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Luthier Larry Pogreba's guitars have been purchased by Jackson Browne and Keb' Mo.
At 74, Larry Pogreba gives his broad curiosity free reign — the Willow Creek guitar builder still takes his perception of guitar design as far and wide as he can.
From solid- and hollow-body electric guitars, to archtop semiacoustic ones, like jazzboxes, to the long Weissenborn that rests on the player’s lap, Pogreba’s approach is one part practical, but two parts experimental.
“You build a few things that you know that are functioned to sell,” said Pogreba. “But then you've got to build things that you want to try. And since the 1990s, people have been buying my experiments.”
Historically, resonator guitars — which produce sound through spun metal cones as opposed to through the sounding board — have been mostly built using sheet metal or brass. Sometime ago, Larry started designing them with an aluminum 1950s-era hubcap at the center.
“I'm not going to build something just because it's goofy,” said Pogreba. “I've got to have a reason to stray, because they've been building guitars the same way for, well, 500 years. And, so you have to have an idea to change something that's that old.”
“By the '70s, people all wanted resonator guitars like Bukka White’s, and they were so heavy that they all weighed 10 or 12 pounds, because of the materials. People used to call them hubcap guitars. I realized there were only a few hubcaps that are the right shape to cover the guitar, like a 1952 Mercury, a ‘55 Olds, a '54 Packard, '53 Chevy.”
One of the guitars that Pogreba is presently constructing, he pieced together with Belizean rosewood burl wood and mahogany; another project in flux has a fingerboard of South African pink ivory. In his shop, he has stacks of red spruce and Appalachian spruce and big walnut slabs from southeast Kansas to cull from as well.
No matter what it is constructed with or how it is built, a guitar’s potential is reliant upon the skill of the player.
“I’ll often have a guitar around for a month and I will think that I know that guitar, but then somebody like Darrell Scott or David Lindley, they’ll pick that guitar up and you're like, wow! You never made that noise for me, honey!"
Singer-songwriter Jackson Browne, a prolific musician of note who has sold more than 18 million records in his career, owns at least five of Pogreba's guitars. In 2018, Browne received the Gandhi Peace Award for his contributions to world peace, and when he accepted the prize, he had a Larry Pogreba guitar at his side.
“I don't know anybody who's more just absolutely eaten up with guitars than Jackson Browne," Pogreba said "When he gets a guitar, he'll try different gauges and types of strings, different tunings, he'll do more experimenting with that guitar than I do. And he'll figure out the single best voice that that guitar has … He might only use that guitar when he plays 'Running on Empty.' When he's traveling, the stage looks like a pawn shop, because he's got so many guitars."
Approximately 30 years ago, Pogreba met blues musician Keb’ Mo, and soon after, he was introduced through him to Bonnie Raitt, and he has maintained a longstanding business relationship with the former ever since.
“I was selling my resonator guitars at a Boulder-area music store. I was driving through town and they said, Keb’ Mo is here at the radio station today. ... Bonnie played on his album and saw that guitar and the tech sent me the measurements for her guitar neck, what she's already used to, so that thing would feel comfortable as soon as she picked it up. She said she wanted to take it out and play a gig with it.”
About 15 years ago, Pogreba was invited by Raitt to attend one of her shows. Coincidentally, Keb’ Mo opened the engagement, and the two musicians played together for an encore, side by side, and for one song each clutched one of Pogreba's instruments.
Another time, Pogreba received a phone call from the staff of country music stalwart Emmylou Harris: she was traveling through Montana and the night prior had dropped her guitar and broke its headstock.
“Emmylou has one of these lightweight resonators and they didn't want to stop at Gibson (Acoustic Factory, in Bozeman), because it’d just be a big dog and pony show. So, we met at Wheat Montana right there at the intersection (in Three Forks). And I got the guitar from her, fixed it, and she was playing over in Livingston the next night down there.”
Larry’s father, Dean Andrew Pogreba, was born in Three Forks, and his mother, Maxine Albro, was born in the Willow Creek area. One of his grandfathers was born in Pony in 1886. His great-grandfather was a miner in Virginia City, and he made enough profit from the mines to purchase farmland near Harrison.
“At the time I was born,” relayed Pogreba, “Dad had just come back from World War II and was going to the school there in Helena to learn how to work on airplanes. While she was waiting, my mother was working at the bank in Helena. I was born in the hospital in Helena, and then they moved back to Three Forks as soon as I was born. And then Willow Creek, where the family lived, and where I could just take off in any direction I wanted to go.”
Pogreba attended the first grade in Willow Creek and from there the family criss-crossed and zigzagged across the U.S. and Europe, from Montana to Georgia, to Texas, to Las Vegas, Nevada, and then out to England. Larry attended junior high school in England and finished high school in Germany.
“Dad flew in World War II, and then he came back and he worked on the railroad until Korea started and then he got back to the Air Force. He got to fly the coolest airplanes in the world all his life. A surface-to-air missile killed him (Col. Dean Pogreba) in Vietnam in October 1965.”
Pogreba first started building guitars while he was a sculpture major in college.
“By ‘75 or so I was wanting to build more fun kinds of stuff and as wacky as people were back in those days, they were really conservative about their guitars. They had to be just like the one grandpa had ... you didn't have that much freedom to design something far from the way they had been building guitars for the last 100 years.”
Sometime around 1990, Pogreba said that he discovered a book about experimental guitar building and was inspired by the unusual depictions enough to re-consider the course of his life.
“I thought that things had changed and unusual guitars would be more accepted,” said Pogreba.
After scooting around the country, the peripatetic Pogreba ultimately returned to Willow Creek, where he lives off-the-grid and remains as fascinated and delighted as anyone else by the unexpected, creative, and sometimes bizarre things that his unbounded thinking somehow constructs.
“These asymmetrical guitars and the fan frets — they're kind of unusual,” concluded Pogreba, inspecting one of his concoctions. “But inventive people will try him, because there is a definite advantage to this setup.”
Music writer Brian D’Ambrosio may be reached at dambrosiobrian@hotmail.com
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