Part 1 – You know nothing about mandolins. Nothing except background music that you have heard while eating a pizza in an Italian Restaurant.
Part 2 – You go to a county fair and hear David Grisman play the mandolin, for the first time in your life.
Part 3 – You go home and go to bed, and have a dream that you are playing the mandolin, just like David Grisman.
Part 4 – You still know nothing about mandolins, but the next day you get up and go to a local music store and buy a mandolin. You think it’s a pretty good one for $300 bucks, even though the big round belly of the back of the mandolin pushes hard against your own big round belly when you try to play it.
Part 5 – After a couple of weeks go by, you come to the conclusion that you need to take mandolin lessons. Lessons so you can play just like David Grisman.
Part 6 – During your first mandolin lesson your teacher tells you that your bowl-back mandolin will never do if you want to play bluegrass music and “Dawg Music” just like David Grisman.
Part 7 – The next day you go back to the same music store and trade your mandolin in for a mandolin that has a flat back, and it costs you $500 plus your trade-in mandolin. You think it’s worth it.
Part 8 – While at the aforementioned music store you buy a CD, “Tone Poems,” mandolin and guitar music by David Grisman and a guy who is a decent guitar player.
Part 9 – In the CD jacket is a booklet that shows you pictures of all kinds of different mandolins (and guitars), and provides you some information about each mandolin (and guitar). There are A models, F-4 models, and F-5 models. older mandolins and newer mandolins, and everything in between. You get a pretty good jump-start toward your education on mandolins from reading that and looking at the pictures of the mandolins.
Part 10 – You get some books, go to a lot of bluegrass festivals, get involved in beginning bluegrass jams, work your way up to intermediate jams, and finally make it to advanced bluegrass jams (this takes some time….). And along your journey you discover that the F5 model is now your mandolin of choice. You think, “Yep, that’s it. That’s the mandolin I dream of having. That’s the one for me!”
Part 11 – You go again to your local music store, trade in your flat-back mandolin, and buy an F-5 mandolin. It costs $3,000, but you think it’s worth it.
Part 12 – And as the years go by, and you get more and more exposure to the mandolin world, you now think that THE MANDOLIN to have is a Gibson F-5 Lloyd Loar signed mandolin that was made between the years 1922 to 1924. You think this because you have found out that Bill Monroe, David Grisman, Ricky Skaggs, John Reischman, Butch Waller, Chris Thile, and some lady in your last bluegrass jam have one of these mandolins (of course you liked the sound and look of her Gibson mandolin more that any other mandolin in the jam).
Part 13 – More years go by, and your playing level is such that you figure you deserve one of those Gibson mandolins signed by Lloyd Loar (The Gibson Company’s acoustic engineer from 1919 to 1924). By now you have seen and heard some of these mandolins, but for some reason you never learned how much they cost. And you learn that there are only 250 to 300 or so of these mandolins now in existence (supply and demand enters the picture). And once again you think, “Yep, that’s it. That’s the one mandolin I dream of having. That’s the one for me!”
Part 14 – And yowza! You discover that there are actually some of these mandolins for sale! But you also discover that they range in price from $100K to $250K (depending on the condition and which bluegrass luminary owned it). At this point in your mandolin journey you think it’s worth it. But you don’t have that kind of money. So you think about taking out a second mortgage on your house (because desire has now taken over the rational part of your brain). You think about doing this because you have heard stories about other mandolin players who have done this so they can own a Gibson F5 Lloyd Loar signed mandolin.
Part 15 – You tell your wife that you really, really want one of these mandolins. And not only that, you’ve found one for sale, with a price of, well, “Way up there.” Your wife says, “That’s nice. How much does it actually cost?”
Part 16 – You tell your wife the price. She slaps you, and threatens to make an appointment with a divorce lawyer.
Part 17 – You’ve finally come to the conclusion that the mandolin you have is better than you thought (even though you keep looking at the 1922-1924 Gibson mandolins for sale, while muttering to yourself, “That damn internet”). And you reach the mental milestone that there is no way you are ever going to be able to play the mandolin like David Grisman does.
And as the pharaoh said when he was burying his wife, “That about wraps it up.”
Okay, okay, I’ll admit it. The stuff I just wrote was plagiarized from a well known mandolin player who is a member of the CBA. All I really know is that right now I’m in an Italian Restaurant, eating a pizza and listening to some background music.
