Author Bradley Klein owns the production company Twangbox®, creating multimedia stories about music, musicians and musical Instruments.
The Hateful Eight is a violent movie, written and directed by a man who has made an art form out of reinterpreting violent cinematic genres.
Quentin Tarantino debuted with 1992's Reservoir Dogs, exploded with Pulp Fiction a couple years later, and continues to experiment with westerns, martial arts flicks, and police dramas to the current day.
A few years back he wrote and directed Django Unchained, which has been called, "the worst musician bio-pic ever!" (It's NOT about the gypsy jazz guitar pioneer.)
Hateful Eight is set in Wyoming just after the civil war, and as in most Tarantino films, there's plenty of evil, deception and blood-letting. But there is a special horror in one scene.
Kurt Russell, playing 'The Hangman' has taken refuge in a rustic lodge. Actress Jennifer Jason Leigh, 'The Prisoner' is playing a small guitar and singing, when Russell announces that "music time's over," grabs the guitar by the neck and smashes its body against a wooden column.
The exact circumstances are still coming to light. But what IS known, is that, instead of a prop guitar, Russell smashed an irreplaceable Martin built around 1870. It was the property of the CF Martin Company's museum in Pennsylvania — and on loan to the filmmakers.
According to a member of the film's crew a pair of duplicate, prop guitars were on hand for the smashing, but somehow the switch was bungled, and an irreplaceable museum piece ended up shattered in Kurt Russell's hands as Jennifer Jason Leigh reacts in all-too-realistic horror.
However this happened, it was NOT the FIRST act of Guitar-Destruction-As-Art. Beginning in the 1960s, Jimi Hendrix and Pete Townsend both smashed their way into rock and roll history, leaving shattered electric guitars in their wake. Fans ate it up, but countless young musicians who wanted nothing so much as a Strat or Les Paul of their own have never fully forgiven those legends for their destructive showmanship.
And we mandolin players have our own special story of violent destruction that horrifies us all. But we love to tell it. And to ponder that moment when iron met 62 year old spruce and maple. November 13, 1985 someone broke into Bill Monroe's Tennessee home and applied a fireplace poker forcefully to his two Loar-signed F-5 mandolins as well as a number of family portraits. Nothing was stolen and no one was charged, but the story is passed from hand to hand, a cautionary tale about the damage a spurned lover can do.
And where do these disparate scenes all get their 'juice’, their power? I think it's that musical instruments are a class of object that transcends 'objectness'. From their anthropomorphic shapes to the way they are cradled in our arms, to the sounds they produce. They infiltrate our emotional lives.
They can be objects of burning desire, and lifelong artistic companions. Closer to pets than possessions. And closer to 'alive' than inanimate. And there is the ever present knowledge that they can, and many will, outlive their owners. The best instruments, mandolins, guitars, violins will endure and move from hand to hand, musical immortals for whom a century is just middle age.
I read a suggestion on social media that the Martin Museum "get Charlie Derrington" to fix their shattered 1870 guitar. After all, he sorted over a hundred pieces of Monroe's mandolins and reconstructed two playable instruments to return to Bill's hands.
I sadly informed them that we lost Mr. Derrington almost a decade ago, killed by a drunk driver in 2006. It will have to be someone else to attempt rebuilding the 'Hateful Eight Martin', and maybe someday, someone will. In the meantime, the Martin museum has announced it will no longer loan instruments to filmmakers.
NOTE: C.F. Martin has indicated the guitar is beyond repair.
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