My Father, Guitar Guru to the Rock Gods

In August 2000, after I was 2 years outdated, my mom put me in a maroon velvet costume and caught foam earplugs in my ears. She carried me by way of the backstage corridors of the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium—the identical venue the place, in 1964, James Brown gave one of the crucial ecstatic performances of his profession. It’s the place, in 1972, George Carlin first listed the “Seven Phrases You Can By no means Say on Tv.”My mom remembers the evening in flashes. David Crosby—walrus mustache, smiling eyes—telling jokes. Bonnie Raitt’s aura of crimson hair. Within the distance, the sound of Linda Ronstadt warming up. Sitting in a dressing room with Michael McKean and Christopher Visitor, already in costume as Spinal Faucet’s entrance males.Discover the September 2025 IssueCheck out extra from this difficulty and discover your subsequent story to learn.View MoreThat evening, the auditorium was internet hosting the Pals of Fred Walecki profit live performance. These pals included Crosby, Raitt, and Ronstadt. Additionally Jackson Browne, Graham Nash, Emmylou Harris, and Warren Zevon. Three of the 4 authentic Eagles, who on this room in 1973 had carried out their new album, Desperado, have been there too.One of many Eagles, Bernie Leadon, had helped put the occasion collectively. He had recognized Fred Walecki, my father, since they have been youngsters, when Leadon began coming into Westwood Music, Dad’s musical-instrument store in Los Angeles.Dad had just lately been recognized with Stage 4 throat most cancers and had undergone an entire laryngectomy. Surgeons eliminated his vocal cords and created a gap in his throat that he used to breathe; to talk, he pressed an digital buzzer in opposition to the aspect of his neck. If folks gawked at him, he’d joke that everybody on his dwelling planet gave the impression of this.When Leadon had realized that my father was sick, he referred to as Glyn Johns, one other of Dad’s shut pals and a groomsman at my dad and mom’ marriage ceremony. Johns is the English sound engineer and producer who labored with just about each main rock band of the ’60s and ’70s—the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Who, the Eagles. He and Leadon suspected that my household was struggling to pay Dad’s medical payments, so that they contacted his different pals and requested in the event that they’d play a profit live performance for him. Everybody stated sure. Dad’s classmate from Emerson Junior Excessive College, Jeff Bridges, who’d just lately starred as “The Dude” in The Large Lebowski, could be the night’s emcee.I want I had been sufficiently old to recollect this evening of thank-yous to my father. He was 51 after I was born; I’ve solely recognized Dad with grey hair, and I’ve no reminiscence of his authentic voice. However Browne remembers my father’s impeccable Jimmy Stewart impersonations; he remembers Dad because the man who turned him on to Gibson guitars. On the live performance, he carried out “My Opening Farewell” on a guitar that had been assembled at Westwood Music. Dad had spent hours sharpening it to offer it the wealthy hue Browne needed.Crosby considered my dad as his “guitar guru,” and like most of the performers that evening, he praised my father for his friendship. “Fred’s helped lots of people once they actually wanted it. Actually wanted it,” he stated. He and Nash then performed their music “Déjà Vu.”Nancy Walecki: The home the place 28,000 data burnedBefore the evening might get too sentimental, Spinal Faucet—who claimed that Dad had been the primary individual within the music enterprise to ask them, Do it’s a must to play so goddamn loud?—took the stage and gave an enthusiastic rendition of “Large Backside.” I’m informed I fell asleep someday earlier than the Byrds reunited.After the live performance, Rolling Stone declared that Fred Walecki had been “chargeable for an evening of music historical past,” regardless that his title “won’t imply a lot, if something in any respect, to music followers.” However my father has been there for the reason that Sixties—doing his work in order that a few of America’s best artists can do theirs.I. The StoreDad by no means needed to enter the household enterprise, and his father, Hermann, didn’t need him to both. Hermann opened Westwood Music, a classical-instrument store, in 1947, the 12 months after Dad was born. However whilst he taught my father to use skinny layers of shellac to picket devices till they have been as reflective as nonetheless water, he’d say, This life is simply too small for you.Perhaps as a result of no Walecki earlier than him had lived a small life. Dad’s grandfather had been a cabinetmaker by day and a socialist revolutionary by evening. His opera-singer aunt was the buxom blonde on The Three Stooges, and his sister, Christine—referred to as the Goddess of the Cello—was the primary American musician to carry a live performance in Castro’s Cuba. Dad’s brother, the one member of the family who wasn’t within the music trade, was one of many engineers behind the quickest jet-propelled plane on the planet. Then there was Hermann, who spoke 5 languages, had a photographic reminiscence, and was a world-renowned skilled on and supplier of uncommon classical string devices. As a younger man, he’d skilled to be a priest earlier than getting recruited to play hockey for the Chicago Blackhawks.Hermann Walecki, who based Westwood Music, circa 1934 (Courtesy of Nancy Walecki)However as I might half a century later, Dad grew up in Westwood Music. He liked it as I might; he memorized its scent of outdated wooden and lacquer. When clients got here in to have their violin bows rehaired, they’d sit beside Hermann and confess their issues whereas he labored. Hermann, nonetheless a religious Catholic who prayed on his knees each evening, would pay attention, nod, and sometimes supply religious recommendation. The Walecki tract dwelling close by was adorned with harps and baroque devices, and served as an artist’s salon of types: For a summer time, the harpist Marcel Grandjany gave grasp lessons in the lounge and slept within the further twin mattress in Dad’s room. When my father was born, his dad and mom obtained a year-long diaper service as a present from their buddy Harpo—whom Hermann knew extra as a harp participant than a Marx Brother.Dad began engaged on Westwood Music’s gross sales flooring in grade college. As soon as, he bragged to his father that he’d persuaded a person to purchase dearer