Becky Gillette – Bob Gage, a carpenter who has lived in Eureka Springs off and on for 30 years starting in 1978, made his first musical instrument when he was eight years old and got into his grandfather’s garage to make a rubber band banjo. Through the years his fascination with making musical instruments from unusual materials has continued with one of his first and most remarkable pieces being a saxophone made from wood salvaged from a burn pile.
“I was in Michigan cleaning my mother’s backyard and left a pile of brush,” Gage said. “I went back a couple years later, cleaned up more, and lit the brush on fire. As it was burning, I looked down in the fire and saw what looked like a saxophone. I think it was a real old elderberry bush. I hung it on the wall and carried it around the country with me for fifteen years and called it art. Then about 15 years ago, I had a job with a rather trying customer. So I took it to work with me. Every time I got frustrated, I quit working on cabinets and worked on the saxophone. I directed all the frustration into the instrument and it worked out real well. When the job was over, the saxophone played. I decided to call it a wind wood saxophone because it sounded like a bull moose.”
He says he isn’t a musician except for playing his saxophone on occasion. He got to play it in Guatemala with British rock musician Pete Sears, who was with Jefferson Starship and did an album with Rod Stewart.
Gage also made a five-string, fretless banjo made from a ten-inch cooking pot, with a neck made from a piece of cedro (Guatemalan cedar) with a big knot in the middle.
“Pete was the first person to tune and play that banjo,” Gage said.
Gage has been “making sawdust” all his life, as he grew up in a lumberyard.
“When I was a kid, we didn’t have a lot of money and I enjoyed making my own stuff,” Gage said. “I also like making toys. I’ve been making toys as long as instruments. But I end up giving them away long before I can make any money off of them.”
While he has tinkered with making unusual artistic musical instruments for decades, now he has more time for his hobby. It has turned into what he calls the “That’s Not Right Instrument Company.” Everything is made out of non-standard materials, and most instruments are left-handed.
Sometimes the artistic drive takes over and he is surprised how it turns out.
“I go crazy,” Gage said. “Sometimes I look at stuff I made and wonder how I made it.”
The materials are found or repurposed. The lumber in the neck of his upright washtub bass is from a piece of ponderosa pine he carried around from his teen years until it found its purpose. He used two washtubs sliced and fitted together to make the bass body, then punched holes shaped like dragons down the sides of washtubs for sound holes.
“I took the electronics out of a broken bass, and ended up with an upright, four-string electric washtub bass with LED lights inside that make the dragons light up,” Gage said. “It is one of my very favorite pieces. I have frequently made washtub basses for people including one with a mahogany pole with a carved violin scroll head. And then I’ve taken whiskey flasks and made violins out of them. I call them flaskolins.”
He also has made a full drum set made 100 percent from metal. It consists of washtubs, buckets, pails, and trashcans. He also combined a 12-gauge shotgun, an old aluminum pot, a dancing stick man, a mousetrap and a hammer to make a musical instrument.
“You can pluck the bass strings like a washtub,” Gage said. “When you tap the hammer, the mousetrap on the fish line makes the stickman dance and rattle his bells. That one is real fun.”
Right now he is working on what he calls a badrumjo. It is made from a broken drum and broken electric bass.
“Part of the fun is naming them,” he said. “The ideas just kind of come to me. I don’t try to force them. Sometimes I will start looking at something and start seeing an instrument. A lot of times I don’t know what it will sound or look like when done.”
Gage is now trying to build up enough collection of his musical instruments to start selling them. He also envisions putting together a “That’s Not Right Band” to be in the Ozark Folk Festival. He has enough pieces to do it.