On Saturday, I am taking one of my most treasured possessions to hospital. It’s a two-thirds size guitar which I bought while travelling in Latin America in 1973. It is now so cracked and battered that I daren’t play it any more. This weekend it’s going in for treatment.
When I bought it I was three months into a ten-month-long journey through South, Central and eventually North America; an experience which remains with me vividly more than half a century after the event, and about which I’ve often written here before.
At the time I had a beautiful guitar at home, but I hadn’t wanted to risk taking it on the road. My girlfriend and travelling companion had given me a nice travelling guitar, but it had been stolen in Bolivia.
A couple of weeks after that, a hair-raising road journey from Cuzco, out of the Andes and down into Amazonia, in the rains, had brought us to Pucallpa, a muddy frontier-town of a few thousand inhabitants, on the banks of the Ucayali River. There we were going to catch a boat for the 600-mile journey downstream to the confluence of the Ucayali with the Amazon, at the Peruvian port of Iquitos.
Thrown around in the back of a truck for several days as we negotiated precipitous roads, biblical downpours, mudslides and bogged vehicles, I’d had little time to think of music. But now that we had a day to kill I set out, with almost no expectation of success, in search of a guitar.
I remember a rectangular grid of streets deep in mud with raised wooden sidewalks, clapboard buildings, men on horseback, rattletrap vehicles, waterfront warehouses piled high with exotic animal skins, and then, miraculously, a shack where a middle-aged man and his teenage son were bent over a workbench, the wall behind them hung with guitars.
The father showed me a couple of beautiful instruments made from some kind of tropical wood, dark and gleaming. But they were too expensive. Then, almost bashfully, the son showed me one of his. Although it was made of something nearly as light as balsa-wood, it had an easy action and a deep resonant tone. I paid ten dollars for it.
My journal tells me that it was 14 March 1973. The crudely handwritten label inside the guitar tells me it had been made only a few weeks earlier, on 17 February, by Damián Estrella Co. I’m guessing Damián Estrella was the father. The son was fourteen years old.
For the next six months I carried it with me in a yellow plastic fertiliser sack. Long waits at bus stations, and occasionally at the roadside, were a regular feature of the trip. There the little guitar came into its own. I wrote a lot of songs during that year, several of which I went on to record.
Since then it has travelled with me and done faithful service wherever I’ve lived. My daughter has played it. Last summer it came with me to France for two months. Given the age of its maker, I marvel at its character and tone. Given what it’s made of, I marvel at its survival. And I cherish it, above all, because it’s the one tangible object remaining to me from that epic year of travel.
Somewhere in the Amazon rainforest someone had felled a tree, from which a cut or two had come into the hands of a teenage boy in ragged shorts, with rubber-tyre sandals on his feet, who was learning his craft from his father, in a shack in a muddy street in an out-of-the-way jungle town in Peru. The spirits of that tree, that place, that boy, live on in my little guitar.
Beneath the signature, the young maker had added the word ‘Atahualpa’. The name of the last Inca emperor, it was also I guessed, though my journal doesn’t mention it, the name of the street where the guitar shop stood. Pucallpa today, I learn, is a thriving city of half a million people. Jirón Atahuallpa is a street running from the centre to the waterfront. Is it the same one? Very likely.
There are guitar shops in Pucallpa today, too, several of them. But now they boast sleek electric instruments and amplifiers, and there are none on Jirón Atahuallpa. Of Damián Estrella I have been able to find no trace.
How I would love to be able to tell the young maker, now a man in his mid-sixties, about his little guitar, about how it ended up in Scotland, and about all the adventures it has had along the way.
A Few Kind Words 