by Julia Crowe
We’d started calling every guitar store we knew when we were on tour, asking if they had any of the Fender humbucker pickups that came out of Tele Deluxes, and we started to stockpile them. At a certain point, these pickups started to catch on again in favor the same way the Gibson P-90, say, has become famous. Now we’re connected to this whole network of younger pickup modifiers and winders who are searching for the “Holy Grail” sound of those pickups. Fender has tried to replicate them in recent years, and these replications have generally fallen far short of the originals. The pickups look the same but they don’t sound the same.
There are guys who have dug deeply into this subject who we have managed to become connected with and — this story has a few prongs — a couple years ago, Fender invited Thurston and me to do signature Jazzmaster model guitars with them. They found out I was playing these Jazzblasters, and they wanted to make those and replicate them down to every detail. The first prototype they sent had the new-issue Fender humbucker pickups, and they did not sound so good at all — nothing like the vintage ones we had been buying up at top dollar. So Fender worked with us to get the pickups to sound better and actually went through a couple of iterations of their recent pickup for my guitar to make it sound better. For what they were capable of doing, they did get a pretty nice-sounding pickup out of it, though still not as nice sounding as the old ones. These young guys, these “pickup specialists,” take these modern guitar pickups and retrofit them to make them sound more like the old pickups. I’ve been working closely with a bunch of these guys, which has been interesting because the process takes you down these little rivulets of guitar history and guitar lore.
To get back to that original Tele Deluxe, when we had our gear stolen in ’99, that guitar was in the van full of gear — so this guitar that had been with me since probably ’80–’81, from the time I was in Binghamton with The Fluks to the early days of Sonic Youth, went missing. An entire truck full of stuff went missing. All of our drums, amps, twenty-five to thirty guitars and basses, all of our pedals, just gone — gear that we had spent the ten years prior, all through the ’90s basically, just fine tuning to our purposes, so that we could step onstage feeling assured this gear represented as good as we could sound. We really had it pretty perfected at that point, for what we were trying to do and the sounds we were looking for. And actually, the original Jazzblaster, this beautiful tobacco-sunburst Fender Jazzmaster — it breaks my heart — that guitar went missing and never came back.
The short story is, none of that gear ever surfaced again, to this day, except for four guitars that slowly filtered their way back to us over time, and for some strange reason, they were all my guitars — none of them were Thurston’s guitars. A couple years after the theft, we were in L.A. playing a show and these two young, sort of freaky kids came up to us — they must have been about eighteen to twenty years old — and they told us they had information on the theft. The story was, one of these kids’ uncles was involved in the theft. I think the theft had been stealing the van — I don’t think they knew what was in it. It was just like, “There’s a van full of stuff. Let’s steal it.” The van was found in East L.A. a few days later with nothing in it, doors hanging open. So this was kind of interesting.
We didn’t really know whether to believe these guys or not. They told us their folks had kicked them out of their houses and they were living out of a car and they kind of looked like it. But, subsequently, through intermediaries, we gave them email contacts and they sent us a bunch of photographs that showed our gear that was readily identifiable by little pieces of tape, notes our techs had written on various pieces of the gear. Without showing any people’s faces, you could see our gear and close-up shots of a couple effects pedals with someone’s sneaker on one. It looked as if they were in a basement somewhere. These guys told us, “We know where some of the gear is.”
The theft happened in Southern California, so for some reason I always assumed that much of it probably went into Mexico. Subsequently, through these two guys, we got two guitars back. It was weird because at the time our gear was stolen, there were a number of other artists who’d had their gear stolen. I know that Jon Spencer Blues Explosion had their gear stolen shortly after, along with a couple of other bands. That hadn’t happened to anyone in our circle at that time. This was the early days of the internet, and I remember sending out a big missive about the theft online, which someone told me the other day is still floating around out there in cyberspace.
Shortly afterwards, our crew guys, who were very organized at that time, partly because they had these carnets for when you go in and out of countries, where you are required to list all your gear — they were able to post all the guitars with their serial numbers, and all these geeky guitar guys in music stores (and actually friends of ours because they often helped us out) got hold of these lists. And every once in a while, over the years, someone will send us an email saying, “You should check out this eBay auction — this might be one of your guitars.” Sometimes it is and sometimes it’s not and sometimes it is kind of a copycat, where people will have put those Fender wide-range pickups onto a Jazzmaster or whatever, but twice it turned out to be one of our guitars. So we’ve found a couple more of the stolen guitars over time.
One of these guitars we tracked down was that original f-hole Telecaster Deluxe, which is back in my lineup now. It came back to us! There were two guitars at the time — I was going to talk about this other kind of guitar called Travis Bean, who made these all-aluminum-necked guitars for a brief period of time during the ’70s. They had these pickups that looked very much like the Fender pickups and sounded very much like the Fender pickups, so that’s another guitar brand that I’ve really loved, with similar big shiny silver pickups from that period are the kind I like, for one reason or another.
