by Julia Crowe
If I had to name my most prized guitars, this guitar would be it, along with the guitar I had used in “Cult of Personality” — the ESP multi-colored guitar. I used the Keith Haring guitar on the first Public Enemy record and the first Living Colour record, and I also used it for recording with Ronald Shannon Jackson. I have a huge amount of affection for that guitar and someday, it will belong to my daughter.
Marty Friedman
Marty Friedman is recognized for being the lead/rhythm guitarist for the thrash metal band Megadeth. He is a resident of Tokyo, Japan, and hosts his own television programs, Rock Fujiyama and Jukebox English.
I was seven years old when I received a really cheap acoustic guitar from a company called Harmony. It was not a great guitar but I played it for about three years, studying guitar books and taking private lessons. After three years, however, I realized that I did not like anything I was doing because the stupid stuff in those guitar books had been along the lines of “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” No matter how good I became, it was still the same content and I went through three of these books, thinking, “This is not sounding anything like what I hear on the radio for guitar, so maybe I am doing something wrong.” I gave up. In fact, I gave up the guitar for a long time for this reason.
I could play a few chords on the piano and make synthesizers work, but I found I could never really play other musical instruments properly. When I was fourteen years old, it dawned on me the reason why I did not like what I was doing earlier on the guitar was that my guitar was an acoustic and all the guitars on the radio are … electric. If someone had just told me, “Dude, get an electric!” I would have saved all that time. I probably would have progressed much further within that amount of time.
When I was fourteen, I saw KISS play and a buddy of mine, who was a KISS fan as well, happened to play guitar. I thought if my friend played guitar, possibly I could play it, too. He was able to play the guitar in a way that sounded exactly like the music we were listening to, so I realized all I had to do was what he was doing on the guitar. What my friend did was make playing the guitar look possible. The first electric guitar I owned was a Les Paul copy from a brand called Rythmline, which I’ve not heard of before or since, and it cost about $100. I wish I had a picture of it, but I gave it away. It wasn’t that bad for a beginner’s electric guitar.
I loved punk rock, hard rock, heavy rock. Anything with a lot of energy appealed to me because I felt I could do it and the music came naturally. I took lessons with the electric for maybe six months and, though my teacher was good, I was not open to learning the proper way of playing the guitar. Because I wanted to rock right away, I stopped taking lessons and taught myself by ear, by playing along with every album I owned until I started to sound like what I had been envisioning. As a result, I built up a lot of playing stamina at a very early age.
Some guitarists can understand the logic and technical information in instructional books, but I chose to concentrate on exactly what it was I wanted to do. If it did not interest me, I would not pursue learning it. I saved all my energy for exactly the kind of music I wanted to play. For this reason, I became very proficient at what I wanted to do, and, if I did not do something, it was because I did not want to do it. I did not want to waste any energy on aspects of playing that are normally taught, such as theory and proper technique, how to stand and hold a guitar, etc. As a result, I would most likely not be a proper teacher for someone who wanted to learn the “most proper” way of playing.
I was not obsessed with playing guitar. I just knew this was what I was going to do with my life. I loved sports but I was too skinny and did not have the body to play football, and I was not tall enough to play basketball. So when I saw rock bands playing, I knew I could definitely do that. But I never really felt obsessed, like I was living and breathing guitar — never, to this day even. I stand firm on telling people that one really has to have a life outside of playing their instrument, whether this means listening to other music or doing some other activity entirely unrelated to music. It is very important to have other real-life experiences to draw from when you are creating your own music. You have to experience happiness and heartbreak and sadness and toughness, otherwise you’ll have no real emotion to bring into the music you create.
The young Marty Friedman with his Harmony acoustic guitar. (Courtesy Marty Friedman)
My family was supportive about my playing the guitar and I did not want to let them down because they had bought me my guitar and amp. Later, I used my college fund to buy another amp, so I felt that I was putting them at a risk and I did not want to let them down. I felt responsible about keeping up my goals.
I know I could be speaking for any musician when I say that the guitar allows you to express yourself in a way that a non-musician would not be able to experience. Some of us are not so eloquent with words at the right time in the right situation but, with your instrument, you can express yourself. Perhaps you do not necessarily get your point across, but at least you get it out in a way that, sadly, non-musicians will never be able to experience. I think that is the coolest thing about playing the guitar.
