Chasing the Ghost of Lloyd Loar

    Jim Triggs is hunched over his workbench.  Something in the tone of the instrument doesn't sound right.  Glasses perched on the edge of his long face, he watches his sawdust-caked hands gently guide the chisel's edge across the mandolin. Stroke after stroke, he gets closer.  He stops.  He replaces a string in its groove and adjusts his dusty ball cap atop his shock of graying brown hair. Triggs props the instrument on the towel on his workbench. He strums the strings and smiles.
    "That's it," he says.
    Triggs has spent the last 25 years of his life as a luthier, a master craftsman, building stringed instruments such as mandolins, violins and guitars of every variety: flattop, arch-top, solid bodied. But it has become his quest constructing an instrument as close as possible to the exact specifications of the glory days of Gibson mandolins, or as he put it, to get closer to the warm resonance of "the Loar sound."
     Lloyd Loar is a legend in the bluegrass music, Triggs knows.  Born in 1988 in Cropsey, Ill., he is credited with the invention and perfection of the F-5 style mandolin during the 1920s.  The skill and craft with which he designed instruments is revered so much that luthiers worldwide strive to achieve Loar's precision and sound.  An original Loar sells for $250,000.  Countless luthiers still aim to achieve that original perfection.  But Triggs was enmeshed in the bluegrass scene long before he ever touched a Loar mandolin.  
    

     In Lawrence, Off the Wall Hall, now the Bottleneck, served as a bluegrass shop by day and music venue at night.  Triggs watched touring musicians and occasionally sat in, playing banjo.
     He began building full-time after moving to California with his wife, Mary Ann, and their son Ryan, who was less than a year old at the time.  It was 1983.  Triggs dedicated himself to the process of learning the craft.  Every process was still new.  
    "When I was starting out, it was all exciting," he said.
    Then he met a man with a voice "country, redneck Mickey Mouse, " he said.
    Charlie Derrington, a fellow luthier, had heard about Triggs from a mutual friend, bluegrass fiddler Byron Berline.  Derrington gained fame after he reconstructed Bill Monroe's Gibson mandolin, one built by Lloyd Loar himself.  An intruder smashed the instruments to splinters in Monroe's home .with a wrought iron fireplace poker.  Derrington offered Triggs a job on the spot.
    "He said, 'Hey, why don't you come work for Gibson?'" Triggs said.  "It was completely out of the blue."
    The Triggses moved to Nashville, home to Gibson's custom shop.  For the first time, he got his hands on Loar mandolins.
    "I'd never touched a Loar or seen one before I got to Gibson," he said.
    Over the years he spent at Gibson, dozens came across his bench, including Bill Monroe's.
    "For years, I was Bill's string boy," he said.
Triggs studied them carefully, drew up blueprints, and tried his best to figure out each instrument's personal essence.  For him, it was a study in engineering perfection.
    No one knows exactly how many Loar mandolins are left.  Triggs' son, Ryan, now 26, who also works full-time as a luthier with his dad, spent the last year researching the topic.
    "There was no documentation," he said, but most estimate there are approximately 200 left.
"There are more Stradivari violins in the world than there are Loars," Triggs said.
David Harvey, master luthier of Gibson Original Acoustic Instruments, calls the Loar instruments "a great piece of art."   He also said that most luthiers who focus on mandolins seek to recreate the Loar sound.
    In 1992, the Triggs family returned to Lawrence, with Jim hoping to get away from the artist relation work he was doing in Nashville, and return to building.  Mary Ann took a job working with computers, an irony which is not lost on Triggs himself.
    "I don't understand what she does," he said.  "And she doesn't come out here."
     Here is a replica of the Gibson custom shop Triggs built in his garage.  It's an exact copy; from the green trim on the workbenches to the posters of Bill Monroe and professional wrestler star Ms. Elizabeth on the walls. More than a workshop, it also became a tribute to Charlie Derrington who, in 2006, was killed by a drunk driver.
     "Every time I come in here, I think of Charlie," Triggs said.
When building an instrument, every choice he makes is deliberate.  From the wood, specially chosen from boards cut near a tree's limbs, to the satin finish that Triggs demands to be authentic, every little detail helps the instrument take shape.
Back at the workbench, Triggs turns tuning knobs and plucks strings until the instrument finally rests in tune.  It is not perfect, but it's closer.  He grabs a nearby pick, hoists the mandolin into his arms, and fires into the high-speed opening riff of an old fiddle tune.
    "I know enough to be dangerous," he says.