In August 2000, when I was 2 years old, my mother put me in a maroon velvet dress and stuck foam earplugs in my ears. She carried me through the backstage corridors of the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium—the same venue where, in 1964, James Brown gave one of the most ecstatic performances of his career. It’s where, in 1972, George Carlin first listed the “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television.”
My mother remembers the night in flashes. David Crosby—walrus mustache, smiling eyes—telling jokes. Bonnie Raitt’s aura of red hair. In the distance, the sound of Linda Ronstadt warming up. Sitting in a dressing room with Michael McKean and Christopher Guest, already in costume as Spinal Tap’s front men.
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That night, the auditorium was hosting the Friends of Fred Walecki benefit concert. These friends included Crosby, Raitt, and Ronstadt. Also Jackson Browne, Graham Nash, Emmylou Harris, and Warren Zevon. Three of the four original Eagles, who in this room in 1973 had performed their new album, Desperado, were there too.
One of the Eagles, Bernie Leadon, had helped put the event together. He had known Fred Walecki, my father, since they were teenagers, when Leadon started coming into Westwood Music, Dad’s musical-instrument shop in Los Angeles.
Dad had recently been diagnosed with Stage 4 throat cancer and had undergone a complete laryngectomy. Surgeons removed his vocal cords and created a hole in his throat that he used to breathe; to speak, he pressed an electronic buzzer against the side of his neck. If people gawked at him, he’d joke that everyone on his home planet sounded like this.
When Leadon had learned that my father was sick, he called Glyn Johns, another of Dad’s close friends and a groomsman at my parents’ wedding. Johns is the English sound engineer and producer who worked with pretty much every major rock band of the ’60s and ’70s—the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Who, the Eagles. He and Leadon suspected that my family was struggling to pay Dad’s medical bills, so they contacted his other friends and asked if they’d play a benefit concert for him. Everyone said yes. Dad’s classmate from Emerson Junior High School, Jeff Bridges, who’d recently starred as “The Dude” in The Big Lebowski, would be the evening’s emcee.
I wish I had been old enough to remember this night of thank-yous to my father. He was 51 when I was born; I’ve only known Dad with gray hair, and I have no memory of his original voice. But Browne remembers my father’s impeccable Jimmy Stewart impersonations; he remembers Dad as the guy who turned him on to Gibson guitars. At the concert, he performed “My Opening Farewell” on a guitar that had been assembled at Westwood Music. Dad had spent hours polishing it to give it the rich hue Browne wanted.
Crosby thought of my dad as his “guitar guru,” and like many of the performers that night, he praised my father for his friendship. “Fred’s helped a lot of people when they really needed it. Really needed it,” he said. He and Nash then played their song “Déjà Vu.”
Before the night could get too sentimental, Spinal Tap—who claimed that Dad had been the first person in the music business to ask them, Do you have to play so goddamn loud?—took the stage and gave an enthusiastic rendition of “Big Bottom.” I’m told I fell asleep sometime before the Byrds reunited.
After the concert, Rolling Stone declared that Fred Walecki had been “responsible for a night of music history,” even though his name “might not mean much, if anything at all, to music fans.” But my father has been there since the 1960s—doing his work so that some of America’s greatest artists can do theirs.
I. The Store
Dad never wanted to go into the family business, and his father, Hermann, didn’t want him to either. Hermann opened Westwood Music, a classical-instrument shop, in 1947, the year after Dad was born. But even as he taught my father to apply thin layers of shellac to wooden instruments until they were as reflective as still water, he’d say, This life is too small for you.
Maybe because no Walecki before him had lived a small life. Dad’s grandfather had been a cabinetmaker by day and a socialist revolutionary by night. His opera-singer aunt was the buxom blonde on The Three Stooges, and his sister, Christine—known as the Goddess of the Cello—was the first American musician to hold a concert in Castro’s Cuba. Dad’s brother, the only family member who wasn’t in the music industry, was one of the engineers behind the fastest jet-propelled aircraft in the world. Then there was Hermann, who spoke five languages, had a photographic memory, and was a world-renowned expert on and dealer of rare classical string instruments. As a young man, he’d trained to be a priest before getting recruited to play hockey for the Chicago Blackhawks.
Hermann Walecki, who founded Westwood Music, circa 1934 (Courtesy of Nancy Walecki)
But as I would half a century later, Dad grew up in Westwood Music. He loved it as I would; he memorized its smell of old wood and lacquer. When customers came in to have their violin bows rehaired, they’d sit beside Hermann and confess their problems while he worked. Hermann, still a devout Catholic who prayed on his knees every night, would listen, nod, and occasionally offer spiritual advice. The Walecki tract home nearby was decorated with harps and baroque instruments, and served as an artist’s salon of sorts: For a summer, the harpist Marcel Grandjany gave master classes in the living room and slept in the extra twin bed in Dad’s room. When my father was born, his parents received a year-long diaper service as a gift from their friend Harpo—whom Hermann knew more as a harp player than a Marx Brother.