You can always sit down with your instrument and play something and get emotions out of you that would be harder to get out of you with actual words, simply by emoting a phrase on the guitar or playing hard or soft, fast or slow or the way you pause and linger over a chord. There are so many nuances to how phrasing can be shaped. If only we could have those weapons available to us in our verbal language it would be so beautiful. When you play music for a long time, you become good at shaping notes exactly the way you want to get them out and it becomes a natural extension of you. With the guitar, it is possible to utter the perfect sentence and that is what I love about it.
I always wanted playing the guitar to be a challenge or else I would be bored. And of course, some challenges with the guitar are bigger than others. For example, I just played with the Tokyo Philharmonic recently. I was playing the piano part of the Rachmaninoff Concerto No. 2, Op. 18 on guitar. I had to arrange the piece for my own playing yet I could not alter the piece much because I was playing with a seventy-piece orchestra. I had to create an arrangement they could follow. I love challenges like that. Every day I try not to repeat myself too much in music. So trying to come up with something new and interesting all the time, especially when it comes to phrasing and playing melodies, that is a challenge but it’s one that makes me want to play.
My first paid performance was for a party at a neighbor’s house. It was official because we were paid for it! I had a four-piece band and we received $80, which was $20 a head. At the time, I must have been fifteen and my first thought was “Oh my god, I’m getting paid money to do this! I cannot believe it!” That probably clinched it for me because just making money at all for playing my guitar was great. That being said, we did work very hard and we had to play music we hated because the neighbors wanted to hear certain songs. They had made a list full of these lame songs, and we played enough of their songs, which enabled us to squeeze in songs we liked. You have to bite the bullet a little on the stuff you do not like but, at the end of the day, we were playing our instruments and making actual money.
I’ve never been one of those guys who develops an emotional attachment to their instruments. If my guitar broke, I would be upset that something happened to my guitar, but in terms of having any emotional attachment to a guitar, really, it is a tool to me, no different from a knife or a fork. I do not have any one big attraction to any of my guitars but I can tell you a funny story about one of them. When I was endorsing Jackson Guitars, I was playing a big concert at the end of a tour and I had the brilliant idea to smash my guitar. It is an exciting moment in any concert — KISS did it every night. You just get caught up in things, the show is going crazy and you want to smash your guitar because it looks cool. So I tried to smash this guitar. And I discovered that Jacksons are made like a brick house. It was a very strong, solid piece of equipment. I kept smas
hing and smashing it on the drum rack. And the guitar was not breaking.
So there I am waving this thing like a baseball bat, banging and banging it against the rack, and there must have been about 15,000 people watching this. I thought, “God, what a weakling when you cannot even break this guitar!” I banged it about ten or fifteen times and it finally broke, but oh my god, I felt so lame and so embarrassed and I made the vow right there and then that I was never going to break a real guitar again.
Joey Santiago
Filipino-American guitarist and composer Joey Santiago is the lead guitarist for rock band The Pixies, which formed in Boston in 1986. They’re known for extreme dynamics and stop-start rhythms, and their album Surfer Rosa has been cited by Kurt Cobain as a considerable musical influence. Their fans include U2 and David Bowie.
It’s kind of blurry to me how old I was — I think I was in junior high, like about thirteen or fourteen years old, when I got my first guitar. My older brother had this guitar hanging up on his bedroom wall like it was a piece of art, and one day I was bored and thought to myself, “Hey, I think that’s a real guitar.” I learned how to tune it. We had an organ in the house, and I picked up a Mel Bay book to figure out how to tune the guitar at the organ, figuring out which string was the E. My brother didn’t mind at all that I had taken over his guitar.
I had five brothers and my dad had us learn how to play this organ. We all had to wait to take turns and we would have contests to see who could learn the most from the books. My dad could only play about two songs, which were Filipino standards.
One day — I might have been in high school — I came home really drunk and out of frustration, my dad blistered my guitar. He just trashed it right in front of me. I was like, “WHAT ARE YOU DOING?” This sobered me up real quick. I was totally obsessed with the guitar and with music.
