‘Mojoe’ Joe Boes picked up a guitar at 15 and never stopped playing

SYLVANIA – Joe Boes knows guitars.

The Toledo-born musician has built his life and career around the six-stringed instrument. He plays them, collects them, makes and repairs them, teaches others to play them, and just enjoys being around guitars.

“I love them all, especially electric guitars,” Boes said in his home studio, surrounded by dozens of guitars and amplifiers, most of them painted in his signature color, seafoam green.

He started playing when he was 15. He had a friend who was selling a Squier Bullet guitar for a little under $300. Boes said he didn’t have the money so he hand-wrote a promissory note to his parents begging them to buy it.

They bought him the guitar and he played it for about nine years before he bought another one. He still has it, hanging proudly on a wall in his studio.

When he graduated from Bowling Green State University with a music degree, his father pulled the note out of his wallet, where he had kept it all those years, and handed it back to Joe.

Obviously, Boes kept his promise.

“Pretty much,” he said. “I feel pretty good so far.”

Boes has never stopped playing. As a teenager, he used to practice when he got home from school until he went to bed.

“I’m fortunate because I still play every day,” he said.

Sitting on a desk chair at a recording console, cradling a mug of coffee, the musician with the distinctive spiked gray hair and long goatee said he not only loves guitars, he loves to talk about them — or anything that has to do with music.

His career is a mix of performing, teaching, recording, and working with local luthier Larry Wagner to set up and repair guitars.

“I’m blessed. My wife Laura is very much a person who supports me doing what I do, and that’s important. She’s like a champion for me. My wife’s not saying, ‘You should be outside cutting the grass.’ No, she’ll say, ‘Why aren’t you recording your songs?’”

Boes is taking her up on that, working on a new CD of original material that he hopes to release by the end of the year. His last CD featured songs he wrote during his engagement to Laura and they gave copies to their guests at their wedding in 2005.

Lately he has been recording .library music,’ creating a catalogue of multilayered instrumental tunes on keyboards with just a touch of guitar designed for television or movie soundtracks. He enjoys it because the moody instrumental songs are vastly different from his usual guitar-based music and vocals.

“It’s like there’s another corridor you can walk down in my brain. I love it. The good news is it still has guitar, but the main thing is that it has character.”

Character is vital to Boes, saying it’s what separates good music from the bland, overproduced music that dominates popular music.

“There are so many people who have a record deal who would never win American Idol, but they have character in their voice. I embrace that because I don’t have the best singing voice, but I have character.”

He feels the same about his guitar abilities, which are formidable but not flashy.

“I’m not a monster player,” Boes said. “I’m not just going to blow over a blues tune with a bunch of solos and people might go, ‘So?’ Instead, from a writer’s standpoint, you can steer where the tune goes, which means you can kind of steer where the audience goes. You get a chance to basically be in the driver’s seat, not just responding to a blues chord change.”

He has been leading his trio, Mojoe Boes & His Noble Jones, for about 20 years. He likes to describe their style as eclectic electric music. They perform Boes’ arrangements of songs by artists ranging from the Beatles and Oasis to Frank Sinatra and the Archies.

His band plays at local clubs but not every week, or even every month. The group played at the Majestic Oak Winery in Grand Rapids, Ohio, in August and will be there again on Oct. 11 and Dec. 7.

Boes is quite busy with another gig that landed in his lap about two years ago, playing in the Ultimate Kenny Rogers Tribute band led by Alan Turner, who performs as the 1980s Kenny Rogers, with white hair and beard and a white suit.

“It was kind of out of nowhere,” Boes said. “Alan contacted me because he needed a guitar player. A guy that I did know and a guy that I didn’t know referred me to him.”

The tribute band travels all over the country and performs about 20 of Rogers’ biggest hits each night, including the 1977 Top-10 single Lucille.

“Lucille is like maybe the fourth song in our set and I always chuckle because of the line, ‘In a bar in Toledo,’ and that’s kind of cool. How did I end up in a band where there’s actually a line in a song from my hometown?”

Boes said Rogers’ music has more depth to it than people might think. “I dig it because much of his material is written like jazz tunes. They don’t swing but they have interesting chord changes.”

He strives to play the familiar songs with an artful balance of being faithful to the original recordings while adding some of his own ideas.

“My goal is to do like 75 to 80 percent like the tune, and personally add about 20 percent of my own musical ideas. I want to change it a pinch but I know when to, and that’s the key — not to change it just because you’re bored.

“Most of the people would say it’s perfect because I know they’re keyed into Kenny. I get like two guitar solos that aren’t on any of his records but they have the feel of what the record was. But I move it around so it’s not just a duplicate of a record every night.”

That personal touch and his deft variations keep it interesting for Boes and the other musicians in the seven-person band, as well as for fans who have seen the show multiple times.

“I don’t want to think it’s totally self-serving. And if somebody were to say, ‘Well, that’s not 100 percent like the record.’ I’d say, ‘You’re absolutely right!’,” he added with a laugh.

The guitar

While he enjoys the reference to Toledo in Lucille, that’s just one of the many ways that Boes is strong on Toledo. He loves to support the local music scene, musicians and companies that make guitars and music gear.

He has several Wagner guitars built from scratch by Larry Wagner. He is quick to point out that his current favorite is a uniquely shaped electric Wagner — painted seafoam green, of course — and featuring gold-plated DeArmond pickups that were made in Toledo in the 1960s.

“I love the fact that I travel with a guitar that’s from my hometown, and these pickups were made here back in the ‘60s.”

Boes also has several guitars made by Reverend. That company manufactures its guitars in South Korea but distributes them nationwide through its headquarters in Toledo.

One of his students paints and refinishes guitars with a scratched-up “relic” look, making them look aged and worn. One was a Gibson SG that originally was brown but was refinished in … what else, seafoam green.

“Seafoam green is my aesthetic,” Boes said. “Everybody kind of expects the green now. He brought it to a lesson and I’m playing it and he says, ‘What do you think?’ And I go like, ‘It’s pretty cool.’ And he goes, ‘Do you want to buy it?’”

“He’s a good dude and I want to support his relic-ing stuff, and he’s a local guy, so, yeah.”

Boes picks up a seafoam green Wagner electric guitar that had been lying on a stool and starts playing a tune, unplugged. The notes flow smoothly and melodically.

“The guitar has always been my musical awakening,” Boes said. “There’s just so much about it that I love.”