Rockin’ round the house

• By GEORGE MORRIS
• Advocate staff writer
• Published: Aug 27, 2008 - Page: 1E - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

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Dr. Thomas Guillot has always loved music. It’s a family tradition.

He started playing piano when he was 7, picked up the trombone while in eighth grade and a Redemptorist High School classmate, Randy Rea, taught him to play the guitar.

“That totally changed my life — that and the Beatles,” Guillot said. “I started playing guitar. I have 23 guitars now.”

He certainly has a place to put them, as well as his other equipment and memorabilia.

When the Guillots moved into their Hilltrace Avenue home three years ago, the Baton Rouge plastic surgeon turned one upstairs, split-level bedroom into a place for his music. One side of the room is a few feet higher than the other, the sides separated by a railing and connected by a small staircase.

“It just made a perfect room for this, because it just had a little stage,” Guillot said. “This is what we’ve been using this for since we got here. We just took the rail down.”

The result is a space for a drum set, keyboard, assorted amps and microphones. The room gets used from time to time by Guillot, who played in bands through college and now plays with the Louisiana Music Hall of Fame when it honors such stars as the Dixie Cups, Frogman Henry and Irma Thomas. His son, Chris, 15, is a budding musical talent who has played for the Music Hall of Fame events and performed on an HBO children’s special.

The room, however, isn’t used primarily for concerts — which is good, because there is little space for an audience. When Guillot has hosted Krewe of Orion parties, he sets up cameras so the upstairs performances can be seen downstairs on the big-screen TV.

The favorite part of the room for Guillot is that, thanks to modern sound-mixing equipment, he can enjoy this space all by himself.
A 32-track Korg digital recorder allows Guillot, 57, to create music CDs that synchronize individual tracks — instruments, lead and background vocals — into a polished final product. It’s not a state-of-the-art studio sound board, but it’s a far cry from how he started. As an eighth-grader, he did his mixing with tape recorders, which wasn’t that much less sophisticated than was being done in studios at the time.

“This is where I come to hide when I have a chance,” Guillot said. “It’s not every day because for the last year I’ve been operating so much. I only get to come up here when I get a chance, maybe two or three times a week at the most. It’s been really hard to get up here as much as I like.”

Another reason to visit the room is to enjoy his collection of memorabilia and guitars. He has a photo of himself playing the guitar at the Cavern Club in Liverpool, England, where the Beatles played before becoming famous. He also has numerous album covers and posters, some of them superimposed with autographs of rock legends Jimi Hendrix and Donovan (the actual autographs, among others such as a pick guard signed by Les Paul, are stored in a safe).

The instruments include an electric 12-string autographed by Fred LeBlanc of the New Orleans-based band Cowboy Mouth and a variety of electric, acoustic and bass guitars. Included in the last category is a 1967 Hofner bass that was the same model that Paul McCartney played with the Beatles.

Guillot also has a McCartney-autographed electric guitar, but it doesn’t stay in the music room.