strings than his low-cost guitar required. Hermann made Dad chase the man to his bus cease together with his change and the strings he really wanted and will afford. When Dad was 12, he ran the store whereas his dad and mom traveled to Europe to search out uncommon devices. Bought $123 price right now, he reported in a letter to his dad and mom, and added that he’d beforehand offered a piano, 9 flutes, and a $350 drum set, and talked a guitar scholar into shopping for a banjo and studying that, too. As an adolescent, he began a guitar-polish enterprise, mixing his concoction within the storage with an eggbeater and a espresso percolator from Goodwill.Westwood Music again then was a mix of old-world craftsman’s studio and museum. By the entrance door: a grandfather clock constructed by Hermann’s woodworker father. On the gross sales flooring: trumpets displayed in vintage jewellery instances, high-quality violins in velvet-lined cubbies. On the wall: violas da gamba (baroque cousin of the cello), violas d’amore (baroque cousin of the violin), an oil portray of Christine taking part in the cello as a baby, a uncommon oud constructed when Istanbul was nonetheless Constantinople. And in a body above the gross sales counter was one in every of Hermann’s favourite quotes, attributed to Goethe:A person ought to hear slightly music, learn slightly poetry, and see a high-quality image day-after-day of his life, so that worldly cares might not obliterate the sense of the attractive which God has implanted within the human soul.The shop was the exact opposite of Ledbetter’s, the people membership that opened subsequent door within the Sixties. Its concept of decor was placing a classic Dodge truck on the roof. On its stage, in opposition to a brick wall, the then-unknown Steve Martin did his banjo-and-comedy routine and Henry John Deutschendorf Jr. gave one in every of his first performances in L.A. It was the proprietor of Ledbetter’s who steered that Deutschendorf wanted a stage title, which is how he turned John Denver.Chris Hillman, later of the Byrds, purchased mandolin strings from Hermann when he was taking part in in what he described to me as a “horrible fake bluegrass band” for $100 per week at Ledbetter’s. Sixteen-year-old Bernie Leadon was on the town to see Hillman rehearse when he noticed a Nationwide Tricone guitar within the window of Westwood Music. (These guitars, which have our bodies product of steel, appear like they belong to very hip aliens, however are a favourite of blues musicians.) My dad, additionally an adolescent, was behind the counter, and Leadon thought he regarded like a complete prep: oxford shirt buttoned on the cuffs, costume slacks, penny loafers, brown hair neatly coifed. Leadon didn’t purchase the guitar (he couldn’t afford it), however Westwood Music had made an impression.Dad needed to welcome the Ledbetter’s crowd drifting in and informed Hermann that folks and rock have been going to be large. However Hermann was hesitant about including “that ingredient,” as he referred to as it, to the shop whereas nonetheless accommodating violin patrons with white hair and season tickets to the symphony. He allowed Dad the Nationwide Tricone and a few acoustic and electrical guitars if he largely tucked them away in a little-used music-lesson room. Dad paid Hermann hire for the house and furnished his mini guitar salon with an vintage clock and desk in order that, he informed me, “it regarded form of groovy.”From the Could 2025 difficulty: Ringo Starr nonetheless believes in peace and loveDad ran Westwood Music alongside his father, with no designs to take it over. However then Hermann bought lung most cancers. Quickly, suppliers have been calling, asking why Westwood Music was so late on cost. Eighteen-year-old Dad informed them that Hermann was on an prolonged journey to Europe. He ran the store solo, and at evening, he repaired devices for more money. He’d take money straight out of the register to pay his father’s dwelling nurses. The most cancers unfold to Hermann’s mind, and he died in 1967, when Dad was 20. Westwood Music was now his to run alone.When he’d open the store within the morning, Dad had no bother with the lock on the prime of the door. However when he’d bend right down to undo the latch on the backside, he’d get hit with a wave of nausea. The neon signal above the door nonetheless stated Westwood Musical Devices—Hermann Walecki, however the decal on the window now learn Hermann Walecki & Son. He requested himself, How do you’re taking your father’s place? At some point, a tour bus pulled up in entrance of the shop and out walked the nation singer Merle Haggard. He was a real-life outlaw who’d performed time in San Quentin and a pacesetter of the “Bakersfield Sound,” gritty country-western music that sounded nothing just like the overproduced schmaltz Nashville was promoting within the ’60s. “I’m right here to get a very good violin,” he stated. Dad took him to Hermann’s secure and introduced out a centuries-old Carlo Antonio Testore. “Can you place metal strings on that?” Haggard requested. Hermann would have thought the request blasphemous, however Dad obliged. The violin went for $16,000; this one sale would cowl a lot of the household’s remaining medical debt. Haggard was fiddling on the brand new strings when Marian, Dad’s mom, who’d taken over as the shop’s bookkeeper, walked by.“It feels like that violin has metal strings on it,” she stated. An achieved classical violinist and wool-skirt girl of the old fashioned, she was scandalized. However then Dad informed her that Haggard was going to purchase it. “It sounds marvelous,” she stated.Each time he offered one in every of his father’s violins, Dad would reinvest in new stock—handmade guitars by the Spanish luthier José Ramírez; Traynor amps imported from Canada; and, for musicians who needed their very own sound system, Lamb Laboratories mixing boards from England (as a result of Dad discovered that if he adjusted the board’s settings excellent, it might “get you a very good Rolling Stones sound stay”). Martin guitars, a favourite of folks musicians, had solely a handful of licensed retailers in Los Angeles; Dad was one in every of them. As musicians began touring increasingly more by airplane, he discovered a person named Mark Leaf, who constructed fiberglass guitar instances on his kitchen desk in Virginia. Dad informed Leadon {that a} guitar in that case might fall onto an airplane tarmac with no scratch. (Leadon later realized this to be true.)Dad would inventory something that delighted him—folks, rock, or in any other case. Dolmetsch, an organization in England, made “the last word baroque recorders,” in his opinion, so he carried a full line of them. “If one other music retailer offered it, then overlook it, you understand? But when it was one of the best and the best, then I might get it,” he stated. He remembers a younger man wearing denims and a go well with jacket coming into the store sooner or later and attempting out the recorders. He’d take one out of the show case, play it, then slip it in his suit-jacket pocket earlier than returning it. Time and again: out of the case, within the pocket, again within the case.