When Randy Setty suggested that he teach guitar back in 1975, John Lippolis figured it would last “about two weeks.”
But when Wilson Freight in South Charleston began to go under, taking his real job with it, Lippolis, whose main musical outlet had been playing “folk masses” at St. Raphael Church, had reason to be patient.
Forty years later, he’s still at it.
Sitting with him in his sunny teaching studio in a Ward Street home long ago converted into the Guitar Attention Center, understanding Lippolis success seems easy like Sunday morning.
As friendly as the day is long, he is a rolling musical conversation. Yes, there is his well-known encyclopedic knowledge of the Beatles and the personal trivia that “Help!” is the first song he taught himself.
But his knowledge of the New Christy Minstrels, The Association, Leslie Gore and the Beach Boys can light the inner lava lamps of a whole generation of his contemporaries. Although that didn’t stop him from teaching the next generation tunes by KISS, Motley Crue and Guns N’ Roses.
A conversation with him feels like flipping through the metal pages of the old juke boxes that were mounted at restaurant tables skimming for names of groups and songs, always finding something to pause and smile over.
Paging back through his teaching years, Lippolis smiles as well. Were it not for teaching guitar “I would never have this many friends,” he said. Wherever he goes out, shopping or socially, his students, most now fellow performers, are there.
His greatest pleasure, he said, is “telling stories and teaching kids to do things they never thought they could do.”
The stories are part of exposing them to the fun music can be.
“For years, I wouldn’t let any kid say ‘practice,’ ” he said. “You’re not learning to practice the guitar, you’re learning to play the guitar.”
He’d purposely teach his students whatever interested them musically, using the excitement and energy they brought in the door to take carry them as far as they wanted to go. The direction, however, would take a quick turn.
“I liked country,” said Lee Wellman, who walked into for his first lesson 33 years ago. “Three or four weeks later, I’m playing Eric Clapton.”
Four or five years later, he was doing what so many students would do: play out with Lippolis.
“We did a lot of blues and country and pop,” Wellman said. “We even did a little bit of bluegrass.”
“John’s a guy that encourages you all the time,” he added. “The first four or five years, he’s a cheerleader. I’d get down, he’d bring me up.”
“He’s got the patience of a saint,” agreed Bob Burke, who showed up in Lippolis’ studio because of a word-of-mouth recommendation 17 years ago. “You can’t upset him. I don’t care how many times you screw up. He’s a temperate man.”
But Setty says Lippolis’ success is due to more than that.
At Kincaid’s when he first talked Lippolis into teaching, Setty brought him along when he opened the Guitar Attention Center in 1979. It was a decision prompted by a quality Setty first noticed while giving Lippolis lessons in the early ’70s: “I knew he would do the things (that) were needed to make a program work.”
“As self-employed people, you need to be here on the job when the people are available, which means we start in the day early when people want to come in early and we stay late if people want to come in late,” Setty said.
“You work when you can and you rest when you can. And the dedication to do that is the quality that John possesses — that willingness to do whatever it took.”
Lippolis has held student concerts (not recitals), the 100th of which will be given early this month. After his and wife, Monica’s son Chris was born in 1985, he started teaching at St. Teresa, St. Raphael and Holy Trinity School. He organized coffee houses at St. Raphael Church, Dream Cup and Un Mundo coffee houses and gave lessons at United Senior Services.
A performance March 8 at the Upper Valley Mall was the 138th he and his students have given — and then there’s his Beatles Tribute Band, Glass Onion; the 10-year run of his students playing on WBLY radio; Thanksgiving and Christmas concerts; and a stack of staff books filled up with cheat sheets of all the songs he taught to all those students over all these years.
“He’s a juggernaut,” Setty said.
Lippolis said it all began when he was 9 or 10 and his father brought a guitar home. The boy’s interest was furthered by a chord chart his mother had around the house. Then came the guitar lesson gig and a path to mastering more songs than a tableside juke box could hold.
Still, for Lippolis the teacher, the sweetest thing may be that the job he thought might last two weeks has answered, for him, the question posed by one of the most whimsical of Beatles songs.
His students still need him, his students still feed him, now that he’s 64.
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