With Strings Attached

With Strings Attached: The Art and Beauty of Vintage Guitars
Book by Jonathan Kellerman
2000 Asher Lap Steel
By Jonathan Kellerman
Photography by Jonathan Exley

With Strings Attached

Some offspring of Hollywood celebrities end up as dissipated wastrels. Bill Asher didn’t.

The son of film director William Asher and actress Elizabeth Montgomery of Bewitched fame, Bill is a first-class luthier with a brilliant eye for balancing form and function. This elegant guitar’s highly figured Hawaiian-koa-wood face and sinuous contours combine for a postmodern take on the classic Knutsen-Weissenborn lap steels.

Out of a limited run that arose from a collaboration with lap stylist/singer-songwriter Ben Harper, this is the first of two instruments that Asher trimmed in abalone. The eight-chambered body is Honduran mahogany, and the neck is reinforced with carbon graphite. Single-coil custom Asher S-I stacked pickups provide tremendous tone color – ranging from authoritative church-organ chords to snap, buzz, and bite worthy of a ’59 Les Paul. Harper was interested in a solidbody stage guitar that would evoke the warmth and aesthetics of his beloved Weissenborns. Asher attained that goal with panache.

**This book is available on Amazon.com