Six-String Samurais

Santa Fe newcomer and master luthier Scott Baxendale can pinpoint the moment he fell in love with music and guitars.

“I was 5 years old in Kansas City, in 1960...and my parents left me with a babysitter to go to the Playboy Club, because they had a friend who was the head bandleader at the club,” he tells SFR. “At 3 o’clock in the morning, I woke up to these loud noises, and I was laying in bed thinking they’d come home and put on the record player, but it was too present to be the record player. Even at 5, I knew that, so I went to the top of the basement stairs—my parents had invited the rhythm section from the club’s band for an after-hours jam. I sat there mesmerized, and I think that’s what sealed my fate.”

The next chapter of Baxendale’s story is taking off locally as a merger with Shawn Lee’s Stay Gold Guitars. But between that moment on the stairs and today, Baxendale would go on to develop a Beatles obsession, which ultimately evolved into a guitar obsession. This would lead him to manufacturing positions through the 1970s with Mossman Guitars in Kansas and Gruhn Guitars in Tennessee.

While at Gruhn, he says, a challenge from luthier legend George Gruhn himself found Baxendale and other workers attempting to suss out the reason certain Martin guitars from certain years sounded so particularly good. This sparked in Baxendale a newfound passion for the mechanics of acoustic guitars. He went on to buy the Mossman company before spawning his own outfit, Baxendale Guitar, an Athens, Georgia-based shop through which he either created or restored instruments for huge names like Roy Acuff, Johnny Cash, Donovan, Willie Nelson and many others.

That is, of course, the abbreviated version of the story, but after years of making guitars sing, Baxendale settled on one speciality: conversions. It’s a process through which he takes older guitars—say ones from the department store catalogues of ‘20s, ‘30s or earlier, or the forgotten Kay that has been sitting under someone’s bed for years, un-played—and breaks them down to their bones. He then restores what needs restoring and builds them back up stronger, including a proprietary methodology of X bracing, a guitar-building technique that describes the shape of the wooden bracing materials found inside an acoustic instrument. Through a decades-long process of trial and experimentation, Baxendale’s specific bracing layout and wood shaping gives even the oldest, most beat-up guitar a new lease on life, and the instruments often sound better than when they originally hit the streets; they also come with cases and warranties, a virtually unheard-of guarantee in the business. He’s amassed quite a following.

Alongside Baxendale in his Santa Fe workshop is another guitar lover from a different era. In 1987 or so, a young Lee discovered Jimi Hendrix and, by extension, a whole world of guitar shredders: blues, rock and metal. His life changed forever.

“I was fortunate to have parents that, y’know, were there in the ‘60s and had a lot of records,” Lee says. “They got it. They were supportive.”

Lee picked up a music degree from the College of Santa Fe, then, later, an MBA from University of New Mexico. And though he accepted a position with Santa Fe’s Thornburg Investment Management, where he worked for years, the guitars always called to him. He resigned that job in 2018 and, by December of 2019, he had opened Stay Gold Guitars (1221 Flagman Way Unit B5, (505) 699-2128), a specialty shop dedicated to vintage and higher-end acoustic guitars like Iris, Collings and others. Lee had already been working with El Paseo, Texas-based restorer Dan Lambert, but his newfound dedication to guitars enjoying newfound life is also how he met Baxendale.

“I’d found Scott on [online instrument marketplace] Reverb and bought some of his guitars before I even opened,” Lee says. “So then on a whim I kind of asked him if he’d thought about having a dealer, and it turned out he had been thinking of that. ‘You read my mind,’ he said.’”

Lee would have no trouble selling the Baxendale conversion guitars through his store, and he jumped at the chance to work more closely with Baxendale when the latter mentioned he was thinking of moving to Santa Fe, where his wife had once lived. Now, just about a year after Baxendale’s relocation, he and Lee are in the midst of finalizing a merger between the two businesses. Not only will this allow Stay Gold to be the home base for Baxendale projects, it’ll mean Baxendale’s legacy is secure if and when he decides to retire. For Lee, who will take over when the time is right, it also means another dimension to working with guitars—lessons from a bonafide master in the field.

“I dreamed of this for probably 25 years,” Lee says. “I was the kind of guy who was buying tools before I even knew what I was doing. I wanted to build guitars in my garage, and never got to it. It happened with Scott by coincidence or by magic.”

Today, Lee splits his time between appointments at Stay Gold and the Baxendale workshop down Agua Fría Street in an unassuming warehouse. Already he’s rebuilt about a dozen guitars under Baxendale’s tutelage. Of course, Baxendale will probably stick around even after he retires—for some, working on guitars isn’t something that ever fully leaves their system.

“A lot of people like these guitars because they’re really stable,” Baxendale adds. “Ours have gone through so many years of shrinking and contracting and expanding and drying and getting humid that they get to a point where they’re sort of impervious. There’s something different about the sound when they reach that point.”

There is indeed something different about a Baxendale, which makes the merger all the more exciting. Lee’s not even close to slowing down, and Baxendale’s expertise is enduring. Not too shabby for a pile of wood with six strings slapped across it.