What happens when guitar players become guitar collectors

Larry Holiday is pictured with a part of his guitar collection. BDN photo by Dave Abner

By Dave Abner
BDN Staff Writer
dabner@bransondailynews.com

(Note: The following is the second in a three-part series of stories.)

In Part One, a pair of area guitarists detailed their early days as guitar players.

Larry Holiday plays guitar and sings for “Take it to the Limit,” an Eagles tribute show at RFD TV The Theatre in town. He’s played guitar all over America, had record contracts and played with some of the most recognizable names in the music business.

Like Holiday, Jack Pribek has played guitar all over America. He landed some years back in southwest Missouri and served as business manager, bandleader and guitarist for Bill Dees. Dees gained notoriety in part for penning a number of hits with rock legend Roy Orbison, including the Orbison-Dees classic, “Oh, Pretty Woman.”

Part One examined the early days. Now it’s on to the next step – making a living as a guitar slinger.

GOING PRO

As a kid, Pribek knew what he wanted— make a living as a guitar player.

He said, “That was always the goal—be a professional musician.”

He started out with his young bandmates playing “biker keg parties.

“It was southern rock, mostly,” he said, heavy on Allman Brothers and Skynyrd and Molly Hatchett, with a dash of covers like “Sweet Jane” and “Lola” thrown in.

He was 17 when he landed his first house gig. His band backed a country singer a part of each night. In between country songs, his band got to play the rock and blues they loved.

Holiday got a taste of music for money in high school while working with Hispanic musicians.

“I got hired by this Mexican band,” he said. “I’d play trombone and then I’d come up front and play guitar. We were making a pretty good bit of money.

“That’s when I thought, ‘Yeah – this might be better than washing dishes.’”

BECOMING A COLLECTOR

Holiday and Pribek are seasoned veterans now. Both have paid dues, Holiday with Little Anthony and Martha and the Vandellas and the Marvelettes and Robin Trower and Chuck Berry’s daughter and a Pablo Cruise spinoff with Bruce Day, bass player from Pablo Cruise and Pribek earning his wings with six-nights-a-week road bands, playing watering holes, nightclubs and roadhouses all over North America.

“I got a good reputation on those circuits,” Pribek said. “I got to where I could make a phone call and get a gig.

“I was never without work.”

And when guitar slingers go from late teens and learning about how to make a living in the music business to salty pros on the back side of 40 or 50 who have been doing it for three or more decades, some things happen.

Guitar players get good or they don’t last.

And another byproduct of time in the guitar trenches – guitar players sometimes become inveterate guitar collectors.

Holiday and Pribek represent flip sides of the coin.

Holiday’s a guitar collector.

Pribek’s not.

Holiday was asked a question: Why do guitar players so often become guitar collectors?

His response: “Why do women like to buy shoes?”

He recalled an ex-wife who liked dogs.

Holiday said, “I told her, ‘Every time you bring home a new dog, I’m getting a new guitar.’

“She got up to 13 dogs at one time.”

Holiday maintains about two-and-a-half-dozen instruments in his arsenal.

“I’ve been staying pretty close to thirty (guitars). If I get rid of one, pretty soon I’ll get one.

“Sometimes I have to open the cases to see what I have.”

Jazz players were some of the earliest to refer to their instrument – a guitar or a saxophone, for instance – as an “ax.”

Pribek is mostly a one-ax guy.

He’s played bunches of them through the years – Gibson Les Pauls and Fender Telecasters and Stratocasters are but a few.

But it’s the Telecaster – the Tele (TELL-lee) – he revisits again and again.

In fact, he’s spent the better part of the past few years playing nothing but Telecaster – and not one Tele out of a collection of a dozen, but one Tele.

A single Tele. His bread-and-butter ax.

Part of it’s just what you know.

“I’m used to ‘em,” Pribek said. “I know ‘em inside and out.”

He said some age-old guitar questions (Fender or Gibson? Strat or Tele?) are decided the same way some guys decide car choices.

“It’s like Ford and Chevy,” Pribek said.

(Coming in Part Three: Solving a couple of guitar dilemmas and some closing notes.)