains outdoors L.A. My mother, Kathy, made it clear, in her quiet method, that she knew much more about off-the-grid residing than he did. Collectively, they completed the house the place I used to be raised, surrounded by sage and overlooking the Pacific. When the solar energy inevitably went out, Mother would placed on a headlamp and begin the generator; when our water stress dropped, she’d go outdoors and bang on the pipe with a rock; when rattlesnakes got here into the home, she’d deal with it. She created the situations for Dad to proceed doing his work. He purchased a Seventies GMC motor house on eBay (shag carpets, corduroy seats), which grew to become a visitor room for household, pals, wandering souls, and the addicts he mentored. Mother organized a household journey to Ohio to drive it house. At one level, she held the damaged door closed with a bit of rope so it wouldn’t fly open on the freeway.
All through my childhood, and to today, Dad recurrently reads his favourite guide, The Biggest Factor within the World, a pocket-size theological meditation on love as outlined in First Corinthians. It was his father’s favourite too. And now it’s mine. The part a couple of love that “thinketh no evil” jogs my memory of my father:
Love “thinketh no evil,” imputes no motive, sees the intense aspect, places the very best development on each motion. What a pleasant way of thinking to stay in! What a stimulus and benediction even to fulfill with for a day! To be trusted is to be saved. And if we attempt to affect or elevate others, we will quickly see that success is in proportion to their perception of our perception in them. For the respect of one other is the primary restoration of the self-respect a person has misplaced; our perfect of what he’s turns into to him the hope and sample of what he could turn out to be.
Dad doesn’t describe the folks in his life as musicians, mathematicians, or zoologists; they’re the drummer “who understands methods to swing on a metaphysical stage,” “the mathematician who virtually ran the Aerospace Company,” and the “solely individual Dennis Wilson trusted” to look after the Asian small-clawed otters he stored in his swimming pool.
My father sees us because the folks we want to be, and he’ll tolerate us being nothing much less. In 2022, Dad was one in all Mitchell’s guitar techs at her shock Newport People Competition comeback, and he let me tag alongside. At a rehearsal, Marcus Mumford was sitting just a few toes away from us, behind the congas, and I whispered to my father how a lot I cherished his music. “Go discuss to him,” Dad mentioned. “He’s Marcus Mumford, Dad,” I mentioned. He grinned. “And also you’re Nancy Walecki.”
V. When It Was Ours
Westwood Music was at all times a household enterprise. Dad advised prospects to verify this out on the gross sales ground whereas my brother and I ostensibly helped take stock, however largely constructed forts in a loft above the amp room. We’d learn Tales From the Crypt surrounded by touring instances, cross-legged on the British-racing-green carpet. Upstairs, in her bookkeeping workplace subsequent to the restore store, my mother stored the Fred Walecki Expertise working.
Musicians would sit on the shop’s leather-based couches, taking part in guitars and ingesting the espresso we made in our Mr. Espresso machine. I noticed how a lot the electrolarynx annoyed my father, however he continued to be the voice of the store. He as soon as got here up behind Browne whereas he tried a guitar; received actual shut, as much as his ear; then buzzed: “Are you able to consider that tone?”
By the Nineties, the shop was struggling, as skilled musicians received increasingly more free gear by sponsorship offers. A Guitar Middle opened down the road—a black gap sucking up our enterprise, to listen to my mother and father describe it. “Gui-Goal,” Dad known as it. Later, folks began shopping for devices on-line, however Dad wasn’t fascinated with constructing an internet presence. If an instrument has its personal little soul, how might you purchase it with out spending time with it in individual?
Dad bought Westwood Music in 2010, and the brand new house owners closed it through the pandemic and by no means reopened it. Dad and I went again to the shop final yr, to filter out the final of his belongings: the leather-based sofa my brother and I had carved our initials into with a paper clip; the scoreboard-size {photograph} of Dad, sitting backwards on a chair, speaking to Lyle Lovett; the neon Westwood Musical Devices—Hermann Walecki signal. I considered one thing Christopher Visitor had mentioned. Somebody ought to put a plaque outdoors the constructing: Westwood Music was right here. 1947–2021.
I advised Dad I used to be sorry that my brother and I hadn’t carried on the household enterprise. It felt like we’d failed him and the generations earlier than him. Dad shook his head and jogged my memory that his father hadn’t wished him to take over the shop. In addition to, being right here didn’t even make him that unhappy, he mentioned, as a result of the brand new proprietor’s iteration was so completely different. “However when it was ours,” he advised me, “we did it properly.”
Dad is 78 now, and nonetheless repairs devices for patrons like Visitor, Sklar, Robby Krieger of the Doorways, the Edge, and anybody else resourceful sufficient to seek out his new store, unlisted on Google Maps and positioned inside a transformed greenhouse at a succulent nursery in Malibu. Dad brings lettuce from house to feed the rabbits that run beneath the pallets of cacti; the opposite tenants embody a glassblower, a clothes designer, a painter, and a sculptor. When he leaves house within the morning, he’ll say, “I’m off to do my father’s work”—referring to each Hermann and his heavenly father.
His restore store nonetheless smells of Westwood Music’s outdated wooden and lacquer, together with the ocean and the light paper in his packing containers of ephemera. (My favourite piece is {a photograph} of Crosby, Stills, and Nash’s leisure baseball workforce, the Hoovers—a cocaine joke, Dad needed to clarify to me.) He retains his father’s Goethe quote above his workbench, the place he lately repaired a cello from 1876. “You understand what’s attention-grabbing? I noticed that’s what I love to do,” he advised me. If he didn’t love guitar gamers a lot, he’d work solely on cellos. Repairing them reminds him of his father.
This previous winter, I finished by with some lunch for us to share. He was chatting with a buyer whereas he lowered the strings on the person’s guitar nearer to the fretboard so it might be simpler to play. Dad advised a joke and supplied the person some recommendation on an issue he’d been having together with his spouse, then the 2 of them mentioned Romans 8. When it was time for the person to go, my father advised him a narrative all the best way to his automobile.
Dad and I ate our sandwiches, and I discussed how a lot I missed singing. He mentioned that I ought to cling round extra jazz golf equipment, as a result of “events don’t occur by themselves,” and that I ought to be part of a crusing membership, as a result of he suspected that I missed the ocean. (I’ve by no means expressed an curiosity in crusing, however possibly now I’ll be taught.) We looked for a guitar decide he wished to indicate anyone, from the set he’d custom-made for the Seaside Boys. Once we locked up the store for the day, he seemed drained however happy. He’d be again once more tomorrow.
This text seems within the September 2025 print version with the headline “My Father’s Work.”
