Quick Take
A half-century after Richard Hoover co-founded Santa Cruz Guitar Company, the internationally acclaimed guitar maker is celebrating its roots with a museum exhibit, concerts and a one-of-a-kind guitar crafted from Santa Cruz redwood and sycamore.
Recently, several Santa Cruz institutions have celebrated their golden anniversaries. Last year, it was Streetlight Records and the local weekly paper, Good Times. On Saint Patrick’s Day this year, The Catalyst celebrated 50 years in its current building. In November, “The Lost Boys” comic shop, Atlantis Fantasyworld, will mark its 50th milestone.
Yet there’s one company that has literally carved out a name for itself over the past five decades: Santa Cruz Guitar Company.
“We weren’t the first but we were certainly among the first to come up with this concept of custom guitars for one person at a time,” says owner and master luthier Richard Hoover. “Whereas a lot of the other people wanted to be the next Martin [Guitars].”
The guitar company’s 50th anniversary festivities kick off on Thursday, June 18, with the opening of a new exhibit at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History (which, it should be noted, celebrates its 30th anniversary this year). The show – Santa Cruz Guitar Company: The First 50 Years, which runs through Oct. 4 – will take a historic dive into the company’s origins to the present. It will showcase five separate limited-edition 50th anniversary guitars that highlight key models in the company’s lifespan, like its OM Pre-War (which honors pre-World War II models and won an industry award in 2005) and its FTC. The latter was first introduced in 1978 and was the company’s earliest exploration beyond a traditional flat-top. Among its earliest advocates was the legendary Eric Clapton.
“Before Clapton, we were known as some of the best craftsmen,” Hoover says. He then pauses, smiles and continues with a laugh. “On the Westside of Santa Cruz. People thought, ‘What would my friends think if I didn’t buy a Martin?’ But once we made a guitar for Eric Clapton, we were OK.”
However, the crown jewel of the exhibit is the one-of-a-kind, all redwood H13 Model made exclusively for the MAH show and dedicated to the city of Santa Cruz. It’s made entirely of redwood and sycamore picked from inside the city limits. It’s an incredibly gorgeous instrument, with an amazing grain pattern throughout the body. As an added nod to the city, the headstock features a depiction of the Santa Cruz Boardwalk in mother of pearl, designed by Jimmi Wingert and the heel (where the neck meets the body) is a scrimshawed depiction of the Westside surfer statue made by Bob Hergert.
“It would’ve taken maybe a few hundred years for the redwood to tumble through the glacier boulders to finally get out to the sea,” Hoover says. “It’s an unusually wonderful-sounding piece of redwood. The guitar sounds crazy good.”
For the history buffs out there, that particular redwood tree fell long before European settlers ever set foot in the Santa Cruz area. And the sycamore? It’s noted as being at least 5,000 years old, and traveled down the San Lorenzo River when the body of water flowed through what is now downtown Santa Cruz. It was unearthed after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake at Cathcart Street and Pacific Avenue, where Gateways Bookstore once stood and is now home to Five Guys burgers.
The celebration continues on June 22, when the Kuumbwa Jazz Center and the MAH present the musical accompaniment to the museum exhibit. This night will feature an appearance by Hoover along with performances by Bay Area guitar player Vicki Randle and local folk celebrity Keith Greeninger.
The festivities don’t stop there.
On Sept. 19, SCGC will host a show at the Rio Theatre with San Francisco-based bluegrass rockers The Brothers Comatose. The show will also feature Ron Artist II, Hustle Souls and James Nash.
“I’ve always been a huge fan of these guitars,” said Brothers Comatose singer and guitar player Ben Morrison as he strummed a Santa Cruz Guitar at the company’s office and workshop. “It’s the craftsmanship. To have such cool, world-renowned instruments so close to home is amazing.”
Santa Cruz Guitar Company manager Brenda Martinez agrees.
“One of the appeals about our guitars is that each one tells a story like the musicians who play them,” she said. “And Richard’s just a badass.”