“Hey, man,” Dad stated, and requested what the man was doing.“I needed to see how comfy it’s, as a result of I need to use it as slightly touring instrument,” Jackson Browne replied.I met Browne at his recording studio in Los Angeles final summer time. One of many first issues he stated to me was “You’re tall!” The final time we’d seen one another, I used to be 3 ft and nonetheless struggling to pronounce my r’s. He confirmed me his studio of classic recording tools and the ailing sunflower seedlings he was attempting to develop on the windowsill for his grandson. “You will come again,” he informed the slouching shoots. “Sorry I let this occur once more.” We sat at a desk within the studio’s kitchen whereas he made us a pot of espresso.Browne has no concept what his youthful self needed to do with that recorder. “That was fairly harebrained,” he stated. “I didn’t actually be taught to play recorder in any respect.” However again then, music was “the coin of the realm. The songs you might play or what you might do on a guitar was a form of introduction to folks and pals.” At little golf equipment like Ledbetter’s, musicians might pay attention to at least one one other and ask, How do you do this?All of them have been so younger. Browne was solely 18 when he wrote “A Youngster in These Hills.” Linda Ronstadt was the identical age when she moved from Tucson, Arizona, to Los Angeles. Crosby and Hillman have been of their early 20s when, in 1965, the Byrds basically launched the folk-rock style with their cowl of “Mr. Tambourine Man.” By 1970, Hillman and Leadon had fused nation and rock collectively within the Flying Burrito Brothers. (Their pedal-steel participant used Jimi Hendrix–esque fuzz distortion and was additionally an animator for The Gumby Present. His title was Sneaky Pete.)Dad’s retailer had change into a part of a scene that was reshaping American standard music. However Dad was nonetheless attempting to run a store appropriate for his father’s remaining violin clientele. Leadon took him apart. “Fred, you don’t want to decorate like that, sporting a tie and white shirt and slacks,” he stated. “These folks that you just’re dressing for will not be those which might be bringing in cash. We’re.” So Dad stored his father’s outdated devices on the wall, his grandfather’s clock by the door, and the Goethe quote above the gross sales counter, however he positioned his Martin guitars on stadium bleachers within the entrance window and began sporting Levi’s like the remainder of them.II. The ToolsIn one in every of my favourite images of my father, he stands behind the counter of Westwood Music. A lute, a violin, and a couple of dozen guitars hold on the wall behind him, and the counter and cupboards overflow with papers. In his Levi’s and Waylon Jennings T-shirt, he’s now the king of cool. After which there’s his smile—the one I inherited—which takes up half his face. He appears at whoever is on the opposite aspect of the counter as if they’re the middle of his world.Dad, in Levi’s and a Waylon Jennings T-shirt, behind the counter of Westwood Music (Courtesy of Nancy Walecki)“Individuals would are available and it was growth, that floodgate of tales would open,” Christopher Visitor informed me. Perhaps Dad would launch into the one the place he discovered himself in a Las Vegas greenroom with Elvis and girls he took for “girls of the evening,” as he put it; or the time he dropped off a 12-string guitar at a recording session for Crosby, together with some regifted weed from a member of Ricky Nelson’s street crew, who’d cautioned that it was “one-hit dope.” The recording engineer referred to as the subsequent day to say they’d all ignored the warning, and when he drove dwelling afterward, he couldn’t imagine how lengthy it was taking to get to his home, just a few neighborhoods over. Then he noticed the signal: Welcome to San Diego. Dad would observe clients to their automobile, simply to complete a narrative.My father was a reliable musician, although by no means thought of doing it professionally. He realized some songs, together with Browne’s “My Opening Farewell,” so he might present clients totally different points of a guitar’s tone. “He at all times actually favored to point out me that he might play it, which I felt very honored by, you understand?” Browne stated. “And that goes proper together with him pulling out a guitar and saying, ‘I’ve to point out you one thing. Test this out.’ And he would present you what invariably could be an exceptional guitar.”Test this out : the three-word portal into the Fred Walecki Expertise. Test this out, and he’d hand John Entwistle his first-ever Alembic bass, a model he would go on to make use of for a few years with the Who. Test this out, and he’d pull out a guitar by Mark Whitebook or David Russell Younger, luthiers he’d found within the mountains of Topanga Canyon, and whose devices he offered to James Taylor and Gram Parsons. Glyn Johns purchased a David Russell Younger so he’d have a superb acoustic guitar for the rock bands he labored with. (Johns confirmed me that guitar after I visited him at dwelling final fall; he apologized for all of the scratch marks. “Everyone’s performed this,” he stated. “Eric has performed it; Jeff Beck’s performed it; Jimmy Web page has performed it.”)Visitor does an imitation of my father rummaging round in his store for the merchandise he wants you to see. Wait, what’s this factor? he’ll say, as he finds some treasure. My dad has been doing this for so long as I can bear in mind. It was simply over right here [Dad lifts up a touring case, printed with B.D., from a Bob Dylan tour]. Perhaps it’s beneath [peers behind a platinum record the Eagles gave him for One of These Nights]. I believe it’s simply [moves aside a priceless Spanish guitar by the 19th-century luthier Antonio de Torres Jurado]. Oh, right here! The enjoyment for my father