RIP Eddie Haymaker.

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Thank you for giving me music, Eddie Haymaker: Today I found out one of my greatest lifelong musical heroes passed away. Eddie Haymaker was an extraordinarily talented guitarist and the owner of Haymaker’s Guitar Shop in Ruston when I was growing up. He let me hang around in there experimenting with instruments, synthesizers and recording gear, and made me feel part of music since well before I took up music myself. His guitar shop was my universe when I was an elementary school child, and continued to be the center of my world through my teenage years growing up as a young musician in Ruston, out of place in my environment. My parents bought me a children's classical guitar from his shop when I was in 5th grade and I took lessons in a tiny room in the repair shop at the back of the place. This was some years before I took up guitar for real, it was my gateway into music, and as I would leave my lesson every week, my school friend Jeff Mangum would come into the same small room for drum lessons. It was how Jeff and I first discovered we were each into music, passing by each other in the back of Haymaker’s shop. My parents bought me a used RadioShack Moog synthesizer from Eddie for my 12th birthday, that was my first real instrument — with the synth and a boombox, I started writing and recording music and never looked back. I bought my first electric guitar from Eddie on layaway when I was 13, and I would go into the shop every day after school and he would let me take it out from the layaway storage and play it. This story is shared almost exactly by all of my Ruston-raised Elephant 6 colleagues, and all of my musical friends from Ruston. Along with the airwaves of the college radio station KLPI, which usually blasted inside his shop, Ruston was turned into a music town by this man and his crew. None of the music I have made, none of Elephant 6 would exist at all, without Eddie Haymaker's encouragement, support, teaching, networking and physical gear. He sat with me as a little kid and showed me how to press the strings and pluck a guitar. I vividly remember the nylon strings cutting my fingers, and Eddie telling me they would turn into calluses if I kept it up. (Eddie, I still have those calluses today!) He patiently showed teenage me how to use the demo 4-track on display in his shop, which I rented on weekends and taught myself to produce with. When I was 16 I cashed out my life savings and bought a 4-track of my own from Eddie, which kicked off a lifetime of recording for me and my friends (a few years later we founded Elephant 6 by direct cause-and-effect). Eddie was always so supportive. His reggae band The Rusty Dreads was the first group I ever followed, never missed a show — my friends and I would sneak into frat parties (a primary musical venue back then in the small college town) through the woods to watch them play. I met my lifelong best friend and musical collaborator, Bill Doss, in his shop, and spent literally almost every day of my childhood and teenage years admiring, learning from, and joking with Eddie as he operated his legendary guitar store... patiently teaching an enthusiastic little kid and everyone else what it means to be a musician: to be gentle, patient, competent, sincere, someone who builds community, someone who teaches and encourages the younger generation. He was the definition of cool (and probably taught me that word). Thank you forever, Eddie, for leading me to Music, for leading all of my friends there, and bringing musicians together in a small town that was really not cut out for freaks like us ??

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