The Story of the "TEN" Book

In 1982, we decided to put together a promotional book for GIT that brought together many of the great players who were associated with the school. I tackled the job of coordinating the project and help several of the guys write their chapters. It was quite a job, but I will always be proud of this book, as it is truly full of great information. I’ll always remember the evening at GIT, when all eleven of us got together for the cover photo shoot. I’d never been surrounded by so many incredible players in my life! We had a great time; Eddie joking around with Howard and Joe, Larry and Robben trading stories, and Tommy telling jokes and cracking everybody up.

But what people don’t know is that Pat Martino was originally suppose to be part of the project. In 1981, Pat had moved to LA to teach with us at the school. (I can’t tell you how great it was becoming friends and spending time with Pat. We had offices next to each other and in the mornings I could hear him practicing. He played some of the most amazing things, a lot of which were solo pieces he was writing.) So when the idea of the Ten book came about, Pat was one of the ten, plus HR, and would submit a chapter. And in fact the chapter was partly written when the evening came for us all to get together at the school for the photo shoot.

My wife Kathy, an professional art director hired a photographer, had organized the shoot. She made the huge book cover out of a sheet of plywood and we were all to sit around it for the photo. We all sat down and Pat was seated between Joe Diorio and Robben Ford. The photographer took probably 100 shots and then we all just hung out for a while afterwards. I’ve always said that if a bomb had hit the building that night, modern guitar playing would have had a huge set-back for years to come.

After the shoot I sat with Eddie and took lots of photos of his hand positions to use in his chapter which I basically “ghost-wrote” for him. Only a few days after that evening Pat Martino told the schools owner, Pat Hicks, that he was moving back to the east coast. I think Pat was dealing with the effects of his brain aneurism, and wanted to get back home to eventually undergo surgery. Pat made a fairly quick departure and with his chapter not finished it was decided to drop Pat from the book. This left us in a fix because we had a great cover photo and we knew that it would be a huge ordeal to get everyone together again for another shot.

Tommy Tedesco came to the rescue with the idea to get Joe Pass to replace Pat Martino so we would still have the “ten” players. But this did not solve the problem with the photo. Kathy then suggested that we re-shoot only the part of the photo where Pat had been seated. In the days before Photoshop, she felt that if we could get the four of us, who were seated on the left side of the book cover, she could have the image airbrushed together with the original to create a seamless photo. So that’s what we did. Joe Diorio, Robben Ford and myself joined Joe Pass a few days later and Kathy recreated the shot with the four of us. It’s nearly impossible to see the airbrushed seam between Tommy and myself. We eventually got the book completed with a new chapter by Joe Pass. A lot of credit goes to Tony Baruso, a former GIT student who was hired on by the school to do music transcription and notation. Tony was also close to Pat Martino and helped with Pat’s “Linear Expressions” book for REH Publications. As part of my compensation for my work writing and editing much of the book, I ended up with several boxes of the books. And to this day I still have a few hundred copies so if you would like one, send me an email at Mock@guitaraxis.com
-Don Mock