Dad started working on Westwood Music’s sales floor in grade school. Once, he bragged to his father that he’d persuaded a man to buy more expensive strings than his cheap guitar required. Hermann made Dad chase the guy to his bus stop with his change and the strings he actually needed and could afford. When Dad was 12, he ran the shop while his parents traveled to Europe to find rare instruments. Sold $123 worth today, he reported in a letter to his parents, and added that he’d previously sold a piano, nine flutes, and a $350 drum set, and talked a guitar student into buying a banjo and learning that, too. As a teenager, he started a guitar-polish business, mixing his concoction in the garage with an eggbeater and a coffee percolator from Goodwill.
Westwood Music back then was a blend of old-world craftsman’s studio and museum. By the front door: a grandfather clock built by Hermann’s woodworker father. On the sales floor: trumpets displayed in antique jewelry cases, fine violins in velvet-lined cubbies. On the wall: violas da gamba (baroque cousin of the cello), violas d’amore (baroque cousin of the violin), an oil painting of Christine playing the cello as a child, a rare oud constructed when Istanbul was still Constantinople. And in a frame above the sales counter was one of Hermann’s favorite quotes, attributed to Goethe:
A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life, in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful which God has implanted in the human soul.
The store was the complete opposite of Ledbetter’s, the folk club that opened next door in the 1960s. Its idea of decor was putting a vintage Dodge truck on the roof. On its stage, against a brick wall, the then-unknown Steve Martin did his banjo-and-comedy routine and Henry John Deutschendorf Jr. gave one of his first performances in L.A. It was the owner of Ledbetter’s who suggested that Deutschendorf needed a stage name, which is how he became John Denver.
Chris Hillman, later of the Byrds, bought mandolin strings from Hermann when he was playing in what he described to me as a “horrible faux bluegrass band” for $100 a week at Ledbetter’s. Sixteen-year-old Bernie Leadon was in town to see Hillman rehearse when he spotted a National Tricone guitar in the window of Westwood Music. (These guitars, which have bodies made of metal, look like they belong to very hip aliens, but are a favorite of blues musicians.) My dad, also a teenager, was behind the counter, and Leadon thought he looked like a total prep: oxford shirt buttoned at the cuffs, dress slacks, penny loafers, brown hair neatly coifed. Leadon didn’t buy the guitar (he couldn’t afford it), but Westwood Music had made an impression.
Dad wanted to welcome the Ledbetter’s crowd drifting in and told Hermann that folk and rock were going to be big. But Hermann was hesitant about adding “that element,” as he called it, to the store while still accommodating violin buyers with white hair and season tickets to the symphony. He allowed Dad the National Tricone and some acoustic and electric guitars if he mostly tucked them away in a little-used music-lesson room. Dad paid Hermann rent for the space and furnished his mini guitar salon with an antique clock and table so that, he told me, “it looked kind of groovy.”
Dad ran Westwood Music alongside his father, with no designs to take it over. But then Hermann got lung cancer. Soon, suppliers were calling, asking why Westwood Music was so late on payment. Eighteen-year-old Dad told them that Hermann was on an extended trip to Europe. He ran the shop solo, and at night, he repaired instruments for extra money. He’d take cash straight out of the register to pay his father’s home nurses. The cancer spread to Hermann’s brain, and he died in 1967, when Dad was 20. Westwood Music was now his to run alone.
When he’d open the shop in the morning, Dad had no trouble with the lock at the top of the door. But when he’d bend down to undo the latch at the bottom, he’d get hit with a wave of nausea. The neon sign above the door still said Westwood Musical Instruments—Hermann Walecki, but the decal on the window now read Hermann Walecki & Son. He asked himself, How do you take your father’s place?
One day, a tour bus pulled up in front of the store and out walked the country singer Merle Haggard. He was a real-life outlaw who’d done time in San Quentin and a leader of the “Bakersfield Sound,” gritty country-western music that sounded nothing like the overproduced schmaltz Nashville was selling in the ’60s. “I’m here to get a really good violin,” he said. Dad took him to Hermann’s safe and brought out a centuries-old Carlo Antonio Testore. “Can you put steel strings on that?” Haggard asked. Hermann would have thought the request blasphemous, but Dad obliged. The violin went for $16,000; this one sale would cover much of the family’s remaining medical debt. Haggard was fiddling on the new strings when Marian, Dad’s mother, who’d taken over as the store’s bookkeeper, walked by.
“It sounds like that violin has steel strings on it,” she said. An accomplished classical violinist and wool-skirt woman of the old school, she was scandalized. But then Dad told her that Haggard was going to buy it. “It sounds marvelous,” she said.
Every time he sold one of his father’s violins, Dad would reinvest in new inventory—handmade guitars by the Spanish luthier José Ramírez; Traynor amps imported from Canada; and, for musicians who wanted their own sound system, Lamb Laboratories mixing boards from England (because Dad found that if he adjusted the board’s settings just right, it could “get you a really good Rolling Stones sound live”). Martin guitars, a favorite of folk musicians, had only a handful of authorized retailers in Los Angeles; Dad was one of them. As musicians started traveling more and more by plane, he found a man named Mark Leaf, who built fiberglass guitar cases on his kitchen table in Virginia. Dad told Leadon that a guitar in that case could fall onto an airplane tarmac without a scratch. (Leadon later learned this to be true.)
