1/31/2024 0 Comments Kaleidoscope david lindley![]() ![]() There were venues like the Ash Grove, the Troubadour and the Cat’s Pajama’s, music stores like Claremont’s Folk Music Center and Pasadena’s Barry and Grasmick’s to frequent, there were luthiers working on all sorts of instruments in East LA (not to mention the bigger CA-based makers like Fender and Standel), and musicians Clarence and Roland White alongside all the touring blues and folk acts and talented young peers…Lindley soaked it all in. If we accept that he was from this planet, we can also agree that he was a byproduct of the unique melting pot that was Southern California in the ‘60s. And I said, “You mean I’m supposed to judge people’s musical worth?” And they said, “Yeah, you can do that.” –Lindley to Ben Harper, Fretboard Journal 11 And then they finally told me, “Lindley, don’t enter anymore!” So they made me a judge. “I won under Three-Finger Bluegrass Picking and then Traditional – separate divisions. It’s all staggering: Lindley was still a teenager and already had his 10,000 hours under his belt on more than one instrument. Next thing we hear, he’s winning the annual Topanga Canyon Banjo Contest so many times (five) that they just threw their hands in the air and made him a judge. The woodshedding details we may never know (in the comic book version of our hero’s life, this would be a convenient place for the radioactive asteroid to land, giving him fretted instrument superpowers). In one of his best interviews, he told Steve Dawson on the Music Makers and Soul Shakers Podcast the whole chronology, how he got the Pete Seeger book, how his uncle, the Ricardo Montalbán (!!!), ended up gifting him his first guitar. Lindley took up the violin, then played baritone ukulele, and then, sometime around high school, a five-string banjo. ![]() There was a great record collection, a piano, and a ukulele in the house. This much we know: He was born in San Marino, California. ![]()
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