Classic Guitar Storyteller

This eclectic yet familiar music reflects O'Gara's colorful upbringing that included time living in Indonesia as a child and attending high school in Northern California's Humboldt county. For the past decade and a half, Los Angeles has been O'Gara's home where he has produced a number of acclaimed records including 2005's Sticky as Tobacco. His newest recording, tentatively titled Underground Waltz, was recorded live in the studio and features some of O'Gara's most compelling work to date. LoveToKnow Guitar had the good fortune to speak with O'Gara recently about everything from his aversion to most guitar players to his love of Elizabeth Cotton.

Tim O'Gara: Classic Guitar Storyteller

When did you start playing music?

I had a really good friend in high school who played guitar. He was in a band that played Led Zeppelin covers and stuff like that. He loved to just surf and play guitar, that was his whole thing. He started writing songs and asked me if I'd help him, so we wrote songs together. Sometimes I'd write words and he'd figure out some stuff on guitar, and sometimes he'd have melody ideas with all this guitar stuff going on and I'd put words to that. It made me always want to try writing songs on my own. And at home, my mom always had a guitar. Both my parents sang all the time, and my mom played guitar just enough to be able to do it with all the kids at that time. She does more now, and she's actually learning how to play banjo.

When did you start to write songs in the style you play today?

After my first lesson, actually. I had this great teacher named Sam McNeil, and I think in that first lesson I maybe learned the chords B, A and G, and he showed me this simple picking style to try. I think I wrote something that time. The next time I came back I showed it to him. It's probably a song I can still sing. It may be a little bit hokey, but I remember I wrote it on the last day of school of my senior year.

Tim O'Gara

Did you ever want to be a great guitar player, or was the guitar always just a catalyst for writing songs?

Well, I'm not actually a huge fan of guitar in general, as an instrument. There are certain guitarists who I have always thought were just amazing and were important for me. Actually, there was this woman up in Humboldt who had this picking style that I thought was really beautiful, and I remember asking her if she could show me how to do that. She said, "Oh, you know, just play and try to find the notes that are in the melody and put them in there somehow. I can't tell you how to do it, just keep trying, keep trying."

I remember I played a song maybe five years later that she heard, and she said, "Hey, you did it, you figured it out!" A certain thing that I really love in the guitar is when it carries its own voice, almost like another human voice. A lot of guitarists I really like are able to find something that sounds like it could have rung right out of a person's body. Like it's really connected with their body in a way. There are not that many people I've seen where I've really felt that, especially, because there's so much posing and acrobatics involved in a lot of guitar stuff. But some blues players definitely have had it.

Can you give an example of someone you've heard who really plays from the heart?

Around the same time I asked that woman about her picking style, Elizabeth Cotton came up to Humboldt. She was in her late 80s at the time, and she had this amazing style. She was left-handed, and instead of having the guitar restrung she just played it upside down. When you watched her play, it was impossible to figure out what she was doing. To my ear, she's one of the best.

Who was Elizabeth Cotton? Can you talk more about her?

Lightning Rod

She was a black woman from the south from a region where there was a certain kind of blues music. There were originally a lot of regional styles of blues that disappeared after radio. Anyway, when she was a little girl, between the ages of eight and twelve, she wrote gorgeous songs, just amazing songs. However, she was told by her family that they didn't want her singing blues songs because it was against their religious beliefs. They wanted her to sing gospel songs, so they made her stop playing guitar. So she quit for a long time.

When Elizabeth was in her 40s or so, she was working as a house cleaner at the house of a famous collector of folk music. There were all these guitars around, and when he wasn't there she'd start playing. One day he came in, and he basically caught her playing on the job. He said, "Wow, this is amazing!" and he made her keep playing. He soon found out that she was this treasure because in those 40 years that she hadn't played music, the whole world had changed. That whole style was gone; nobody else played that kind of music. It definitely would have disappeared forever, but she still had it perfect because she had an amazing mastery of it as a child.

So anyway, that melodic playing is exactly her style. Her most famous song was Freight Train. She sings, and the guitar melody is just floating along in it. I was just a young kid when I heard her play, but I sat right at her feet watching it, listening to her. She was amazing. The feeling you got when you were there was just amazing. She was just a carrier, like she had some kind of stream that was pouring through her. She was just giving out everything that she had.

Talk a bit about the guitar you play. Is it a Martin?

It's not a Martin, actually, it's a Takamine. It's one of the ones they got sued over by Martin because it's an exact copy. People are always coming up to me and telling me, "Your Martin sounds great". It was a gift from my parents in high school, but I've always sort of liked nylon strings better. They seem to fit the sound of my voice and the feeling of a lot of the songs.

For a long time, I thought I could only write songs on that kind of guitar. I've played some different classical guitars that have sort of landed in my lap. The only guitar I ever actually bought was my favorite. I bought it at a garage sale for $25.00 dollars, and it was carved out of one piece of wood. It was gorgeous, and it didn't have perfect symmetry or anything like that. It had waves in it, but to me every note had magic. I loved that guitar. It was small, the size of a parlor guitar, and it was made for gut strings. It was really beautiful.

Unfortunately, that guitar was stolen from my apartment when I first moved to Los Angeles. In a weird way it was sort of my introduction to Los Angeles.

Tim O'Gara

Hear O'Gara Play

Anyone who has had the pleasure of hearing Tim O'Gara's music or has shared a leisurely conversation with him can wholeheartedly attest to the effortless and enduring quality of his art. If you haven't had this pleasure, do yourself a favor and check out his website and his MySpace page where you can hear and purchase the music of this classic guitar storyteller. The photos in this article were taken by Tim's lovely wife, Virginia.