Dad would stock anything that delighted him—folk, rock, or otherwise. Dolmetsch, a company in England, made “the ultimate baroque recorders,” in his opinion, so he carried a full line of them. “If another music store sold it, then forget it, you know? But if it was the best and the coolest, then I would get it,” he said. He remembers a young guy dressed in jeans and a suit jacket coming into the shop one day and trying out the recorders. He’d take one out of the display case, play it, then slip it in his suit-jacket pocket before returning it. Again and again: out of the case, in the pocket, back in the case.
“Hey, man,” Dad said, and asked what the guy was doing.
“I wanted to see how comfortable it is, because I want to use it as a little traveling instrument,” Jackson Browne replied.
I met Browne at his recording studio in Los Angeles last summer. One of the first things he said to me was “You’re tall!” The last time we’d seen each other, I was 3 feet and still struggling to pronounce my r’s. He showed me his studio of vintage recording equipment and the ailing sunflower seedlings he was trying to grow on the windowsill for his grandson. “You are going to come back,” he told the slouching shoots. “Sorry I let this happen again.” We sat at a table in the studio’s kitchen while he made us a pot of coffee.
Browne has no idea what his younger self wanted to do with that recorder. “That was pretty harebrained,” he said. “I didn’t really learn to play recorder at all.” But back then, music was “the coin of the realm. The songs you could play or what you could do on a guitar was a kind of introduction to people and friends.” At little clubs like Ledbetter’s, musicians could listen to one another and ask, How do you do that?
All of them were so young. Browne was only 18 when he wrote “A Child in These Hills.” Linda Ronstadt was the same age when she moved from Tucson, Arizona, to Los Angeles. Crosby and Hillman were in their early 20s when, in 1965, the Byrds essentially launched the folk-rock genre with their cover of “Mr. Tambourine Man.” By 1970, Hillman and Leadon had fused country and rock together in the Flying Burrito Brothers. (Their pedal-steel player used Jimi Hendrix–esque fuzz distortion and was also an animator for The Gumby Show. His name was Sneaky Pete.)
Dad’s store had become part of a scene that was reshaping American popular music. But Dad was still trying to run a shop suitable for his father’s remaining violin clientele. Leadon took him aside. “Fred, you don’t need to dress like that, wearing a tie and white shirt and slacks,” he said. “These people that you’re dressing for are not the ones that are bringing in money. We are.” So Dad kept his father’s old instruments on the wall, his grandfather’s clock by the door, and the Goethe quote above the sales counter, but he placed his Martin guitars on stadium bleachers in the front window and started wearing Levi’s like the rest of them.
II. The Tools
In one of my favorite photographs of my father, he stands behind the counter of Westwood Music. A lute, a violin, and about a dozen guitars hang on the wall behind him, and the counter and cabinets overflow with papers. In his Levi’s and Waylon Jennings T-shirt, he is now the king of cool. And then there is his smile—the one I inherited—which takes up half his face. He looks at whoever is on the other side of the counter as though they are the center of his world.
Dad, in Levi’s and a Waylon Jennings T-shirt, behind the counter of Westwood Music (Courtesy of Nancy Walecki)
“People would come in and it was boom, that floodgate of stories would open,” Christopher Guest told me. Maybe Dad would launch into the one where he found himself in a Las Vegas greenroom with Elvis and women he took for “ladies of the night,” as he put it; or the time he dropped off a 12-string guitar at a recording session for Crosby, along with some regifted weed from a member of Ricky Nelson’s road crew, who’d cautioned that it was “one-hit dope.” The recording engineer called the next day to say they’d all ignored the warning, and when he drove home afterward, he couldn’t believe how long it was taking to get to his house, a few neighborhoods over. Then he saw the sign: Welcome to San Diego. Dad would follow customers to their car, just to finish a story.
My father was a competent musician, though never thought about doing it professionally. He learned some songs, including Browne’s “My Opening Farewell,” so he could show customers different aspects of a guitar’s tone. “He always really liked to show me that he could play it, which I felt very honored by, you know?” Browne said. “And that goes right along with him pulling out a guitar and saying, ‘I have to show you something. Check this out.’ And he would show you what invariably would be a phenomenal guitar.”
Check this out : the three-word portal into the Fred Walecki Experience. Check this out, and he’d hand John Entwistle his first-ever Alembic bass, a brand he would go on to use for many years with the Who. Check this out, and he’d pull out a guitar by Mark Whitebook or David Russell Young, luthiers he’d discovered in the mountains of Topanga Canyon, and whose instruments he sold to James Taylor and Gram Parsons. Glyn Johns bought a David Russell Young so he’d have a good acoustic guitar for the rock bands he worked with. (Johns showed me that guitar when I visited him at home last fall; he apologized for all the scratch marks. “Everybody’s played this,” he said. “Eric has played it; Jeff Beck’s played it; Jimmy Page has played it.”)
Guest does an imitation of my father rummaging around in his shop for the item he needs you to see. Wait, what’s this thing? he’ll say, as he unearths some treasure. My dad has been doing this for as long as I can remember. It was just over here [Dad lifts up a touring case, printed with B.D., from a Bob Dylan tour]. Maybe it’s under [peers behind a platinum record the Eagles gave him for One of These Nights]. I think it’s just [moves aside a priceless Spanish guitar by the 19th-century luthier Antonio de Torres Jurado]. Oh, here! The joy for my father is in watching other people check this out. This is why when he looks at me with pure excitement and asks me to try the soup he has made from three different types of Progresso, I accept the spoon from him.