is in watching different folks verify this out. This is the reason when he appears at me with pure pleasure and asks me to attempt the soup he has comprised of three various kinds of Progresso, I settle for the spoon from him.I’ve tried to get my father to wax poetic concerning the music that his clients have been making within the ’60s and ’70s. He was there for the start of what’s typically referred to as the California Sound, a mix of nation, bluegrass, folks, and rock that’s completely distinctive and practically unimaginable to categorize. Learn how to include the Seaside Boys and the Byrds, the Doorways and the Mamas & the Papas, Bonnie Raitt and Joni Mitchell? Gram Parsons referred to as his personal sound Cosmic American Music, and perhaps that’s a greater time period for the complete Los Angeles scene. The music, he stated, would unite “longhairs, shorthairs, folks with overalls, folks with their velvet gear on.” Cosmic American Music, no less than, captures the motion’s religious aspirations, whereas gesturing to the gap between its stars.The Eagles. Don Felder is within the Westwood Music T-shirt. (Revealed within the Sydney Morning Herald)No matter you name it, this music outlined an period, and it has caught round since. On street journeys, my pals and I, all beneath the age of 30, nonetheless roll down the home windows and blast the Eagles. We act like Joni Mitchell wrote Blue only for us. I’ve requested my father to elucidate it to me, to supply a idea for why there, why then. How did a lot good music come out of 1 place?However he simply shrugs. “I’m extra of a jazz man,” he says. That is true. My complete childhood, our automobile radio was beneath the tyranny of KJAZZ 88.1. His heroes are Bola Sete, Kenny Burrell, Johnny Smith, and Baden Powell. If I need to speak concerning the California Sound, he tells me, I ought to ask his pals who really made it. So I introduced the query to Browne, the bard of ’70s Los Angeles. What do you suppose did it?“It was the guitars,” he stated. “Anyone will let you know it’s the devices.” He smiled and we each laughed. However then Browne stopped himself, thought-about. “I’m joking after I say it’s the guitars. However I’m additionally critical.”Every instrument accommodates unwritten melodies and lyrics, he stated. “They’ve personalities, and they’re going to converse to you with these personalities.” (Dad likes to say that devices have their very own little souls.) Browne stated, “Particularly for a author, you’ll get to play stuff that may unlock a method of taking part in, or a music that’s in that guitar that you just won’t write on one other.”Chris Hillman described Westwood Music to me as “the ironmongery shop” of the L.A. music scene. Visitor had a extra romantic metaphor: Dad, he stated, “was like a matchmaker,” a conduit between the human soul and the instrumental one. The place different salesmen may simply let you know the worth of a guitar, with my father, “it was about going a lot additional than that and pondering, I’m listening to you play, and it feels like this is perhaps a superb guitar for you.”When Joe Walsh introduced in his Gibson J-200 to promote, Dad referred to as up Emmylou Harris straight away. “You’ll want to have this guitar,” she remembers him telling her. It had that heat nation sound he knew she’d like. “You play an A chord and it’s identical to, pwah! ” Harris informed me, miming fireworks. J-200s have been her signature guitar ever since. She added, “I type of turned the unofficial Gibson Woman.”Early in her profession, Bonnie Raitt was taking part in in little golf equipment and “wasn’t even anticipating to do that for a dwelling. It was form of a passion for me,” she informed me. However Dad, she says, “confirmed me round and confirmed me the entire world of issues that I might have.” He defined how totally different amplifiers might change her sound, and he took her to a commerce present the place he launched her to the genteel, moderately historic chairman of Martin Guitar, C. F. Martin III.Raitt has a mischievous, bawdy humorousness. (As a child, I understood I used to be by no means to repeat a Bonnie Raitt joke.) Dad informed C. F. Martin that Raitt was a rising star and could also be in want of a custom-made guitar. “What I really want is a custom-made IUD,” she stated. Martin had no concept what she was speaking about, so Dad jumped in: “Uh, it’s so much like a Martin D-35.”None of this might occur now. At present’s musicians don’t want Fred Walecki to name them up a couple of J-200 or dealer a deal for a bespoke Martin. Like skilled athletes, they’ve sponsorship offers and may get their tools totally free. However Dad “made it his enterprise to know the most recent on each single enchancment of each keyboard, each amp, and each guitar,” Raitt stated. “It’s not one thing I take with no consideration. We have been all extremely fortunate to have somebody on our aspect that had a lot integrity.”Dad by no means forgot having to chase down the person he’d upsold on fancy guitar strings; as soon as the shop was his, he stored costs cheap—if something, he charged too little. Warren Zevon as soon as noticed an vintage harmonium in Westwood Music and requested Dad how a lot he needed for it. “Fifty bucks,” he stated. “Or nothing! Take your choose!” Zevon used to name them “Freddie’s Zen Costs.”My father turned an angel investor of types. When the long run Eagle Don Felder first got here to L.A., he wanted to be taught mandolin for an audition, so Dad loaned him one. As Felder writes in his memoir, my father informed him to take it “when you have an opportunity for a job,” and wished him luck. He bought the gig. The Eagles landed their first tour earlier than they’d the cash to purchase all the required tools. Dad gave them a cost account.III. The SceneAs ordinary, I’m staying within the Blue Room, named for its cerulean rug and robin’s-egg partitions. And as ordinary, after I come down the staircase, Linda Ronstadt is in her favourite armchair.Her San Francisco front room looks like the within of an Impressionist portray: pastel-hued, delicate on the edges. It smells of minimize flowers and the black tea she prefers to espresso. An icon of Our Girl of Guadalupe retains watch from the mantel; a portray of her cat sporting a crown overlooks her cabinets and cabinets of books. Outdoors within the backyard, fog cradles the roses she introduced along with her from one in every of her grandfather’s ranches within the San Gabriel Valley.She has recognized me since I used to be born, when