'83 Gold Star

I wanted to document the story of my main banjo. a 1983 Gold Star GF-100HF

I got really fortunate with the original purchase on this. I picked it up in Feb of 21 during COVID at an auction near my home in Towson MD. Because of quarantine conditions, Alex Cooper (the auction house) wasn't having in person auctions. Everything was being displayed and sold online. My Dad had noticed there was a Gold Star banjo for sale and sent me a link. The current bid on it was $300 and I guessed it was a newer Taiwanese made model and probably worth around $600. You could make appointments and go inspect the items, but I thought, what the heck, I'll put a max reserve of $500 on it and if someone bids higher, I'm not gonna worry about it. Ultimately I got lucky and ended up getting it for $375. 

When I picked it up, I immediately noticed it was in pretty good shape and felt pretty good about the purchase, but then I got home and took a look at the serial number and discovered it was a 1983 model which made it in an outstanding pickup.

As I do with every other banjo purchase, I took it up to my buddy Mike Munford's shop in PA. On top of being a super nice guy, he's an amazing player and the ultimate banjo setup specialist in the mid Atlantic. I'm extremely fortunate to live less than an hour from his place. So the first thing he noticed was that the string packs in the case had some interesting handwriting on them which led the to following post in Facebook...

"The Kids are Alright...

Back in the mid 80s, two kids stocking the store at Baltimore Bluegrass would put custom sets of banjo string packs together. When I bought an old banjo at an auction last week, there were lots of remnants from the old Baltimore Bluegrass store still in the case. When I showed the new banjo and accessories to Mike Munford (pictured), he was immediately drawn to the two sets of custom string packs in the case.

The one on the left with green lettering was labeled by Mike Munford (awarded banjo player of the year by the International Bluegrass Music Association in 2013) the pack on the right with the red lettering was labeled by Ned Luberecki (IBMA banjo player of the year in 2018)"

So after reminiscing a little bit about Baltimore Bluegrass, Mike began his usual setup. He replaced a couple frets, put in a new nut and pip, tightened the head, made sure the tension and fit was good with the rods, the ring and rim in general and he did a little slot work on the bridge. As he worked through all this, the tone really started to pop. But we decided to experiment with bridges a little and when we tried a Scorpion bridge from Silvio Ferretti suddenly BOOM! That was it. It had this perfect quintessential vintage tone that I look for in bluegrass banjos and it became my #1 banjo.

To describe it a little more, it's got a mahogany neck and resonator, a Presto tailpiece, rosewood fingerboard and again, at the time of purchase it was in really nice shape. There were very few (if any) scratches in the finish. (I've put a couple dings in it since then). It does have some cheap elements about it. For instance the binding on the side of the neck is actually painted and there's a few other things about it that wouldn't be there if it was made by a quality luthier. But it's a beautiful sounding banjo and it's always felt fairly easy to play.

One of the things I immediately liked about this banjo was it's slender neck. I had previously owned an 80s Gold Star that didn't sound as nice and had a really bulky neck. The dimensions of this neck felt really comfortable in my hand. But it also had a slight ridgeline or what I thought was a crack/bump in the finish that ran below an area from about the 4th to the 7th fret and seemed to get more noticeable the more I played it. And also, during the summer months, not only did that ridge line seem to pop out but the finish on the neck got really sticky. (way more so then the finish on other banjos I've owned over the years)

As that ridge line grew more and more noticeable I decided to get something done about it and took it to my friend Frank Schoepf in Manchester. Along with being another incredibly nice guy, he's a tremendous wealth of knowledge on all sorts of vintage banjos and he does really nice wood work and instrument repair. We decided to remove the finish on the neck and he immediately noticed that the ridge line was actually the truss rod cover popping out of a slight crack in the very thin neck. Apparently a previous owner had actually worked on the profile of this neck and in filing it down he accidentally got too close to the truss rod. 

So Frank ended up cutting a shim of mahogany wood, plugging the crack and gluing it in place and then he removed the original finish which he said had been applied after the neck alterations and were probably the cause of the extra stickiness that I'd felt when using it during the humid summer months. 

Now the neck feels AWESOME, no stickiness or weird bumps, it's got the slender profile that I like and the tone of this thing is just incredible. It's got a 40 year old vintage sound that has qualities about it that I don't think you can get from a newer instrument. I'm sure that some day I'll run across another banjo that will just knock my socks off, but for now I feel pretty content playing my 83 Gold Star and I don't have any desire (currently) to seek out a pre-war Gibson. 

Here's a clip of me playing my '83 Gold Star on a Bob Dylan cover that I did with some friends in the summer of '21... a couple months after picking it up and restoring this banjo. 

Let me know what you think.