I’ve tried to get my father to wax poetic about the music that his customers were making in the ’60s and ’70s. He was there for the birth of what is sometimes called the California Sound, a blend of country, bluegrass, folk, and rock that is utterly distinctive and nearly impossible to categorize. How to contain the Beach Boys and the Byrds, the Doors and the Mamas & the Papas, Bonnie Raitt and Joni Mitchell? Gram Parsons called his own sound Cosmic American Music, and maybe that’s a better term for the entire Los Angeles scene. The music, he said, would unite “longhairs, shorthairs, people with overalls, people with their velvet gear on.” Cosmic American Music, at least, captures the movement’s spiritual aspirations, while gesturing to the distance between its stars.
The Eagles. Don Felder is in the Westwood Music T-shirt. (Published in the Sydney Morning Herald)
Whatever you call it, this music defined an era, and it has stuck around since. On road trips, my friends and I, all under the age of 30, still roll down the windows and blast the Eagles. We act like Joni Mitchell wrote Blue just for us. I’ve asked my father to explain it to me, to offer a theory for why there, why then. How did so much good music come out of one place?
But he just shrugs. “I’m more of a jazz guy,” he says. This is true. My entire childhood, our car radio was under the tyranny of KJAZZ 88.1. His heroes are Bola Sete, Kenny Burrell, Johnny Smith, and Baden Powell. If I want to talk about the California Sound, he tells me, I should ask his friends who actually made it. So I brought the question to Browne, the bard of ’70s Los Angeles. What do you think did it?
“It was the guitars,” he said. “Anybody will tell you it’s the instruments.” He smiled and we both laughed. But then Browne stopped himself, considered. “I’m joking when I say it’s the guitars. But I’m also serious.”
Each instrument contains unwritten melodies and lyrics, he said. “They have personalities, and they will speak to you with those personalities.” (Dad likes to say that instruments have their own little souls.) Browne said, “Especially for a writer, you’ll get to play stuff that will unlock a way of playing, or a song that’s in that guitar that you might not write on another.”
Chris Hillman described Westwood Music to me as “the hardware store” of the L.A. music scene. Guest had a more romantic metaphor: Dad, he said, “was like a matchmaker,” a conduit between the human soul and the instrumental one. Where other salesmen might just tell you the price of a guitar, with my father, “it was about going so much further than that and thinking, I’m listening to you play, and it sounds like this might be a good guitar for you.”
When Joe Walsh brought in his Gibson J-200 to sell, Dad called up Emmylou Harris right away. “You need to have this guitar,” she remembers him telling her. It had that warm country sound he knew she’d like. “You play an A chord and it’s just like, pwah! ” Harris told me, miming fireworks. J-200s have been her signature guitar ever since. She added, “I sort of became the unofficial Gibson Girl.”
Early in her career, Bonnie Raitt was playing in little clubs and “wasn’t even expecting to do this for a living. It was kind of a hobby for me,” she told me. But Dad, she says, “showed me around and showed me the whole world of things that I could have.” He explained how different amplifiers could change her sound, and he took her to a trade show where he introduced her to the genteel, rather ancient chairman of Martin Guitar, C. F. Martin III.
Raitt has a mischievous, bawdy sense of humor. (As a kid, I understood I was never to repeat a Bonnie Raitt joke.) Dad told C. F. Martin that Raitt was a rising star and may be in need of a custom-made guitar. “What I really need is a custom-made IUD,” she said. Martin had no idea what she was talking about, so Dad jumped in: “Uh, it’s a lot like a Martin D-35.”
None of this could happen now. Today’s musicians don’t need Fred Walecki to call them up about a J-200 or broker a deal for a bespoke Martin. Like professional athletes, they have sponsorship deals and can get their equipment for free. But Dad “made it his business to know the latest on every single improvement of every keyboard, every amp, and every guitar,” Raitt said. “It’s not something I take for granted. We were all incredibly lucky to have someone on our side that had so much integrity.”
Dad never forgot having to chase down the man he’d upsold on fancy guitar strings; once the store was his, he kept prices reasonable—if anything, he charged too little. Warren Zevon once saw an antique harmonium in Westwood Music and asked Dad how much he wanted for it. “Fifty bucks,” he said. “Or nothing! Take your pick!” Zevon used to call them “Freddie’s Zen Prices.”
My father became an angel investor of sorts. When the future Eagle Don Felder first came to L.A., he needed to learn mandolin for an audition, so Dad loaned him one. As Felder writes in his memoir, my father told him to take it “if you have a chance for a job,” and wished him luck. He got the gig. The Eagles landed their first tour before they had the money to buy all the necessary equipment. Dad gave them a charge account.
III. The Scene
As usual, I’m staying in the Blue Room, named for its cerulean rug and robin’s-egg walls. And as usual, when I come down the staircase, Linda Ronstadt is in her favorite armchair.
Her San Francisco living room feels like the inside of an Impressionist painting: pastel-hued, soft at the edges. It smells of cut flowers and the black tea she prefers to coffee. An icon of Our Lady of Guadalupe keeps watch from the mantel; a painting of her cat wearing a crown overlooks her shelves and shelves of books. Outside in the garden, fog cradles the roses she brought with her from one of her grandfather’s ranches in the San Gabriel Valley.
