Athens man makes music with his art

by Christina Xenos
FOR THE POST

Local musician Billy Rhinehart entertains a crowd with more than just his folky lyrics and electric guitar riffs. He adds a different dimension to his performances - and others' - with his brightly colored handcrafted guitars.

Rhinehart has created his own line of specialty electric guitars. His designs range from Mardi Gras party masks to a woman's bust he calls "Mona" to animals including dogs, snakes and fish. The designs can be viewed on his Web site (http://www.fishguitar.com).

"There's not really anything like what I am doing," he said

Rhinehart, a librarian at Ohio University's Alden Library, began developing the guitar line in 1989 when he sketched a fish with a guitar neck coming out of its mouth on the back of a library card.

"It all started when I went to this party and pulled the card out of my pocket," he said. "I said 'I'm going to make this guitar'...I told enough people then that I felt obligated to at least give it a try."

Without any woodworking experience except his seventh-grade shop class, Rhinehart used a book and a set of chisels he bought from Odd Lots and went to work on the guitar. He continued using the chisels for the first few guitars and then later invested in a set of authentic carving tools.

Rhinehart's guitars are chiseled out of mahogany, alder and ash; common woods for guitars, he said. He usually orders the necks from catalogs, but has made necks for two of his guitars. He uses a variety of media to color the guitar bodies, including oil and acrylic paints, and on rare occasions, watercolors.

Rhinehart spends about three weeks carving each guitar body, with extra time painting and finishing it. The greatest number he ever completed in one year is three guitars. He has sold six of the 22 guitars he has created and the prices range from about $2,400 to $3,400 each.

David Baer, a lawyer with the Center for Student Advocacy and a musician with the local band Stella, bought Rhinehart's "Deco-Fish" guitar about five years ago.

"I hang it on the wall of my office as an ice breaker," he said. "I just like the colors and the cartoonishness...It's a labor of obscure love (for Rhinehart)."

Baer played the Rhinehart guitar in his former band, Gravyland, but now plays bass for Stella.

Rhinehart also is part of the local music scene.

A Steubenville, Ohio native, he came to OU in 1968 to study library science. While a student, he lived with two local musicians who drafted him to play in their band. From that foundation, Rhinehart worked his way further into the local music scene and started playing open stages at O'Hooley's Irish Pub, 24 W. Union St., where he met his partner, Bruce Dalzell.

Together they started the Billy and Brucie Show in 1988 in a restaurant owned by their friends, below Seven Sauces, 66 N. Court St.

"We convinced our friends that maybe we could create a folky-acoustic buzz," Dalzell said. "What we wanted to do was create a cool situation with a good sound and a nice audience."

The purpose of the show was to give Rhinehart and Dalzell a chance to play in front of an audience as well as to showcase other soloists or bands they liked or thought needed more exposure, Rhinehart said.

"It really worked because people who didn't get out to play that often got a chance to play their best," he said.

The show continued weekly in the restaurant for nine months. Then they played in a local coffeehouse owned by another friend until Tim Hogan, associate director of Baker Center, invited them to hold the show at The Front Room.

The regular shows slowly faded away because of dwindling attendance, he said, but Billy and Brucie still get together for reunion shows once in a while.

"Now it's more of a nostalgia trip where we bring back people for a production," he said.

Rhinehart, 50, lives with his wife, Suzanne Knauerhase and two children, Alexis, 20, and Max, 15, in their Second Street home. Besides playing local venues and reunion shows, the lifelong musician also travels to folk festivals in Fredricksburg, Va. and plays music on the guitars he has made.

"I was taken by music when I was about 10," he said. "Something in my head just opened up and there was all this cool music in there."