Roxy

(Originally posted on Facebook - 8/22/22)

I never had a dog before Roxy. I was a cat person

About 11 years ago (early 2011), Ellen approached me about getting a dog for JJ and her to run with. I immediately thought of family friends who had dogs and seemed to constantly be training their pets, doing long daily walks, cleaning up after them and getting up in the middle of the night for bathroom breaks (regardless of the weather). I told Ellen I wasn’t a fan of being a dog parent, but if she and JJ would be responsible for 100% of its care, I wouldn’t stand in the way. So Ellen and JJ went looking for a dog... seeking out good running companion traits... and eventually found a cute little border collie mix picked from a group of rescued puppies out of Tennessee. She had a white head, pink speckled nose and brindle markings on her body. I think we called her Peanut for a little while but eventually named her Roxy.

When we first brought Roxy home there were suddenly two huge issues. First of all, unbeknownst to us, she was in extremely poor health and we spent a significant amount of time and money just keeping her alive the first two or three months. Secondly, for reasons we've never been able to figure out, our son Koby has always had a serious dog phobia. So when Ellen and JJ selected Roxy it was in part because she seemed calmer and more “laid back” then the other puppies in her litter. Ellen thought that was her personality and it might be easier to get Koby acclimated to us having a dog if she was less lively than a typical pup. Unfortunately, we soon learned that Roxy was more sedate because she was deathly ill and as soon as we were able to nurse her back to health, she was just as rambunctious as any typical border collie. So no matter what methods we tried, Koby’s anxieties with dogs intensified as we broke Roxy into our daily home life and they didn't improve for years to come.

On top of that there were other typical new dog issues with bathroom training, dealing with our cats (who weren’t big Roxy fans) and household items getting chewed up. It was pretty chaotic being new dog owners for about a year at our place. We thought many times about giving her up for adoption with another family. But ultimately, we had concerns about her ending up in a pound and we felt committed to making our family’s dog situation work.

I’m glad we did.

Ellen and JJ did eventually begin running with Roxy in the trails behind our house and she proved to be a great companion. She could run five miles or more, staying close by and easily keep up with her running buddies. I wasn’t running at the time, but I was doing a lot of mountain biking. I discovered that Roxy could actually keep up with me on mountain bike rides too. I started to enjoy bombing down the fire roads and single-track trails in Loch Raven with my border collie running right in tow.

Over time, even though I had sworn away from it at the start, I began to help with Roxy’s day to day care and grew to appreciate having a family dog. She would get so excited when you fed her or took her for a walk or really did anything just to engage with her. It was hard not to appreciate her enthusiasm. I learned that dogs actually smile when they’re excited about something. (For some reason I didn’t realize this until I had my own dog) and that made her enthusiasm all the more infectious. She LOVED to take rides in cars and trucks. She LOVED when our cleaning lady Laura would come over. She LOVED visiting my parents. She LOVED it when any family member or girlfriend would come home and she could hear the garage door opening and closing as they came in. She LOVED it when musicians would visit and play at our house with me. She LOVED going to our bedroom every night and sleeping with Ellen and me. In general, Roxy just loved doing STUFF… and stuff was doing literally ANYTHING with her family that didn’t involve sitting idly and staring at a computer for hours at a time.

As I grew more comfortable with Roxy, I was eventually diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. In addition to diet and exercise recommendations, my doctor advised me to take more frequent walks. So in 2018 I started taking daily hikes to the lake behind our house with Roxy. It was therapeutic and Roxy loved it. I felt like we had always made efforts to get her out as much as we could, but now I was religious about it. Day in, day out, Roxy and I did our little 1.5 mile loop by the lake, usually in the late afternoon, but sometimes late at night using moonlight to see the trail. It felt like we owned that path. Over the past couple years I’ve taken countless pictures and videos of Roxy documenting the different scenery back there as the seasons change.

Roxy even helped me with music. During the pandemic I made a lot of remote videos to help satiate my desire to make music with friends. Instead of having everyone play in place at the same time, I filmed people playing individually with click tracks and then I’d combine them into multi panel videos and make it appear as if we were all playing together. No surprise, half a dozen of those clips have guest appearances from my favorite canine.

My parents were also big Roxy fans. They live about 10 miles down the road and always seemed to enjoy it when Roxy would come over for visits. My mom would keep dog treats at their house and always made it a point to feed Roxy when she showed up. As my mom began to struggle with a heart condition in the months before her passing, I would bring Roxy over for visits and I think the dog treat feeding ritual helped Mom feel a little better as her health began to fail.

Roxy’s own health began to fail her earlier this year. She was diagnosed with some form of dog lymphoma in June. She still displayed the same enthusiasm and doggy smile when you would do STUFF, even if she had thrown up minutes before and was obviously feeling sick. She was a doggy smilin trooper and would do everything in her power to join me on our daily walks through Loch Raven. But as the cancer got worse, it ultimately made everything in her daily life more difficult and painful and we finally had to put her down today.

I’m gonna miss Roxy like crazy. We’ve recently lost both our last cat (Pikachu) and Roxy and we’re probably gonna be without pets for a while at this stage in our lives. But if we decide to get another pet in a couple years. I’m probably gonna push for a dog. I’m a dog person now.

RIP sweet girly

Roxy Bonta

3/2/11 – 8/22/22