She has known me since I was born, when my parents were still trying to make my double name, Nancy Kathryn, catch on. When I began singing as a child, Linda introduced me to Brian Wilson’s harmonies and Maria Callas’s vocal placement, and, unbeknownst to me, paid for my lessons. Every time I visit, we talk about books (most recently, Anna Karenina) and boys (I talk, she listens). We watch TV and go to bed early. I’m just Nancy now to most people, but to Linda, I’m still Nancy Kathryn.
She has known my father since the 1960s, when she started coming to his shop as the lead singer in the somewhat bumbling folk-rock group the Stone Poneys. In a feeble attempt to sound like a rock band, they bought electric pickups for their acoustic guitars. Dad, she recalled, “gave us the same attention he gave to the Byrds.”
The two became friends, and whether she was looking for a new guitar or just some company, “he always showed up when he was needed. And he was always needed.” In the late ’70s, a powerful storm hit Malibu, washing away the glass-enclosed tearoom attached to Linda’s house. Dad arrived with sandbags, quick-dry cement, and a stockpile of Mexican food from Lucy’s El Adobe. Years later, he was the one who drove her home to Tucson after her breakup with George Lucas.
When Linda pictures Westwood Music, she thinks of an old line she loves: “Music is a conspiracy to commit beauty.” Someone was always fingerpicking, an electric guitar was always humming—musicians were always conspiring.
Jackson Browne, Glyn Johns, and Dad outside the store (Courtesy of Nancy Walecki)
People didn’t necessarily come to buy something. Westwood Music was a daytime clubhouse of the L.A. scene, Bernie Leadon said. Emmylou Harris called it “the watering hole.”
It “was a place where people saw people, made friendships, made connections, and it was all through your dad,” Harris told me. “He just put out that vibe—that sense of it was always about music, the musicians.”
This was an analog world, a world in which serendipity was still possible. “Sometimes you’d go in and you’d see Jackson or Ry Cooder and all these different people that were hanging out there, and suddenly it would turn into half a day, and you’d go in the back room and you could just sort of sit and jam together,” Leland Sklar, a bass player who has backed artists including Linda, Browne, and James Taylor, told me. Artists would catch up, talk about what they were working on, and then head off to their respective recording sessions, maybe at the Complex or Village Recorders nearby. Cooder, a slide-guitar virtuoso, would bring a six-pack and jam. Joni Mitchell popped by for pizza. Even Neil Young, known as something of a hermit, stopped in.
The store came with a bemused den mother, Marian, known to all as “Mrs. Walecki.” She’d do the store’s payroll while musicians in the adjacent guitar room tried out new instruments by playing “Stairway to Heaven.” (It was always “Stairway to Heaven.”) One time, Mick Taylor, the bony, long-haired guitarist for the Rolling Stones, asked Marian where the loo was. That depends, she said, with total sincerity. “Are you a boy or girl?”
Mark Bookin, the store’s senior salesman for decades, described Dad as the “master of ceremonies” at each day’s gathering. But Dad says he thought of himself more as the store’s maître-d’hôtel. Let me sit so-and-so here, near the producer from Asylum Records, he’d think. Or: These two guitar players might sound good together; let me introduce them. He connected Linda and Johns because he thought they might make a good record, and shortly after, they did—We Ran. “Music-store owners don’t do that,” Johns told me.
My father and his store, Guest said, “accelerated everything. It made everything better, because it provided a second home and a place where people could feel appreciated, and that’s a big thing.” When I asked Dad what time Westwood Music would close at night, he shook his head. It closed when its crowd wandered elsewhere—usually to the Troubadour, a West Hollywood club and the scene’s nighttime nexus. Dad remembers leaning against the bar and running through his celebrity impersonations: Jimmy Stewart, John Wayne, Kirk Douglas. “You know, really funny shit,” Browne said. Dad had to get up early the next morning to run a business, while the rest of them slept in. But Ned Doheny, a singer-songwriter and Browne’s former musical partner, said, “He was as much a part of that scene as anybody who ever made a record during that period of time.”
By the mid-’70s, “it was all happening,” Dad says. The Eagles and Jackson Browne were playing arenas around the world. Linda would rush home from one string of concerts, dump out the contents of her suitcase, pack for an entirely different climate, and head out on the road again. Dad sold her a portable, battery-powered Pignose amplifier, about the size of a lunch box, that she and her band could use for jamming between gigs. He sent the Beach Boys cases of Ricola cough drops to preserve their voices on tour.
As his friends’ music moved deeper and deeper into rock, Dad phased out his remaining pure-folk inventory—ceding the folkies to a music store he’d been competing with nearby. Not long after, a roadie for the Rolling Stones called and asked Dad if he could come to a Warner Bros. soundstage, where they were recording. Keith Richards wanted a guitar with a B-string bender—a device that musicians put inside their guitars to emulate the sound of a pedal steel. Dad’s car was in the shop, so he hopped in his mother’s station wagon. When he got there, he mentioned that he was going to see the blues duo Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee at the Ash Grove, and asked if the Stones wanted to come. They piled into Marian’s station wagon. When they walked into the club, Dad saw that the other music store had set up a kiosk inside. “And here I come with the Rolling Stones,” Dad says, with that smile that takes up half his face.
