Ron Farrar started playing guitars from a young age. Then he started making them.
The guitars hanging and sitting around his home in Huntly East are made with love, and played with love. One of his best is a seemingly booze-themed electric guitar with a Jack Daniel’s logo engraved into the body.
“The wood is actually off a huge wine barrel. The back of it was off a barn, I think. It’s quite rough,” Farrar said.
“I took the body into a place in Hamilton and said to him, can I get [the Jack Daniel’s logo] done with the laser? As he was engraving it, you could smell the wine or whatever that was in the barrel.”
“I don’t drink Jack Daniel’s, by the way.”
Farrar has lived in Huntly for most of his life. He now lives with his wife Shirley, and sees his son Steve often. Music is just a part of his world, he said.
“If you haven’t got music, you haven’t got anything, really. The first thing I do in the morning is turn the radio on. I listen to music in the car, same thing, you know, music in the car all the time.”
He began as a young teenager with no guitar teacher and no books. Almost everything Farrer knows, he learnt by ear and memory. Eventually he found himself in a band during his college years.
“In 1962, we became resident artists at Starlight Ballroom in Hamilton. So that was a regular thing for us.”
The Starlight Ballroom was a big deal in Hamilton in the 50s, 60s, and 70s. The venue has regular events including dances and socials.
“We had a guitar and a big fender piggyback amp. So we had plenty of noise, but just about the only thing you could get for any effects was a tape echo unit, which gave you some of the echoes and the effects.”
Back then, and pretty much all the way through the rest of the 20th century, rock and roll and modern rock were very prevalent in his sets. However, Farrar said he always had a quiet love of country music, and is now making an effort to bring it into his playing.
He now plays once a month, sharing the country music he’s discovered with Huntly and Waikato audiences.
“The people in the town are really friendly and everybody knows one another,” Farrar said about Huntly.
“And the amount of people that are musical or have musical talent in Huntly, it’s quite an unbelievable amount of people that sort of just come out of the woodwork. They play guitars, mouth organs, all sorts.”
by Sarah Morcom
