Guitar man: A tale of Southern Illinois

ALTO PASS, Ill. -- The day is Wednesday, and it's cold, gray and rainy. The perfect kind of mid-November weather that sends dogs and humans alike scrambling for bed, instantly shutting off the serotonin tap in the mind. Seasonal affective disorder they call it, and this Wednesday I'm feeling it.

Mid-afternoon has come by the time I see the little green sign saying I've reached Alto Pass, a village of about 400 people in the gentle hills of Southern Illinois. Next to that sign there's another that foreshadows my afternoon. The sign talks about the famous Root Beer Saloon, and tells me "You have to see it to believe it."

In a few minutes, I'll find out how right that sign was.

I pull in to the village's downtown, which still looks for the most part like a quaint downtown district in a frontier town. The perfect location for a saloon, and a perfect location to find a character named Michael Blank.

My companion and trusty photographer Don Frazier and I pull up to the saloon, and Blank -- a thick denim shirt covering his torso, his long, gray hair under a camo ball cap -- comes through the front door to meet us among the hanging baskets of mums and the laminated clips of newspaper stories that have been written about Blank and his saloon. It's obvious I'm not the first member of the media to come calling (the Southeast Missourian's managing editor, Sam Blackwell, did so a few years back). And Blank is ready.

He evokes the image of Ted Nugent -- a tough, woodsy sort of guy who likes to hunt and camp. Blank's years of being a biker, going to Sturgis and running the wide open spaces of America, comes through in his look and personality. He looks and sounds like he's partied a lot, and if you visit the saloon, you can troll him for stories for hours.

Michael Blank wants to make a splash on the instrument market with his Zuni custom guitars, but the man is even more interesting than his intricately crafted instruments.

But Blank knows we're here to talk about the new line of custom-built guitars and amplifiers, Zuni, he's manufacturing for a trade show coming up in California. He wastes no time getting down to business.

As soon as we step out of the car, Blank is there to tell Don about the amp he'll create based on the designs of the old Vox Super Beetle. After a few minutes, he welcomes us in, his companion Cyndi gets us all a glass of root beer, and we begin to talk.

Blank talks about his guitars, but at first I'm more focused on the Root Beer Saloon's decor. This place is one of the area's real treasures.

All around are the remains of dead things, artifacts from antiquity and mock-ups of things meant to be dead: a deer head, bass mounted on the walls, duck decoys and a rifle sitting behind the bar. A few feet away from where we sit, a wooden Indian with a quiver of arrows looks at something in the distance, a skunk-skin cap on his head. Nearby a tiny T-Rex skeleton sits, and in the back of the room an ancient motorcycle rests among guitars and other music memorabilia.

Along the ceiling runs a giant 40-foot snake skin -- the skin of an anaconda killed by Blank and his associates.

There's no place like the Root Beer Saloon around here, and no one like Blank.

As he starts to tell me about his guitars and his plan to show them in California, I think he must be feeding me a huge line.

He compares his craft to that of the famous violin maker Stradivarius, and tells me nothing on the market can compare to his guitars and amps. He says he used to market and promote bands and events, including Stevie Ray Vaughn. He says he sold guitar wood to Gibson, Washburn and Ernie Ball.

And here are the kinds of terms he used:

"When I first broke out cutting the instrument wood, I wanted to build guitars. That was a means to an end, get to the wood first, then do guitars. It's like building a diamond ring and you've got the gold but you don't have the diamonds. It's better to have the diamonds, then you can be the diamond miner but you can still get the rings."

He tells a story about a guy he knew who owned a first-run 1951 Fender Telecaster and sold it for $300. The guitar, he said, was worth $60,000 in excellent condition.

"Are you guys hearing me? Sixty-thousand dollars," Blank says.

Yeah, right, I thought.

But I found out he must be somewhat legit. The show he's readying for is the National Association of Music Merchandising in January at Anaheim. Sure enough, Zuni guitars is an exhibitor, which costs a good chunk of money. The guy wouldn't be spending that cash unless there was something to gain from it, so I listened.

Blank proceeded to tell me about his line of guitars, for which he builds his own pickups, uses wood he cut himself (mostly high-quality maples with names like "birdseye" and other weird stuff) and the knobs and tuners he builds out of actual deer and elk antlers. They're guitars Ted Nugent would definitely be proud of.

"I have told everybody I think he'll be the first one playing these guitars," Blank says. He calls his creations "thoroughbreds," guitars that are made from quality materials, and will last for decades.

Yes, the guitars look great, and according to Bruce Zimmerman, they play great, as well.

Like me, Zimmerman didn't know whether or not to believe Blank at first. But he soon found out, "Everything he says he can back it up."

Zimmerman played one of Blank's Zunis a few weeks ago at his regular Sunday gig at Port Cape and loved it. Cape's music scene patriarch usually switches guitars often to get different sounds, but not that Sunday.

"The guitar that he brought down that I played was really a nice guitar, really nice," Zimmerman said. "It was the perfect cross between a Gibson and a Fender."

The guys at Shivelbine's know Blank well, too. Bill Shivelbine himself has visited the Root Beer Saloon, as has Ken Keller, who plays bass for Zimmerman.

"They are awesome," Keller says of the guitars. "He brought one down last Sunday and Bruce played it all night, and he usually plays three or four guitars throughout the night. And I'm telling you, it wasn't out of tune when he got done."

But even more interesting is the man. Blank spent decades on the road, riding bikes around the country, rocking and rolling and generally causing as big a ruckus as possible. And he goes through women like a marathon runner goes through shoes, or at least he used to.

In his shop, a place full of wood slabs, graced by a Coors promo poster of Elvira, sits his first Zuni prototype guitar, a testament to his rocky past with the opposite sex.

The six-string is busted, the rod in its neck bent where that neck separated from the body in a shower of splinters. This would have been a Zuni, instead it's a victim. A fiance broke it after Blank left her for cheating on him with his friend.

"When something goes sour a lot of women want to hurt what's closest and most dear to you. And this is what's most dear to me, my new guitar company, my one of a kind prototype," he says, half-joking, as "Blinded by the Light" blares over his cranked-up stereo.

But Blank's turbulent past with women seems to have ended. He's been with his current female companion and co-owner of the saloon, Cynthia Lucas, for years (they met in a biker bar on Blank's road to Sturgis one year). He's even training her to build these Zunis.

Lucas says she's happy to learn the craft and become one of the few women who build custom guitars. And for Blank, it's a smart move to carry on his new company.

"A guy like me may die next year, and you gotta keep this place going," Blank says.

Let's hope that doesn't happen. If it did, the area would lose one of its more colorful characters.

As Keller says, "the guy is incredible."

If you don't believe it, seek shelter in the Root Beer Saloon some time. You won't be disappointed with the personality.