IV. The Confidant
How do I describe my father, a man who, if he could, would crawl out of these pages and meet you himself? In my head, he comes with his own theme music—a rollicking kazoo melody with a boogie-woogie bass line. If he finds himself around someone he feels is taking themselves too seriously, he will hover his finger about one inch from their face and singsong, I’m not touching you! until they are disarmed into being nothing but themselves. When faced with adversity, he will say, God’s not on a coffee break. And if presenting a plan, work-around, or detour that will inspire the fear of death in his companion but ultimately be a lot of fun: Let me show you a cheatsy way to do that.
Dad was never one to say no to an adventure. Over the years, he went skiing with the band Poco and tuna-fishing with the Doors. Wix Wickens, the keyboardist for Paul McCartney, refused to join my father on his frequent trips to Mexico, because, “it being your dad, jaunts would turn into escapades would turn into incidents.”
It was on one such trip that he met my mother, who was sitting at the next table at a seafood restaurant. She was a Stanford grad and a celebrated Western-style horseback rider who had grown up on a Nevada cattle ranch about 100 miles from the nearest gas station. He was a very loud man wearing a hat that resembled a marlin. It had a fin.
Fred Walecki “incidents” were not necessarily fueled by drugs or debauchery. (Dad told me he smoked weed only between 1977 and 1979. He got it for free from Crosby’s dealer.) Instead, his adventures were inspired by what Wickens described as my father’s “benign chaos.” Dad’s policy: “If it seemed to me that a nice person wouldn’t hold it against me, I would do it.”
Jimmy Buffett once called and said he’d been offered a last-minute stadium gig. He asked if Dad could replicate his band’s entire stage setup—including the congas—in record time. Buffett’s box truck couldn’t fit all the equipment, so they loaded up Dad’s station wagon with gear and strapped the congas to the roof. They paused long enough to paint Freddy and the Fishsticks World Tour ’81 on the side.
People turn to folklore to describe my father: He’s the Pied Piper, the maven, or, as Ned Doheny calls him, the trickster—a mischievous entity who “tracks pollen all over the place, and all kinds of things happen.”
A publicity photo for Linda Ronstadt’s album Simple Dreams. Sunburn courtesy of Dad. (Alamy)
One day in 1977, he showed up at Linda’s house in Malibu with some fresh fruit and some excellent marijuana. Lulled by the strong weed, the sun, and my father, Linda stayed outside too long and got horribly sunburned. The next day, she had to take publicity photos for her album Simple Dreams. In the iconic shot of Linda (her ex George Lucas’s favorite, she says), she looks over her left shoulder, lips parted, a white flower in her hair—but whenever she looks at the photo, she sees the sunburn she got with Dad. My father and his pollen.
But then there is my father, quiet, beamed back down to Earth. When I was 18, I got a bad concussion that took me out of college for my first semester. My doctor didn’t want me to fly home for a while, so I called Dad one night from the other side of the country, panicked that my brain would never return to normal. “What are you looking at right now?” he asked. Pine trees, I said. Some shrubs. I’m sitting on a bench outside. “What’s the temperature like where you are?” It’s nice. Cool but not cold. It was early fall in the Northeast, a new sensation for a Californian. “What does the air smell like?” Wood chips. “I know it’s hard, but your only job right now is to stay in this moment and not future-trip. In this moment right now, the one God is giving you, the air smells nice, the temperature is good, you’re somewhere beautiful.” We kept talking and he slowly untangled problems that, before I called, had felt insurmountable. He signed off that night, as he usually does, by saying not I love you, but I’m loving you—love, active.
I know now that he had dozens of conversations like this, with dozens of musicians, decades before he became a father.
Anyone “can feel like the stowaway in the trunk of a great enterprise,” Browne told me. But an artist, maybe especially, needs someone who makes them believe that they’re worthy, that it’s all going to be okay, Mac McAnally, a singer-songwriter and longtime member of Jimmy Buffett’s band, told me. “Fred can make you believe it’s going to be okay.”
Freddy and the Fishsticks on the road, 1981 (Courtesy of Nancy Walecki)
Joni Mitchell stopped touring in the 1980s, and in the ’90s told Dad she was going to do her last-ever public performance, at the 1995 New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival. Her songbook incorporates about 50 different tunings. “I’d tune to the numbers in a date, I’d tune to a piece of music that I liked on the radio, I’d tune to birdsongs and the landscape I was sitting in,” she said in a 1996 interview. “I’d work out these wonderful fresh harmonic movements, only it was a pain in the butt to perform and I felt like I was always out of tune.” She didn’t want to do it anymore.
But Dad told her he might have just the right tool: Roland’s new VG-8, which could electronically alter a guitar’s sonic output and, crucially, memorize tunings. Mitchell could keep her guitar in standard tuning, then push a button for “Big Yellow Taxi,” say, and the VG-8 would convert the sound of each string to match that tuning. Dad knew Mitchell had had polio as a child and still suffered from muscle weakness, so he built her a guitar from lightweight spruce (commonly used in violin making) and placed the VG-8 inside. He painted the guitar his favorite color, British racing green. She named it “Green Peace.”