my dad and mom have been nonetheless attempting to make my double title, Nancy Kathryn, catch on. Once I started singing as a baby, Linda launched me to Brian Wilson’s harmonies and Maria Callas’s vocal placement, and, unbeknownst to me, paid for my classes. Each time I go to, we discuss books (most just lately, Anna Karenina) and boys (I speak, she listens). We watch TV and go to mattress early. I’m simply Nancy now to most individuals, however to Linda, I’m nonetheless Nancy Kathryn.She has recognized my father for the reason that Sixties, when she began coming to his store because the lead singer within the considerably bumbling folk-rock group the Stone Poneys. In a feeble try and sound like a rock band, they purchased electrical pickups for his or her acoustic guitars. Dad, she recalled, “gave us the identical consideration he gave to the Byrds.”The 2 turned pals, and whether or not she was searching for a brand new guitar or simply some firm, “he at all times confirmed up when he was wanted. And he was at all times wanted.” Within the late ’70s, a strong storm hit Malibu, washing away the glass-enclosed tearoom hooked up to Linda’s home. Dad arrived with sandbags, quick-dry cement, and a stockpile of Mexican meals from Lucy’s El Adobe. Years later, he was the one who drove her dwelling to Tucson after her breakup with George Lucas.When Linda photos Westwood Music, she thinks of an outdated line she loves: “Music is a conspiracy to commit magnificence.” Somebody was at all times fingerpicking, an electrical guitar was at all times buzzing—musicians have been at all times conspiring.Jackson Browne, Glyn Johns, and Dad outdoors the shop (Courtesy of Nancy Walecki)Individuals didn’t essentially come to purchase one thing. Westwood Music was a daytime clubhouse of the L.A. scene, Bernie Leadon stated. Emmylou Harris referred to as it “the watering gap.”It “was a spot the place folks noticed folks, made friendships, made connections, and it was all by way of your dad,” Harris informed me. “He simply put out that vibe—that sense of it was at all times about music, the musicians.”This was an analog world, a world during which serendipity was nonetheless attainable. “Typically you’d go in and also you’d see Jackson or Ry Cooder and all these totally different people who have been hanging on the market, and all of the sudden it might flip into half a day, and also you’d go within the again room and you might simply type of sit and jam collectively,” Leland Sklar, a bass participant who has backed artists together with Linda, Browne, and James Taylor, informed me. Artists would catch up, discuss what they have been engaged on, after which head off to their respective recording periods, perhaps on the Complicated or Village Recorders close by. Cooder, a slide-guitar virtuoso, would convey a six-pack and jam. Joni Mitchell popped by for pizza. Even Neil Younger, referred to as one thing of a hermit, stopped in.The shop got here with a bemused den mom, Marian, recognized to all as “Mrs. Walecki.” She’d do the shop’s payroll whereas musicians within the adjoining guitar room tried out new devices by taking part in “Stairway to Heaven.” (It was at all times “Stairway to Heaven.”) One time, Mick Taylor, the bony, long-haired guitarist for the Rolling Stones, requested Marian the place the john was. That relies upon, she stated, with whole sincerity. “Are you a boy or woman?”Mark Bookin, the shop’s senior salesman for many years, described Dad because the “grasp of ceremonies” at every day’s gathering. However Dad says he considered himself extra as the shop’s maître-d’hôtel. Let me sit so-and-so right here, close to the producer from Asylum Data, he’d suppose. Or: These two guitar gamers may sound good collectively; let me introduce them. He linked Linda and Johns as a result of he thought they may make a superb document, and shortly after, they did—We Ran. “Music-store house owners don’t do this,” Johns informed me.My father and his retailer, Visitor stated, “accelerated the whole lot. It made the whole lot higher, as a result of it offered a second dwelling and a spot the place folks might really feel appreciated, and that’s an enormous factor.” Once I requested Dad what time Westwood Music would shut at evening, he shook his head. It closed when its crowd wandered elsewhere—normally to the Troubadour, a West Hollywood membership and the scene’s nighttime nexus. Dad remembers leaning in opposition to the bar and operating by way of his superstar impersonations: Jimmy Stewart, John Wayne, Kirk Douglas. “You understand, actually humorous shit,” Browne stated. Dad needed to stand up early the subsequent morning to run a enterprise, whereas the remainder of them slept in. However Ned Doheny, a singer-songwriter and Browne’s former musical associate, stated, “He was as a lot part of that scene as anyone who ever made a document throughout that time frame.”By the mid-’70s, “it was all taking place,” Dad says. The Eagles and Jackson Browne have been taking part in arenas world wide. Linda would rush dwelling from one string of concert events, dump out the contents of her suitcase, pack for a wholly totally different local weather, and head out on the street once more. Dad offered her a conveyable, battery-powered Pignose amplifier, concerning the measurement of a lunch field, that she and her band might use for jamming between gigs. He despatched the Seaside Boys instances of Ricola cough drops to protect their voices on tour.Learn: Brian Wilson’s world of soundAs his pals’ music moved deeper and deeper into rock, Dad phased out his remaining pure-folk stock—ceding the folkies to a music retailer he’d been competing with close by. Not lengthy after, a roadie for the Rolling Stones referred to as and requested Dad if he might come to a Warner Bros. soundstage, the place they have been recording. Keith Richards needed a guitar with a B-string bender—a tool that musicians put inside their guitars to emulate the sound of a pedal metal. Dad’s automobile was within the store, so he hopped in his mom’s station wagon. When he bought there, he talked about that he was going to see the blues duo Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee on the Ash Grove, and requested if the Stones needed to return. They piled into Marian’s station wagon. Once they walked into the membership, Dad noticed that the opposite music retailer had arrange a kiosk inside. “And right here I include the Rolling Stones,” Dad says, with that smile that takes up half his face.IV. The ConfidantHow do I describe