The story of Santa Cruz Guitar Company is one of handmade craftsmanship, sustainability and stewardship of the natural world. However, it is nothing without Richard Hoover. It’s apparent to anyone who is lucky enough to have the chance to speak with Hoover that he’s about as rare of a person as his guitars are. He’s thoughtful and incredibly knowledgeable. Most of his stories and explanations come with a history from his vast, encyclopedic memory to set up the context of what he’s about to say, making him a fascinating person to listen to.
Born in Hanford, California, in 1951, Hoover’s mother was a reference librarian and his father an artist who would make signs, graphics and shelves for local stores. Some of his earliest memories are of building things with his dad.
“I only have to go back one generation to when the whole economy was based on people making things for each other by hand,” he said. “So we [Santa Cruz Guitar Company] didn’t change in making a good quality and high craft product, the culture changed in buying quantity over quality and price over longevity.”
Hoover moved to Santa Cruz in 1972, brought here by his love for the Central Coast and John Steinbeck’s novels. Decades later, his love for Steinbeck would eventually bring SCGC to build a guitar made from the author’s “Sea of Cortez” boat, the Western Flyer.
In the early 1970s, when Hoover’s D28 guitar was stolen, he went to a local finance shop owned by Bruce McGuire to finance a new instrument – an Epiphone Texan.
“I told him I was trying to make my living being a professional musician and he said, ‘Oh I make guitars,’” Hoover remembers. “And I had been waiting for this forever so, I said, ‘Great, what night of the week should I come over?’”
Little did either one of them know that fateful meeting would bring about a 50-year-strong legacy.
McGuire introduced Hoover to James Patterson, and the men mentored Hoover on building guitars in the style of violins. Instead of making pieces to fit a standard mold, each piece of wood is carved and crafted to meet specific tones and sounds.
In 1976, Hoover went into business with partners Bruce Ross and Will Davis. Their very first guitar was built for friend Chip Rose, who drew up the partnership agreement. However, the three business partners couldn’t agree on a name.
“Which should’ve been an indication,” Hoover says with a smile. “Chip needed a placeholder for the title and Bruce said, ‘Why don’t you put down Santa Cruz Guitar Company?’ and that stuck.”
Over the years, Davis and Ross would walk away – the former after one and a half years and the latter after 12 – leaving the business to Hoover. Today, SCGC employs roughly 17 people at any given time, and it often makes a smaller number of guitars per year than some of the majors do. It’s an incredibly small but mighty staff for one of the biggest names in the guitar world.
The workshop warehouse holds a cornucopia of different types of wood, such as Brazilian rosewood, German spruce, Adirondack old growth and more. The company carries on a tradition of using sustainable and reclaimed wood, partnering with farmers all over the world, some of whom have been in the wood business for generations going back hundreds of years. Like the Yogi family from India.
“They don’t even know how far back their lineage [with wood] goes, but I’m in the third generation of working with them,” Hoover says, noting he started working with the grandfather originally, then the son, and now the grandson.
“They only cut from trees that are dead standing, downed or otherwise nonliving,” he continues. “Wood becomes more resonant as it gets older. So we get two benefits: We do the right thing environmentally and we get a better-sounding guitar.”
Which leads to one of the major lasting impacts SCGC has had on not only the industry, but on the culture as well. It invests in people. In addition to working with families who meet the company’s standards of stewardship and quality, Hoover has invested in a number of people over the past 50 years who have become master luthiers themselves. Or as he says with a laugh, “a lot are my fault.”
In fact, SCGC even had a school in the 1980s for people to learn the art of luthiering. People like Michael Hornick, Willie Carter, Stephen Strahm, Scott Walker, Chris Holcomb, Eric Poulsen, Jeff Traugott, and the list goes on and on.
For Hoover, this is the real legacy he wants to leave on the world: the idea that Santa Cruz Guitar Company is a vehicle for like-minded people to carry the message of environmental stewardship and responsible harvest reclamation.
“I don’t need to leave a personal legacy because I won’t care,” he laughs. “I see it as my responsibility to shepherd this thing into perpetuating the common good.”
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