What she thought would be her swan song “turned into the first performance in a whole new period,” she said in that 1996 interview. She used the VG-8 to make the guitar sounds on Taming the Tiger, giving her “access to all kinds of possibilities in keeping with the way I hear guitar, which is like a full orchestra, with the treble like a brass section and the lower strings like the viola, cello, and bass.” To another reporter, she said, “This instrument is going to be my savior.” She used my father’s name in one of the album’s lyrics—she calls him “Freddie”—and, in the liner notes, thanked him for “rekindling my desire to make music.”
Dad has always been “genuinely interested in people,” Linda told me in her living room. “And when they came in, he’d talk to them, and they confided in him.”
I leaned in, ready for a flood of rock secrets. “What would they confide in him about?”
“Well, I don’t know! He kept it secret.” She smiled. “He kept my stuff secret. But he always knew the undercurrents that were going on and band dynamics and stuff like that.”
And if necessary, “he’d tell them when they were full of shit. He had no reservations about that,” Bookin, the store’s longtime salesman, said. Once, at a recording session, Crosby played Dad a vocal track he’d just cut and was clearly proud of. “Your voice is great, but were you reading it?” Dad asked. Unmemorized lyrics are the height of laziness, in my father’s eyes.
“Oh fuck you,” Crosby said. (The two remained good friends until Crosby’s death.)
My father has a low tolerance for what he perceives as stupidity, and over time, drug use in the L.A. music scene got stupider and stupider. To hear my father and his friends talk about it, the era can be divided into B.C. and A.C.: Before Cocaine and After Cocaine. When Weed Guy showed up at the party, that could be fun. Mushroom Guy, too. Even Acid Guy. But when Cocaine Guy started coming to parties, Dad said, he drained the scene of its remaining innocence. The music got self-indulgent. People would talk over one another and think they were having a conversation.
Doing a line with someone “was like having a cup of coffee” with them, Mickey Raphael, Willie Nelson’s harmonica player, told me. It took everyone a while to notice the scene darkening. In June 1979, Dad’s friend Lowell George, of the band Little Feat, died of an overdose. Dad was an Eagle Scout by the scene’s standards, but he realized that “we couldn’t keep going at this pace” and got sober that August. “He was one of the first people I knew to really get sober and just draw the line,” Browne said. “The rest of us, it was years before anybody decided that was the problem.”
Dad still went to all the parties; he just brought IBC root beer to drink. Once, at a gathering at Crosby’s house, he was being so loud, so boisterous, cracking such awful jokes, that another party guest, Neil Young’s producer and recording engineer Niko Bolas, assumed he was high on some new drug they all needed to try. Raphael said that Dad’s particular brand of abstinence “turned a little light on with all of us, saying, Hmm, if Fred can do it, then maybe I can.” You could be clean and “still able to hang with the musos.” Dad would help heroin addicts detox at the little country home he and his father built together in the 1950s, and started a weekly gathering of the alcoholics he mentored, who nicknamed it “The Gol Darn Dingy Deal,” after my father’s catchphrase when facing a setback. (“What’s the gol darn dingy deal?” he will ask when, say, the car doesn’t start.)
In 1986, when Crosby was out of prison on drug charges and newly sober, Dad joined him on a white-water-rafting trip. That vacation, Crosby’s wife, Jan Dance Crosby, told me, was “really the first time we actually did something for fun after working so hard to get sober.” Dad was proof that life didn’t end—indeed, could become more joyful—after sobriety. “He wasn’t shy about sharing that joy, and he also wasn’t preachy,” she said. “All he was was a friend.”
A photo I took at the Newport Folk Festival in 2022, right before Joni Mitchell took the stage. Dad is holding Green Peace, the guitar he made for her. (Courtesy of Nancy Walecki)
Dad became a Christian around that time. This, too, started in the shop. When Larry Myers, a musician and pastor, came to Los Angeles, someone told him that if he wanted to meet people, he had to go to Westwood Music and meet my father. The two became friendly, and Myers invited Dad to hear his band at the Vineyard Church. Today Vineyard is an international body of churches, but at the time one of its only chapters met in Dad’s old junior high school. Members of Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue made up the worship band; Myers had helped bring Dylan himself to Christ. As Dad listened to the band play that Sunday, “I realized I had tears in my eyes,” he recalled. “I realized that I really always—I always loved God, and it was time to make friends” with him.
When my parents met, in 1990, Dad bragged that he was building an off-the-grid home in Topanga Canyon, in the mountains outside L.A. My mom, Kathy, made it clear, in her quiet way, that she knew a lot more about off-the-grid living than he did. Together, they finished the home where I was raised, surrounded by sage and overlooking the Pacific. When the solar power inevitably went out, Mom would put on a headlamp and start the generator; when our water pressure dropped, she’d go outside and bang on the pipe with a rock; when rattlesnakes came into the house, she’d take care of it. She created the conditions for Dad to continue doing his work. He bought a 1970s GMC motor home on eBay (shag carpets, corduroy seats), which became a guest room for family, friends, wandering souls, and the addicts he mentored. Mom organized a family trip to Ohio to drive it home. At one point, she held the broken door closed with a piece of rope so it wouldn’t fly open on the highway.