The Travis Beans were supposedly great for sustain because the guitar was one solid piece of aluminum from the bridge all the way up to the neck, and then they put a wooden body around it to make it look normal. Jerry Garcia played them in the early ’70s. Two of the four guitars we got back were the Travis Bean and that Tele Deluxe. The Tele Deluxe had been spray-painted metal flake blue, very poorly. When we got them back they were in bad shape with the electronics falling off, so we had to pay to buy them back and then pay to have our guys fix them up! The blue Tele gets played onstage with Sonic Youth to this day and still has this crappy blue metal flake paint job, which I’ve left be because I’d always thought that original dark wood grain finish was kind of boring, and I have three more of these guitars that look just like that. In a way, it was kind of cool to get it back painted metal flake blue.
The Travis Bean guitar I’d played a lot onstage, and it was kind of candy apple red and had a target sticker on it like The Who’s target sticker. It came back with all the electronics falling off or missing, and it kind of looked like it had been left in a campfire for an hour or two because it was all burned and blackened and disgusting. I probably would have left it that way, but before I could say anything, the crew guys assumed I’d want it to look like it always did so it was actually refinished and it looks shiny and red again and is also back in our lineup. There are pictures of both of those guitars on our site, in “before and after” condition. We have a really extensive website and you can find images of those guitars in the section that’s all about our gear and guitars.
So I still have my second real serious electric guitar — the George Harrison cream Telecaster was the first — but this is the first one I ever really seriously played out with in bands, and it was certainly the first guitar I’d ever played in Sonic Youth.
Paul Reed Smith
Paul Reed Smith is a luthier and the founder and owner of the Maryland-based company PRS Guitars.
My first acoustic nylon-string guitar was one I had bought for my mother, and it was called a Hilo. The second guitar I had was a Japanese bass that had sticky wallpaper on it. And the third guitar was a Japanese copy of the H�
�fner Beatle bass. I was fourteen years old at the time. In shop class, I took the neck off this guitar and made a bass out of it. My first real guitar was a Rickenbacker 6-string and then a three-quarter-sized Melodymaker. My first real, real guitar that I owned was a 1953 Les Paul. It’s not about the first guitar. For me it’s about the journey to the real guitar. Each guitar is a learning experience.
I loved The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, Peter Frampton, The Allman Brothers, Jeff Beck, Carlos Santana, John McLaughlin, Al Di Meola and Bill Frisell. My family reacted to my interest in the guitar really well and really poorly — really well because it was music, yet poorly because my father thought I was going to starve and end up being a guitar maker in a one-room shop and never learn how to deal with people. Under any normal circumstances, this would have become true, but my journey ended up not being normal. He and I completely came to terms with this a long time ago and had a beautiful relationship. A parent wants their kid to be intellectually, emotionally and spiritually safe, right? He was worried about the security part because if you do not learn how to deal with people, then spiritually, you are not going to be okay. I had avoided being a lone guitar maker in a room because I had formed a team of family, friends, skilled assistants, engineers, lawyers, top salesmen, machinists and friends, and we decided to form a company.
The guitar is the most intimate instrument after the voice. There is so much you can do with a guitar — you can play rhythm, harmony and melody. The guitar is very cool and expansive. A guitar is a harpsichord where you can change the length of the strings with your fingers. The guitar presents a never-ending learning curve and it is highly competitive. If you walk into a store to buy a toaster, you are likely to find about a dozen brands of toasters in the store, maybe six. If you go into a music store, there are probably 2,500 different brands of amps. It’s probably the most competitive market in the world. There are so many people vying for your attention. The guitar world is highly competitive and skill oriented. People who make it know what they’re doing. The reason women were screaming when The Beatles came out is because they were that good. They knew they were watching something extraordinary. They were merely reacting to the electricity of the moment.
I was not that good of a guitar player but discovered guitar making very early in my life. I knew I was going to be a guitar maker — and not a guitar player — from a very young age. When you go into a store and play a guitar and discover that everyone runs away but you open the case to a guitar you’ve made and everybody draws a crowd, you’d better listen to the feedback!
Vernon Reid
English-born American guitarist Vernon Reid is best down for being the founder and lead guitarist of the funk metal band Living Colour.
I was fifteen years old when I got my first guitar, a Gibson Dixie Hummingbird that was given to me as a gift by a cousin. My cousin and I had shared a long talk about music and he came to know that I was really into music and fascinated by it. He was very kind, telling me, “Hey, man, I have this guitar and do not play it anymore so you can have it.” The Hummingbird is a folk guitar and this one had super-high action. I had tried to play it for a few months and it was so difficult that I stopped, thinking, “Okay, I am on to the next hobby.” The guitar sat there and I realized that I still loved music. I thought, “Am I going to let this beat me?” So I started to play it again and realized what I had really wanted all along was an electric guitar.
Wanting an electric guitar became the motivation for me to work because my parents were not going to buy me a guitar. They felt the guitar was going to be another hobby of mine and if I wanted to go further with it, they felt that was up to me. That was actually great, and I did not resent it but accepted it — and it made me find my first job at a local supermarket in Brooklyn.
