Sept. 11 2001 tribute guitar

"Eagle's Claw" spruce (I made that one up :^) American Sycamore. Bloodwood binding (red), white/blue purfling.

Close up of inlays:

Headstock
Fretboard
Soundhole

This guitar was built for my brother who is recently retired from the U.S. Army. When he first asked me to do this guitar it was not that long after 911, I can honestly say the theme originally didn't inspire me very much. Every time I tried to think about the inlays all I could see were the planes crashing into the side of the WTC. My thoughts seemed to be filled with the defeat of the day. Exactly one year after the attacks the local paper ran a special section commemorating Sept. 11, it was then that I realized the theme had to be one of victory and resilience. The challenge for me was to create 3 distinct areas that equally represented the 3 crash sites. One of the things that I noticed while doing the research for this project was the way the Pentagon and Pennsylvania crashes were almost forgotten in the overwhelming coverage of the WTC crashes. I wanted this guitar to be an example of "modern mythology" that told the complete story with equal emphasis. One of the inlays that I ended up doing that seemed out of place for some reason was "Let's Roll"... it just seemed to not fit with more artistic and subtle inlays, I even tried to translated the phrase in Latin to make it a little more artistic sounding, after much input for several internet friends I came to the now obvious conclusion that it needed to be verbatim and dead center on the guitar.

"Let's Roll" represents the moment we went from reeling from the attack to fighting back.