Throughout my childhood, and to this day, Dad regularly reads his favorite book, The Greatest Thing in the World, a pocket-size theological meditation on love as defined in First Corinthians. It was his father’s favorite too. And now it is mine. The section about a love that “thinketh no evil” reminds me of my father:
Love “thinketh no evil,” imputes no motive, sees the bright side, puts the best construction on every action. What a delightful state of mind to live in! What a stimulus and benediction even to meet with for a day! To be trusted is to be saved. And if we try to influence or elevate others, we shall soon see that success is in proportion to their belief of our belief in them. For the respect of another is the first restoration of the self-respect a man has lost; our ideal of what he is becomes to him the hope and pattern of what he may become.
Dad does not describe the people in his life as musicians, mathematicians, or zoologists; they are the drummer “who understands how to swing on a metaphysical level,” “the mathematician who practically ran the Aerospace Corporation,” and the “only person Dennis Wilson trusted” to care for the Asian small-clawed otters he kept in his swimming pool.
My father sees us as the people we wish to be, and he will tolerate us being nothing less. In 2022, Dad was one of Mitchell’s guitar techs at her surprise Newport Folk Festival comeback, and he let me tag along. At a rehearsal, Marcus Mumford was sitting a few feet away from us, behind the congas, and I whispered to my father how much I loved his music. “Go talk to him,” Dad said. “He’s Marcus Mumford, Dad,” I said. He grinned. “And you’re Nancy Walecki.”
V. When It Was Ours
Westwood Music was always a family enterprise. Dad told customers to check this out on the sales floor while my brother and I ostensibly helped take inventory, but mostly built forts in a loft above the amp room. We’d read Tales From the Crypt surrounded by touring cases, cross-legged on the British-racing-green carpet. Upstairs, in her bookkeeping office next to the repair shop, my mom kept the Fred Walecki Experience running.
Musicians would sit on the store’s leather couches, playing guitars and drinking the coffee we made in our Mr. Coffee machine. I saw how much the electrolarynx frustrated my father, but he continued to be the voice of the shop. He once came up behind Browne while he tried a guitar; got real close, up to his ear; then buzzed: “Can you believe that tone?”
By the 1990s, the store was struggling, as professional musicians got more and more free equipment through sponsorship deals. A Guitar Center opened down the street—a black hole sucking up our business, to hear my parents describe it. “Gui-Target,” Dad called it. Later, people started buying instruments online, but Dad wasn’t interested in building a web presence. If an instrument has its own little soul, how could you buy it without spending time with it in person?
Dad in his Malibu studio. Westwood Music has closed, but he still repairs instruments for clients such as Christopher Guest, Robby Krieger of the Doors, and the Edge. (Peyton Fulford for The Atlantic)
Dad sold Westwood Music in 2010, and the new owners closed it during the pandemic and never reopened it. Dad and I went back to the store last year, to clear out the last of his belongings: the leather couch my brother and I had carved our initials into with a paper clip; the scoreboard-size photograph of Dad, sitting backwards on a chair, talking to Lyle Lovett; the neon Westwood Musical Instruments—Hermann Walecki sign. I thought of something Christopher Guest had said. Someone should put a plaque outside the building: Westwood Music was here. 1947–2021.
I told Dad I was sorry that my brother and I hadn’t carried on the family business. It felt like we’d failed him and the generations before him. Dad shook his head and reminded me that his father hadn’t wanted him to take over the store. Besides, being here didn’t even make him that sad, he said, because the new owner’s iteration was so different. “But when it was ours,” he told me, “we did it well.”
Dad is 78 now, and still repairs instruments for customers like Guest, Sklar, Robby Krieger of the Doors, the Edge, and anyone else resourceful enough to find his new shop, unlisted on Google Maps and located inside a converted greenhouse at a succulent nursery in Malibu. Dad brings lettuce from home to feed the rabbits that run beneath the pallets of cacti; the other tenants include a glassblower, a clothing designer, a painter, and a sculptor. When he leaves home in the morning, he will say, “I’m off to do my father’s work”—referring to both Hermann and his heavenly father.
His repair shop still smells of Westwood Music’s old wood and lacquer, along with the ocean and the faded paper in his boxes of ephemera. (My favorite piece is a photograph of Crosby, Stills, and Nash’s recreational baseball team, the Hoovers—a cocaine joke, Dad had to explain to me.) He keeps his father’s Goethe quote above his workbench, where he recently repaired a cello from 1876. “You know what’s interesting? I realized that’s what I like to do,” he told me. If he didn’t love guitar players so much, he’d work only on cellos. Repairing them reminds him of his father.
This past winter, I stopped by with some lunch for us to share. He was chatting with a customer while he lowered the strings on the man’s guitar closer to the fretboard so it would be easier to play. Dad told a joke and offered the man some advice on a problem he’d been having with his wife, then the two of them discussed Romans 8. When it was time for the man to go, my father told him a story all the way to his car.
Dad and I ate our sandwiches, and I mentioned how much I missed singing. He said that I should hang around more jazz clubs, because “parties don’t happen by themselves,” and that I should join a sailing club, because he suspected that I missed the ocean. (I have never expressed an interest in sailing, but maybe now I’ll learn.) We searched for a guitar pick he wanted to show somebody, from the set he’d custom-made for the Beach Boys. When we locked up the shop for the day, he looked tired but pleased. He’d be back again tomorrow.
This article appears in the September 2025 print edition with the headline “My Father’s Work.”