my father, a person who, if he might, would crawl out of those pages and meet you himself? In my head, he comes together with his personal theme music—a rollicking kazoo melody with a boogie-woogie bass line. If he finds himself round somebody he feels is taking themselves too critically, he’ll hover his finger about one inch from their face and singsong, I’m not touching you! till they’re disarmed into being nothing however themselves. When confronted with adversity, he’ll say, God’s not on a espresso break. And if presenting a plan, work-around, or detour that may encourage the concern of demise in his companion however finally be lots of enjoyable: Let me present you a cheatsy method to try this.Dad was by no means one to say no to an journey. Through the years, he went snowboarding with the band Poco and tuna-fishing with the Doorways. Wix Wickens, the keyboardist for Paul McCartney, refused to affix my father on his frequent journeys to Mexico, as a result of, “it being your dad, jaunts would flip into escapades would flip into incidents.”It was on one such journey that he met my mom, who was sitting on the subsequent desk at a seafood restaurant. She was a Stanford grad and a celebrated Western-style horseback rider who had grown up on a Nevada cattle ranch about 100 miles from the closest fuel station. He was a really loud man sporting a hat that resembled a marlin. It had a fin.Fred Walecki “incidents” weren’t essentially fueled by medicine or debauchery. (Dad informed me he smoked weed solely between 1977 and 1979. He bought it totally free from Crosby’s supplier.) As a substitute, his adventures have been impressed by what Wickens described as my father’s “benign chaos.” Dad’s coverage: “If it appeared to me {that a} good individual wouldn’t maintain it in opposition to me, I might do it.”Jimmy Buffett as soon as referred to as and stated he’d been supplied a last-minute stadium gig. He requested if Dad might replicate his band’s complete stage setup—together with the congas—in document time. Buffett’s field truck couldn’t match all of the tools, so that they loaded up Dad’s station wagon with gear and strapped the congas to the roof. They paused lengthy sufficient to color Freddy and the Fishsticks World Tour ’81 on the aspect.Individuals flip to folklore to explain my father: He’s the Pied Piper, the maven, or, as Ned Doheny calls him, the trickster—a mischievous entity who “tracks pollen in every single place, and all types of issues occur.”A publicity photograph for Linda Ronstadt’s album Easy Goals. Sunburn courtesy of Dad. (Alamy)At some point in 1977, he confirmed up at Linda’s home in Malibu with some recent fruit and a few wonderful marijuana. Lulled by the robust weed, the solar, and my father, Linda stayed outdoors too lengthy and bought horribly sunburned. The subsequent day, she needed to take publicity photographs for her album Easy Goals. Within the iconic shot of Linda (her ex George Lucas’s favourite, she says), she appears over her left shoulder, lips parted, a white flower in her hair—however each time she appears on the photograph, she sees the sunburn she bought with Dad. My father and his pollen.However then there’s my father, quiet, beamed again right down to Earth. Once I was 18, I bought a foul concussion that took me out of school for my first semester. My physician didn’t need me to fly dwelling for some time, so I referred to as Dad one evening from the opposite aspect of the nation, panicked that my mind would by no means return to regular. “What are you proper now?” he requested. Pine timber, I stated. Some shrubs. I’m sitting on a bench outdoors. “What’s the temperature like the place you’re?” It’s good. Cool however not chilly. It was early fall within the Northeast, a brand new sensation for a Californian. “What does the air scent like?” Wooden chips. “I do know it’s arduous, however your solely job proper now’s to remain on this second and never future-trip. On this second proper now, the one God is providing you with, the air smells good, the temperature is sweet, you’re someplace stunning.” We stored speaking and he slowly untangled issues that, earlier than I referred to as, had felt insurmountable. He signed off that evening, as he normally does, by saying not I like you, however I’m loving you—love, energetic.I do know now that he had dozens of conversations like this, with dozens of musicians, many years earlier than he turned a father.Anybody “can really feel just like the stowaway within the trunk of a terrific enterprise,” Browne informed me. However an artist, perhaps particularly, wants somebody who makes them imagine that they’re worthy, that it’s all going to be okay, Mac McAnally, a singer-songwriter and longtime member of Jimmy Buffett’s band, informed me. “Fred could make you imagine it’s going to be okay.”Freddy and the Fishsticks on the street, 1981 (Courtesy of Nancy Walecki)Joni Mitchell stopped touring within the Nineteen Eighties, and within the ’90s informed Dad she was going to do her last-ever public efficiency, on the 1995 New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Pageant. Her songbook incorporates about 50 totally different tunings. “I’d tune to the numbers in a date, I’d tune to a chunk of music that I favored on the radio, I’d tune to birdsongs and the panorama I used to be sitting in,” she stated in a 1996 interview. “I’d work out these fantastic recent harmonic actions, solely it was a ache within the butt to carry out and I felt like I used to be at all times out of tune.” She didn’t need to do it anymore.However Dad informed her he might need simply the suitable instrument: Roland’s new VG-8, which might electronically alter a guitar’s sonic output and, crucially, memorize tunings. Mitchell might maintain her guitar in commonplace tuning, then push a button for “Large Yellow Taxi,” say, and the VG-8 would convert the sound of every string to match that tuning. Dad knew Mitchell had had polio as a baby and nonetheless suffered from muscle weak spot, so he constructed her a guitar from light-weight spruce (generally utilized in violin making) and positioned the VG-8 inside. He painted the guitar his favourite shade, British racing inexperienced. She named it “Inexperienced Peace.”What she thought could be her swan music “changed into the primary efficiency in a complete new interval,” she stated in that 1996 interview. She used the VG-8 to make the guitar sounds on Taming the Tiger, giving her “entry to all types of potentialities in step with the best way I hear guitar, which is sort of a full orchestra, with the treble like a brass part and the decrease strings just like the viola, cello, and bass.” To a different reporter, she stated, “This instrument goes to be my savior.” She used my father’s title in one of many album’s lyrics—she calls him “Freddie”—and, within the liner notes, thanked him for “rekindling my want to make music.”From the November 2017 difficulty: The unknowable Joni MitchellDad has at all times been “genuinely occupied with folks,” Linda informed me in her front room. “And once they got here in, he’d speak to them, and so they confided in him.”I leaned in, prepared for a flood of rock secrets and techniques. “What would they open up to him about?”