It’s a little after noon on Sunday when John Holt III swings open the door of Asylum Sights & Sounds and lets a column of light spill onto the worn carpet. Thirty-two years of incense lingers in the walls and hangs in the air of the Central Avenue storefront. Holt smiles at the few customers roaming the aisles of used CDs and records, greets another employee and slips behind the counter at the front of the shop.
“Hey, you finding everything OK?” he asks a middle-aged man hovering in front of the blues and folk section. The man nods.
That’s Holt’s section: the blues. “It’s so straight and honest,” he says. A slight 21-year-old with honey-brown eyes and sharp cheekbones highlighted by the pink tan of a day spent at the beach, Holt is a student of the greats: Jon Cleary, Derek Trucks, Sam Cooke, Bill Withers, Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder. He started learning his way around a guitar when he was 16. Now he plays it like Stevie Ray Vaughan. He sits in on jam sessions at venues around St. Petersburg, Fla. He teaches guitar lessons. He’s in a band called Quality Time. The people close to him — family, friends and mentors — think he has what it takes to make it, to have his face on one of the album covers in that blues section of Asylum where he has worked on and off since high school.
The past few years have injected enough tumult and loss into Holt's life to fill a blues song. But like any good blues standard, the guitar has been the instrument that holds his story together.
The opening act
Holt’s first guitar was an electric Fender Squier Telecaster.
“I remember saying to his sister, Dawn, ‘Do you think he would like a guitar for Christmas?’” says Holt’s father, John Holt Jr. The elder Holt — who has the same honey-brown eyes and trim frame as his son — played guitar as a hobby with some friends when he wasn’t on call as an air conditioning repairman. When he left his instrument out in the house, he noticed his son fooling around on it and asked if he wanted one. John said no. But the father followed his hunch, and got his son the guitar.
He has been playing ever since.
The Christmas the guitar arrived, Holt was 16 and at a crossroad. He had spent a restless year and a half bouncing between high schools. He began his freshman year at a neighborhood school, then transferred to a visual arts program at a magnet school a few miles away. He lasted two semesters before transferring back to the neighborhood school. He struggled academically.
“I didn’t like going to school,” he says. “I was using a lot of drugs and stuff. It was a low time.”
He started skipping classes to jam with Chris Trull, a drummer friend from school and current bandmate. By senior year, Holt had missed so much class he wasn’t learning anything. Then he stopped going altogether.
He fought constantly with his father and got kicked out of the house.
He slept in friends’ garages and on their couches.
But he kept playing.
And he got the job at Asylum.
Working at Asylum, Holt’s guitar skills improved exponentially. He listened to the store from one wall of albums to the other. Surrounded by musicians and serious fans, he was a sponge for the musical esoterica particular to record shops. He studied the phrasing and composition of rock stars, jazz musicians and bluesmen the way his peers in school were trying to dissect Shakespeare and trigonometry.
Holt doesn’t have that first guitar anymore, but a tattoo of it stretches across the underside of his forearm like a pinup portrait of an old flame. “I thought I’d never sell it,” he says. As he learned more about playing, about sound and tone, he realized the guitar just wasn’t good enough. So he sold it and traded up. He wishes he could get rid of the tattoo.
‘This kid has something’
Holt was still in high school and singing backup for a friend’s sister when Steve “Red” Lasner took notice of him at the Ringside Cafe in St. Petersburg.
“I can remember thinking, ‘Whoa, this kid has something,’” Lasner says.
Lasner led the Sunday night blues jam at the gritty blues and boxing bar for 17 years before moving his show to Gulfport on the Rocks. Over the years, Lasner played with plenty of eager teenage boys who could hold their own with the pros, but Holt upstaged them.
“He was one of the guitarists that would come into the jam and I’d think, ‘Oh great, here’s a guy I can count on,’” Lasner says. “He plays more mature than his age should allow.”
Holt pored over books on the craft. He took lessons. He asked for help. As a teenager, he went to shows to watch local guitar men like Larry Camp, Brad Carlton and Jimmy Griswold. Sometimes after a set, he would corner them and offer $20 for a lesson.
“I’d see a player and say, ‘Wow, you’re good — can you show me what you’re doing?’” Holt says.
Lasner thinks Holt has the skill be a professional guitarist. “He’s got the physical capability as far as his hands,” Lasner says. “Music was in his blood, and I know that. I was not near his level by the time I was in my late 20s. And I started when I was 7.
“As far as a career goes, that’s a whole different thing,” Lasner says.
As a veteran of the local blues scene, Lasner sees success in paths that may not involve making Top 40 hits. Maybe it’s writing jingles, maybe it’s teaching, “maybe it’s through the hard road of picking a style like blues or jazz.”
“He probably is one of my favorite guitar players,” says Holt’s father. “I know that if he puts into it, he’ll get something out. What that is, I don’t know.” As a parent, he says he just wants to see that his son is able to take care of himself.
Singin’ the blues
Holt was 18 when Trull, the drummer, suggested the two should get their GEDs. “I don’t think I would have done it if he hadn’t suggested it,” Holt says.
The GED brought new options. Diploma in hand, Holt headed off to a jazz guitar program at University of South Florida in Tampa. But tuition was too expensive, and he dropped out in the first year. He tried firefighter school. He dropped out of that, too.
He ran out of money after a year in Tampa and had to come back home.
“I had six guitars,” he says. “I sold ‘em all.”
Then he broke up with his girlfriend of three years.
He got kicked out of his father’s house and had to sleep on couches again.
But he got back his job at Asylum.
And he kept playing.
Finding his rhythm
Holt leans over the store counter and fingers the new Al Green album he just ordered. The sideways, cumbia rock beat of a Los Lobos album tumbles from the shop speakers. Just below the music, there’s a percussive clack of plastic against plastic as a handful of Asylum customers flip through the rows of CDs. He looks around the store and he sees his personal music library.
“I think I had a collection of 2,500 CDs, which I sold back to this place,” he says. He also sold his car to the manager’s daughter. He used the money to buy a new computer — onto which he copied all the music he sold.
He also bought the $900 used Stratocaster he plays now.
“It’s just got the feel,” he says. “It’s just like an extension of me.”
Asylum is a part-time job. Holt supplements his income by teaching guitar lessons at Mad Music, a retail instrument shop and rehearsal space two blocks away on Central Avenue. It’s not enough work. When he got kicked out of his apartment two weeks ago for noise violations — he was practicing the drums at 4 a.m. — he had to move in with his grandparents.
He likes Asylum, though he doesn’t picture himself working there forever. He wants to play. He wants to teach more. Sometimes he thinks about going to school for music production. Holt says he’ll know he’s made it when he doesn’t have to do “anything but play music.”
Holt muses on the possibility of opening shows for bigger acts like Derek Trucks or playing regular gigs at big venues. “I really think this band could do that — locally, at least,” he says. But he isn’t sure how to make that happen.
“Lately, I’ve been lost,” he says.
“Maybe I’ll catch a piece of reality some day and get a real job.”
“But maybe not.”
“Who doesn’t want to be a rock star?”