The moment Vince Gill realised most of his guitar collection was gone: “It was a really painful spring cleaning”
“I was curious to see if they’d press on,” country music stalwart Vince Gill said in 2017, referring to his friends in the legendary LA rock band the Eagles, who’d recently lost longtime member Glenn Frey.
Not only was the answer a resounding ‘yes’, but Gill himself was the surprising name recruited to fill part of Frey’s role in the band, about which he said, “I’m glad they chose me, but I wish I wasn’t doing it, because it means Glenn isn’t around”.
While Gill has been one of the poster boys of the Nashville country music machine since the 1980s, he’d grown up an Eagles fan and had started his career playing music more directly inspired by their work, as evidenced by his tenure in the Pure Prairie League. At 60, he still had more creative and instinctive overlap with his new bandmates than some sceptical fans might first have realised in 2017, so rather than contorting himself into a role more reminiscent of the late Frey, Gill was confident that he could seamlessly blend into the Eagles simply by being himself.
“I’m me in every situation,” Gill told the St Louis Post-Dispatch, “I can’t change my stride. I’m good. You’ve got to understand, my whole career has been about a shared experience. Music to me is also about collaboration. And [joining the Eagles] is one of the greatest experiences of my life.”
As an additional benefit to a band with a notorious history of infighting, he is also a hard guy not to get along with, being friendly and humble, and always taking his music seriously without taking himself too seriously; however, this remaining humble in the face of massive success during the height of his solo career sometimes required the assistance of his wife, singer Amy Grant, which he highlighted during a benefit concert.
While raising relief money in the aftermath of a devastating Nashville flood in 2010, Gill spoke at the event and discussed how it had impacted the community and many of his fellow musicians, while also sharing, on a personal note, his own reaction when he heard that SoundCheck Nashville, a rehearsal and storage space on the east side of the Cumberland River, had been badly damaged too.
“I said, ‘Oh, crap! I never even thought about the east side of the river’,” Gill declared to the audience, “I was mortified because I had probably 150 instruments down in there”, and, sure enough, many of the most important guitars from his long career were sitting in a storage room inside SoundCheck, with very few were spared by the floodwaters.
“All told, about 50 guitars were compromised,” he told Guitar Aficionado in 2017, “Some could be rescued, although not many. Most were ruined. I lost a guitar used on ‘One More Last Chance’ and a couple of guitars that my friends made for me. Amy [Grant] gave me a nice, old, small-bodied Taylor that I used on a duet I did with her from 1993 called ‘House of Love’. That one got destroyed. It was a real painful spring cleaning.”
Fortunately, Gill had Grant there to offer a bit of useful perspective, which he recounted during his charity event speech in 2010, saying, “Amy saw the shock on my face. She knew I was just about to completely unglue. She looked at me, said, ‘Just remember, all you need is one guitar to make a living”.