This job was hell on earth. I was a stock boy at Bernstein Brothers, a locally owned supermarket before all the chains took over. I worked the soda aisle, which is the worst job you can possibly have in the summertime — terrible — because the soda aisle never ends. People are always buying Coca-Cola in the hot weather, and the whole thing about supermarkets is that they are never supposed to look as if they have ever run out of anything. So when you walk into your Pathmark or Kroger or whatever, and you see the shelves magically lined up with stuff, this is because there are imp-like minions running around to give you the illusion that nothing ever changes. To maintain that illusion, the minions are to move faster and ever faster so that the shelves appear to be perpetually filled and neatly aligned, as if nothing has ever been taken. So that was a horrible job.
But it got me my first electric guitar, a Univox Mosrite copy, made in Japan. I wish I still had it. I traded it eventually for another guitar because I did not know at that time that I was going to become a professional guitarist. It wasn’t until I had my third guitar that I said to myself, “Okay, I guess I am doing this.”
Santana was definitely a musical influence. He was an icon for me since I was a child, and he is still a giant to me now. His guitar on “Black Magic Woman” — that sound was it for me. As it turns out, I’ve recently completed a project with his new bride, Cindy Blackman. She plays drums and I started a project called Spectrum Road, which is music inspired by the music of jazz drummer Tony Williams. The band consists of me, Cindy Blackman, Jack Bruce and John Medeski. We did a bunch of shows in Oakland, and Santana sat in, which was great.
My family was concerned, of course, about my interest in the guitar. Basically, I was a straight-edged guy and they had a horrible idea of how a career like this could possibly turn out. When they saw I was still kind of normal, at least fitting the definition for how Vernon Reid might be normal — “He’s no weirder than he usually is!” — then they accepted it.
What I love about the guitar is that playing allows me to say and do things that I normally cannot, as verbose as I may be. There is so much more that I cannot really put into words and, for me, the guitar is a conduit to an understanding of the human condition through music. Music is one of the best things that we, as a species, do.
Guitars interact with you in a very personal way and that’s the thing: a guitar that is the guitar for you is one that allows you to be expressive and to make music in a way that is seamless. So nearly every guitarist is on a quest for the guitar that can do that. However, with some musicians, it doesn’t matter what guitar they play because they play their style — and that is a particular type of musician.
I love the shape of the guitar. There’s just something about it I find appealing. Also, as much as has been done already on the fretboard grid, I consider it limitless. It engages me intellectually and also engages me on a souldeep level. It’s an instrument that invites techniques. And in order to be as good as one can be, frustration must be acknowledged, yet there are moments when I’m not in the way, not thinking about it, not judging it but am just in the flow. Playing the guitar is an instinct that allows me to experience a different way of living, loving and of being. That’s what is great about the guitar.
The challenge of the guitar is not to become ambivalent or frustrated with it because it never ends. For some musicians, they arrive at a level and they’re happy, but for me, it never ends in terms of trying to be better, to play, to execute these different elements and to engage the mind and ear. It is a challenge. I’m always going to be learning how to play the guitar. I have been fortunate and make no claims about what level of proficiency I happen to be at. It’s always curious to me when people claim mastery. That is a state that I do not know if I will ever experience, and I am okay with that. Nobody plays everything and certainly not me. The challenge for me is to get out of my own way. My own monkey mind needs to get out of the way and just be with the instrument and stop judging. One needs to be bad on the instrument in order to get better. And that is one beautiful thing about the guitar — that the ugly bit is also the beautiful bit.
I will never forget my first performance. My back was turned to the curtain and I was shouting at
the drummer, Kenny, “What’s the first tune?!” And the curtains had opened right at that moment. This was at my high school, Brooklyn Tech, and I was playing for a junior assembly that had to be a couple thousand because it is an enormous school. Of all my educational experience, Brooklyn Tech was my favorite without question — it changed my life. After all these many years, it is a great school.
Once I played with Ronald Shannon Jackson’s Decoding Society. He is a jazz drummer who plays with Ornette Coleman, and we had this post-fusion band based on Ornette’s ideas. We were chosen to play the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1983 in Switzerland and the official artist for the festival was Keith Haring, a very famous New York artist known for his glowing baby drawing. I loved that drawing. The first time I ever saw the glowing baby, I was in love with it. I also loved that Keith Haring was doing his art at the same time as Jean-Michel Basquiat, very minimalist. At that time, Basquiat was going by the moniker of SAMO but Keith became the official artist of the Montreux Jazz Festival and he did all the posters.
He came to our show and said, “Man, that was GREAT!” I asked if he would do a drawing on my guitar and he said, “Yeah, come to my hotel room!” I took my guitar, my Frankenstrat, to his hotel, where he painted two figures on this instrument. He asked if I would like him to sign it, and I said yes. He signed the pick guard. So I have this guitar, which I have stopped playing because I am terrified of what could happen to it. But it is the only one of its kind that I know of. The drawing he made shows two figures. One figure is dancing with a snake for a head and other one is dancing beside this figure with the snakehead. I rubbed off part of one figure because I actually used to play this guitar. Then it dawned on me I was rubbing it off and stopped playing it.