features
An editor’s look back at the first decade Acoustic Guitar magazine, published in the Tenth Anniversary Collector's Edition, July 2000.
The tail end of the ’80s, when the seeds of this magazine began to germinate, was a strange time to be an acoustic musician. With a few notable exceptions--Suzanne Vega, Tracy Chapman, the Windham Hill scene--all music lacking the throb of synthesizer and the bombast of reverbed drums had disappeared from the radar. Virtually no mainstream publications wrote about it; for acoustic musicians, there was Frets, but that gave up the ghost in 1988. No commercial radio stations played acoustic music, except the occasional "Dust in the Wind" or "Black Water." Major labels didn’t want anything to do with artists tainted by a folk association. There was acoustic activity going on below the surface, but you surely had to know where to look for it. As a young acoustic singer-songwriter, I felt I pursued my music in a weird sort of vacuum.
Here on the other side of the ’90s, we live and play music in a radically different world, and this special issue takes stock of the distance traveled. With its premiere in the summer of 1990, Acoustic Guitar stepped into a void in talking about the great music and great instruments that were being made, and that void simply doesn’t exist anymore. That’s not to say that acoustic music has conquered the mainstream—we entered the ’90s with Madonna and Milli Vanilli ruling the charts, and in the ’00s it’s the Backstreet Boys and Britney Spears. But today’s music scene offers listeners and players so many other options, and even the genres that still inhabit the commercial fringe have found new ways of sustaining and celebrating their independence. And the acoustic guitar is present in so many of these scenes that it’s reclaimed a central place in our culture, consciousness, and music business. We’re a whole lot closer to that state of grace where an acoustic guitar is just a guitar--no qualifier needed--than we have been in several decades.
While the scene around us has grown and changed, so has this magazine and the company that publishes it. Acoustic Guitar came into being as the younger sibling of Strings, which serves the bowed-instruments crowd; and both were put out (every other month) by a handful of people supported by a small army of freelance writers and production artists. As the decade progressed and the industry boomed, A.G. went monthly and Strings went to eight issues per year. Intermittent book projects like the annual Musical Instrument Auction Price Guide and Sharon Isbin’s Classical Guitar Answer Book led to a full-on book-publishing arm that at this writing encompasses 21 titles. The idea of providing original album tracks to go along with our features and transcriptions led to the creation of the quarterly Acoustic Artists CD Series. We hit the Web in the middle of the decade and have been ramping up ever since with all kinds of articles, lessons, searchable databases, and discussion forums. Along the way, we put on several guitar festivals and even toured Spain a few times with small groups of guitarheads, staying up way too late and soaking up a lifetime’s worth of flamenco duende. A.G. aficionados may even recall that we published a transcription of "Bridge over Troubled Water" with a newly minted guitar arrangement by Mr. Paul Simon himself, both in the magazine and as sheet music (remember sheet music?).
The list of people who’ve contributed to all these activities has grown way too long to detail here, and it extends past our masthead and bylines to include hundreds of advertisers and thousands of guitarists who’ve supported us. Countless musicians have also shaped the magazine by sharing their passions and views. Let’s continue our dialogue on these and other topics in the Guitar Talk forums on www.acousticguitar.com, which are visited regularly by Acoustic Guitar’s editors, writers, and special guests.
Who could have guessed that we’d be chatting up A.G.’s tenth anniversary on electronic forums, collecting articles, photos, and music files from far-flung contributors by e-mail, and putting together virtually ever aspect of this magazine digitally? Not I, anyway. Nor could I have dreamed that I’d enter the ’00s with an overflowing CD rack (and desk and table and floor) of great acoustic music from around the world, from both veteran artists and newcomers; that I’d be playing an individually handcrafted guitar with an intricate computer-cut inlay; that I would have recorded, mixed, mastered, and burned a CD on a little gray box in my living room and then uploaded the songs onto the Web; and that I’d have seen Acoustic Guitar go from "Wouldn’t it be great if there were a magazine . . .?" to the buzz of activities and people it is today.
What a great ride. See you around the next bend.
--Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers
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