Alter Ego
String Theory
Best-selling author Jonathan Kellerman isn’t obsessed — he just can’t stop collecting guitars.
by J. Rentilly
When clinical pediatric psychologist Jonathan Kellerman decided to pen a murder mystery in the early 1980s, he followed advice familiar to all aspiring writers: Write what you know. So in crafting protagonist Alex Delaware, he cast the amateur sleuth as a retired child psychologist who, working in tandem with an LAPD detective, uses his knowledge of mental disorders to solve murder cases. Twenty-three years and an equal number of Delaware mysteries later — Bones was released in October — Kellerman’s success as a novelist has born out the adage.
With the publication of With Strings Attached: The Art and Beauty of Vintage Guitars, Kellerman is following this maxim again, this time to fill readers in on something they probably didn’t know about the prolific author: He’s a formally trained guitarist with a world-class collection of the instruments.
The 59-year-old Kellerman began playing on a cheap Gibson archtop some 50 years ago. Diligent practice led to steady improvement, but Kellerman couldn’t afford a decent guitar until he completed graduate studies at USC and set up a clinical practice. “Since then,” he says, “it’s been a 35-year quest for the perfect sound.”
The author recently acquired a guitar designed by Antonio de Torres Jurado, the father of the classical guitar, in 1864. “He only made about 300 guitars, of which we know about 90,” Kellerman says. “If I were on a desert island and could only take one guitar with me, it would be that one.” In such an event, he’d be orphaning 119 others, now safe and secure in a 600-square-foot room in his L.A. home. Kellerman says he never intended to build such a collection, but his fascination with the “beauty and history of these creations” led him through the years to purchase “a great baroque instrument here, a beautiful jazz guitar there — three or four a year. I went a little overboard, I guess.”
Kellerman plans to lend several of his guitars to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for an upcoming exhibit, and he frequently entertains musicians and aficionados eager to examine and play some of the exotic instruments in his collection. Andy Summers of The Police paid Kellerman a visit and awed him with renditions of classical masterpieces on a few of the guitars; Summers was so impressed with the instruments that he was persuaded to write the foreword to With Strings Attached. When Wyclef Jean stopped by, the musician was inspired to write the song “A Hundred Guitars” on the spot.
Though he’s played with great discipline for nearly five decades, Kellerman says he’s unlikely to publicly release any of his home recordings. “When I hear the masters play, it humbles me,” he says. “I’ll stick to my day job and avoid the Peter Principle.”
Photos by Jonathan Exley