“Properly, I don’t know! He stored it secret.” She smiled. “He stored my stuff secret. However he at all times knew the undercurrents that have been happening and band dynamics and stuff like that.”And if vital, “he’d inform them once they have been stuffed with shit. He had no reservations about that,” Bookin, the shop’s longtime salesman, stated. As soon as, at a recording session, Crosby performed Dad a vocal observe he’d simply minimize and was clearly happy with. “Your voice is nice, however have been you studying it?” Dad requested. Unmemorized lyrics are the peak of laziness, in my father’s eyes.“Oh fuck you,” Crosby stated. (The 2 remained good pals till Crosby’s demise.)My father has a low tolerance for what he perceives as stupidity, and over time, drug use within the L.A. music scene bought stupider and stupider. To listen to my father and his pals discuss it, the period will be divided into B.C. and A.C.: Earlier than Cocaine and After Cocaine. When Weed Man confirmed up on the social gathering, that may very well be enjoyable. Mushroom Man, too. Even Acid Man. However when Cocaine Man began coming to events, Dad stated, he drained the scene of its remaining innocence. The music bought self-indulgent. Individuals would speak over each other and suppose they have been having a dialog.Doing a line with somebody “was like having a cup of espresso” with them, Mickey Raphael, Willie Nelson’s harmonica participant, informed me. It took everybody some time to note the scene darkening. In June 1979, Dad’s buddy Lowell George, of the band Little Feat, died of an overdose. Dad was an Eagle Scout by the scene’s requirements, however he realized that “we couldn’t maintain going at this tempo” and bought sober that August. “He was one of many first folks I knew to actually get sober and simply draw the road,” Browne stated. “The remainder of us, it was years earlier than anyone determined that was the issue.”Dad nonetheless went to all of the events; he simply introduced IBC root beer to drink. As soon as, at a gathering at Crosby’s home, he was being so loud, so boisterous, cracking such terrible jokes, that one other social gathering visitor, Neil Younger’s producer and recording engineer Niko Bolas, assumed he was excessive on some new drug all of them wanted to attempt. Raphael stated that Dad’s specific model of abstinence “turned slightly mild on with all of us, saying, Hmm, if Fred can do it, then perhaps I can.” You may be clear and “nonetheless in a position to hold with the musos.” Dad would assist heroin addicts detox on the little nation dwelling he and his father constructed collectively within the Nineteen Fifties, and began a weekly gathering of the alcoholics he mentored, who nicknamed it “The Gol Darn Dingy Deal,” after my father’s catchphrase when dealing with a setback. (“What’s the gol darn dingy deal?” he’ll ask when, say, the automobile doesn’t begin.)In 1986, when Crosby was out of jail on drug prices and newly sober, Dad joined him on a white-water-rafting journey. That trip, Crosby’s spouse, Jan Dance Crosby, informed me, was “actually the primary time we really did one thing for enjoyable after working so arduous to get sober.” Dad was proof that life didn’t finish—certainly, might change into extra joyful—after sobriety. “He wasn’t shy about sharing that pleasure, and he additionally wasn’t preachy,” she stated. “All he was was a buddy.”A photograph I took on the Newport People Pageant in 2022, proper earlier than Joni Mitchell took the stage. Dad is holding Inexperienced Peace, the guitar he made for her. (Courtesy of Nancy Walecki)Dad turned a Christian round that point. This, too, began within the store. When Larry Myers, a musician and pastor, got here to Los Angeles, somebody informed him that if he needed to fulfill folks, he needed to go to Westwood Music and meet my father. The 2 turned pleasant, and Myers invited Dad to listen to his band on the Winery Church. At present Winery is a global physique of church buildings, however on the time one in every of its solely chapters met in Dad’s outdated junior highschool. Members of Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue made up the worship band; Myers had helped convey Dylan himself to Christ. As Dad listened to the band play that Sunday, “I noticed I had tears in my eyes,” he recalled. “I noticed that I actually at all times—I at all times liked God, and it was time to make pals” with him.When my dad and mom met, in 1990, Dad bragged that he was constructing an off-the-grid dwelling in Topanga Canyon, within the mountains outdoors L.A. My mother, Kathy, made it clear, in her quiet method, that she knew much more about off-the-grid dwelling than he did. Collectively, they completed the house the place I used to be raised, surrounded by sage and overlooking the Pacific. When the solar energy inevitably went out, Mother would placed on a headlamp and begin the generator; when our water strain dropped, she’d go outdoors and bang on the pipe with a rock; when rattlesnakes got here into the home, she’d maintain it. She created the situations for Dad to proceed doing his work. He purchased a Nineteen Seventies GMC motor dwelling on eBay (shag carpets, corduroy seats), which turned a visitor room for household, pals, wandering souls, and the addicts he mentored. Mother organized a household journey to Ohio to drive it dwelling. At one level, she held the damaged door closed with a chunk of rope so it wouldn’t fly open on the freeway.All through my childhood, and to at the present time, Dad recurrently reads his favourite e-book, The Biggest Factor within the World, a pocket-size theological meditation on love as outlined in First Corinthians. It was his father’s favourite too. And now it’s mine. The part a couple of love that “thinketh no evil” jogs my memory of my father:Love “thinketh no