Acoustic Alchemy
Benicia's Peppino D'Agostino plays Vallejo
To watch Peppino D'Agostino's fingers while he is playing his precious acoustic guitar is akin to both seeing a ballerina move gracefully and gently across a stage and a sprinter in the Olympics, His fingers dance across the strings as he runs up and down the fretboard.
Longtime Benicia resident Peppino D'Agostino has not only traveled far from his native Italy to his current home and logged countless miles on tour over the years, but he has also covered an immense amount of musical territory on his preferred instrument, the acoustic guitar.
The world-renowned musician, who performs on Saturday in Vallejo, says that when he first started playing the guitar as a young man, he followed the trends of the times in the music world, only to quickly discover that there were many different facets to what could be done on the instrument. Particularly if he switched to acoustic.
“In the late '60s and '70s the Beatles were huge, so I remember playing electric guitar because they were playing electric guitar. But then one day somebody gave me this album with three guitarists on it — it was Leo Kottke, Peter
Lang, and John Fahey,” remembers D'Agostino.
“That's why I started playing the acoustic guitar — because I fell in love with that record,” says D'Agostino. “You know, life is very unpredictable, I ended up actually playing with Leo years later, which was like a miracle to me.”
Before he would become considered one of the greatest acoustic guitar players in the world, however, heralded by publications such as Acoustic Guitar and Guitar Player magazines, D'Agostino would scrabble and labor as a new immigrant to the United States in the mid-1980s, working at a fruit and vegetable stand in Marin County among other jobs to make ends meet.
Gradually he began trying to play his guitar in some of the restaurants in San Francisco's famed Italian neighborhood, North Beach. One such attempt to get a gig resulted in one of D'Agostino's favorite stories to tell.
The musician went to a then-hip establishment and inquired if he could speak to the owner, who had been
sitting at a table with another man. The proprietor said that he had some business to attend to in the back for a few moments, and told D'Agostino to have a seat with the other man.
“So I sat down with his friend, he was an elegant, really nicely dressed man. He was very kind, and he spoke a little bit of Italian, so we could understand each other. He asked about me, where I was from, and I never forgot how nice this man was,” said D'Agostino.
After a little while, the man had to leave and said his goodbyes. The owner of
the restaurant finally came back and sat down with D'Agostino and asked if he knew who he had just spoken with, to which he replied he didn't.
“He said, `He's a very famous singer — his name is Tony Bennett!”
The aspiring musician told the man he had not heard of the crooner.
“I was literally just off the boat a few months earlier. The owner of the restaurant looked at me really puzzled and he said, `You're a musician and you don't know who Tony Bennett is? Well, there's the door, I'm sorry,
we cannot hire you!'”
D'Agostino has clearly come a long way from trying to get dinner gigs for tourists. Indeed, he has toured the globe with an incredible list of other talented musicians, releasing a slew of critically acclaimed albums, and partnering with some of the most wellrespected music companies in the world, including Benicia-based Dunlop Manufacturing — maker of guitar picks, accessories and much more.
After this show in Vallejo, where he will be joined by several special guests including his daughter, he will be taking part in the Martin Taylor Guitar Retreat in Benicia later this month. He then heads back out for a series of gigs in Italy and the United States.
D'Agostino performed several virtual concerts over the course of the past couple of years due to the pandemic, which he enjoyed, but he is looking forward to playing in front of actual crowds again.
“You can connect with people in a different way,” he says, “but there's nothing that can substitute a live audience.”