My Father, Guitar Guru to the Rock Gods

My Father, Guitar Guru to the Rock Gods

August 28, 2025 at 09:24PM

For The Atlantic, Nancy Walecki remembers her father, Fred Walecki, who as owner of Westwood Music, sold instruments to the likes of David Crosby, Graham Nash, Bernie Leadon, all musicians who birthed the California Sound of the ’60s and ’70s. Walecki wasn’t just a salesman; he was considered a matchmaker who took pride in pairing each player with the perfect instrument. Chris Hillman, a founding member of The Byrds, described Westwood Music as “‘the hardware store’ of the L.A. music scene.”

Check this out : the three-word portal into the Fred Walecki Experience. Check this out, and he’d hand John Entwistle his first-ever Alembic bass, a brand he would go on to use for many years with the Who. Check this out, and he’d pull out a guitar by Mark Whitebook or David Russell Young, luthiers he’d discovered in the mountains of Topanga Canyon, and whose instruments he sold to James Taylor and Gram Parsons. Glyn Johns bought a David Russell Young so he’d have a good acoustic guitar for the rock bands he worked with. (Johns showed me that guitar when I visited him at home last fall; he apologized for all the scratch marks. “Everybody’s played this,” he said. “Eric has played it; Jeff Beck’s played it; Jimmy Page has played it.”)

Early in her career, Bonnie Raitt was playing in little clubs and “wasn’t even expecting to do this for a living. It was kind of a hobby for me,” she told me. But Dad, she says, “showed me around and showed me the whole world of things that I could have.” He explained how different amplifiers could change her sound, and he took her to a trade show where he introduced her to the genteel, rather ancient chairman of Martin Guitar, C. F. Martin III.

Raitt has a mischievous, bawdy sense of humor. (As a kid, I understood I was never to repeat a Bonnie Raitt joke.) Dad told C. F. Martin that Raitt was a rising star and may be in need of a custom-made guitar. “What I really need is a custom-made IUD,” she said. Martin had no idea what she was talking about, so Dad jumped in: “Uh, it’s a lot like a Martin D-35.”

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from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/08/28/my-father-guitar-guru-to-the-rock-gods/
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