evil,” imputes no motive, sees the intense aspect, places one of the best building on each motion. What a pleasant mind-set to stay in! What a stimulus and benediction even to fulfill with for a day! To be trusted is to be saved. And if we attempt to affect or elevate others, we will quickly see that success is in proportion to their perception of our perception in them. For the respect of one other is the primary restoration of the self-respect a person has misplaced; our ideally suited of what he’s turns into to him the hope and sample of what he might change into.Dad doesn’t describe the folks in his life as musicians, mathematicians, or zoologists; they’re the drummer “who understands the right way to swing on a metaphysical degree,” “the mathematician who virtually ran the Aerospace Company,” and the “solely individual Dennis Wilson trusted” to look after the Asian small-clawed otters he stored in his swimming pool.My father sees us because the folks we want to be, and he’ll tolerate us being nothing much less. In 2022, Dad was one in every of Mitchell’s guitar techs at her shock Newport People Pageant comeback, and he let me tag alongside. At a rehearsal, Marcus Mumford was sitting just a few ft away from us, behind the congas, and I whispered to my father how a lot I liked his music. “Go speak to him,” Dad stated. “He’s Marcus Mumford, Dad,” I stated. He grinned. “And also you’re Nancy Walecki.”V. When It Was OursWestwood Music was at all times a household enterprise. Dad informed clients to verify this out on the gross sales flooring whereas my brother and I ostensibly helped take stock, however largely constructed forts in a loft above the amp room. We’d learn Tales From the Crypt surrounded by touring instances, cross-legged on the British-racing-green carpet. Upstairs, in her bookkeeping workplace subsequent to the restore store, my mother stored the Fred Walecki Expertise operating.Musicians would sit on the shop’s leather-based couches, taking part in guitars and consuming the espresso we made in our Mr. Espresso machine. I noticed how a lot the electrolarynx annoyed my father, however he continued to be the voice of the store. He as soon as got here up behind Browne whereas he tried a guitar; bought actual shut, as much as his ear; then buzzed: “Are you able to imagine that tone?”By the Nineteen Nineties, the shop was struggling, as skilled musicians bought increasingly more free tools by way of sponsorship offers. A Guitar Heart opened down the road—a black gap sucking up our enterprise, to listen to my dad and mom describe it. “Gui-Goal,” Dad referred to as it. Later, folks began shopping for devices on-line, however Dad wasn’t occupied with constructing an internet presence. If an instrument has its personal little soul, how might you purchase it with out spending time with it in individual?Dad in his Malibu studio. Westwood Music has closed, however he nonetheless repairs devices for purchasers comparable to Christopher Visitor, Robby Krieger of the Doorways, and the Edge. (Peyton Fulford for The Atlantic)Dad offered Westwood Music in 2010, and the brand new house owners closed it throughout the pandemic and by no means reopened it. Dad and I went again to the shop final 12 months, to filter out the final of his belongings: the leather-based sofa my brother and I had carved our initials into with a paper clip; the scoreboard-size {photograph} of Dad, sitting backwards on a chair, speaking to Lyle Lovett; the neon Westwood Musical Devices—Hermann Walecki signal. I considered one thing Christopher Visitor had stated. Somebody ought to put a plaque outdoors the constructing: Westwood Music was right here. 1947–2021.I informed Dad I used to be sorry that my brother and I hadn’t carried on the household enterprise. It felt like we’d failed him and the generations earlier than him. Dad shook his head and jogged my memory that his father hadn’t needed him to take over the shop. In addition to, being right here didn’t even make him that unhappy, he stated, as a result of the brand new proprietor’s iteration was so totally different. “However when it was ours,” he informed me, “we did it nicely.”Dad is 78 now, and nonetheless repairs devices for purchasers like Visitor, Sklar, Robby Krieger of the Doorways, the Edge, and anybody else resourceful sufficient to search out his new store, unlisted on Google Maps and positioned inside a transformed greenhouse at a succulent nursery in Malibu. Dad brings lettuce from dwelling to feed the rabbits that run beneath the pallets of cacti; the opposite tenants embody a glassblower, a clothes designer, a painter, and a sculptor. When he leaves dwelling within the morning, he’ll say, “I’m off to do my father’s work”—referring to each Hermann and his heavenly father.His restore store nonetheless smells of Westwood Music’s outdated wooden and lacquer, together with the ocean and the light paper in his bins of ephemera. (My favourite piece is {a photograph} of Crosby, Stills, and Nash’s leisure baseball staff, the Hoovers—a cocaine joke, Dad needed to clarify to me.) He retains his father’s Goethe quote above his workbench, the place he just lately repaired a cello from 1876. “You understand what’s fascinating? I noticed that’s what I love to do,” he informed me. If he didn’t love guitar gamers a lot, he’d work solely on cellos. Repairing them reminds him of his father.This previous winter, I finished by with some lunch for us to share. He was chatting with a buyer whereas he lowered the strings on the person’s guitar nearer to the fretboard so it might be simpler to play. Dad informed a joke and supplied the person some recommendation on an issue he’d been having together with his spouse, then the 2 of them mentioned Romans 8. When it was time for the person to go, my father informed him a narrative all the best way to his automobile.Dad and I ate our sandwiches, and I discussed how a lot I missed singing. He stated that I ought to hold round extra jazz golf equipment, as a result of “events don’t occur by themselves,” and that I ought to be part of a crusing membership, as a result of he suspected that I missed the ocean. (I’ve by no means expressed an curiosity in crusing, however perhaps now I’ll be taught.) We looked for a guitar choose he needed to point out any individual, from the set he’d custom-made for the Seaside Boys. Once we locked up the store for the day, he regarded drained however happy. He’d be again once more tomorrow.This text seems within the September 2025 print version with the headline “My Father’s Work.”