My brother had a turntable with Van Morrison, the album with “Blue Money” on it and variations of the blue scales — G-C-D, whatever variations of that shape. I also loved The Velvet Underground song “Rock ’n’ Roll.” The whole album is so playful and childlike, the way they strummed. Hendrix was another favorite. I read somewhere that Robin Trower was his English equivalent.
After my dad trashed my guitar, I saved up for an electric Les Paul copy because I figured it would be harder for him to break. I bought it out of this guy’s house and felt frustrated with it because it didn’t play the same way the acoustic had. My mom surprised me. Somehow she had a belief in my playing and wanted to keep me busy, so she bought me an Ovation Viper, which was an expensive thing to give a kid. It was nice and small and played very well — the action was great. I had a little amp and would play this thing loudly and annoy my family. I lost this guitar. I have a feeling what happened was I’d broken up with a girlfriend a little too early and I left my guitar at her apartment. Needless to say, I think it ended up in the Dumpster. [Pixies bandmate] Charles [Thompson IV, a.k.a. Frank Black] bought me a new Viper four years ago.
What I love about the guitar is that it’s portable. With five kids in the house, I could take this thing into the basement and have my privacy there rather than wait in line to play the behemoth organ stuck in the living room. I would also take my guitar to parties and jam along. In high school, I yearned to play with cover bands, but the person who really challenged me to become original was my little brother. He played drums and my parents wouldn’t allow a drum set in the house. He was amazing on the drum pad. I showed him what I knew on the guitar and he soon surpassed me. He learned Van Halen’s “Eruption” and that entire album, just from listening to it. So I had to find another way to play in order to impress him.
I did have a guitar teacher briefly — a guy who taught me how to do barre chords. But then once I learned them I said thank you and sent him on his way. Most of what I learn is by ear.
I broke a Les Paul on purpose during a concert, right in front of the audience. I was playing a Pixies crazy solo and had run out of ideas and thought, “Hey, I’ll just break this thing.” I will never do that again. I felt shitty afterward. It was so embarrassing. My guitar tech came up to take away the pieces and had this really sad look on his face. You know, it took someone longer to make that guitar than it did for me to break it. I think if I ever saw someone do that at a concert, I would walk out. I just couldn’t watch it.
Benjamin Verdery
Classical guitarist and composer Benjamin Verdery heads the guitar department at Yale University and is the Artistic Director of the Art of the Guitar concert series at the 92nd Street Y in New York City. The Assad Duo premiered his work, What He Said, dedicated to the late luthier Thomas Humphrey. His other works include “Now and Ever,” recorded by David Russell on Telarc and “Peace, Love and Guitars,” written for guitarists John Williams and John Etheridge.
My first guitar was a gift from my parents — an Emenee, a little plastic guitar with cowboys on it. I don’t know what happened to it, but I most likely learned an E chord on it. It was like a Maccaferri imitation, a plastic yet very playable guitar. My brother once held it out the window, threatening to drop it if I didn’t do something he wanted me to do at the time. (I forget what it was he wanted me to do. All I remember was my guitar was hanging out the window.) The funny thing is my brother is now my manager. Later on in life I picked up a similar model of that little Emenee at a shop in Maine for about $50, well over what my parents first paid for it.
My second guitar met with a tragic end. It was a no-label little steel-string, plywood guitar — reddish purple and maroon with white purfling. The action on it was so high you could do chin-ups on it. On this guitar, I learned to play a D chord, an A chord and possibly “Day Tripper.” My friend John Marshall, who is the percussionist for my band Ufonia, and I were about thirteen years old at the time we saw The Who perform on TV. We were very impressed with how they smashed their instruments at the end of the song!
I was now playing a Gibson hollow body single pickup with a sunburst design — my first really great guitar — with a small pickup amp. John had also gotten some new drums. We got together and played “Louie, Louie.” When we were done, we grabbed our old instruments and trashed them. I’ll tell you, after looking at all that wood splintered all over the place, I just felt horrible and sad! It was not at all satisfying. Let the moral here be that just because you see other people do things that look cool, you should not try to imitate. I would give anything to have that guitar back again.
My first classical guitar I picked up in Danbury, Connecticut, at The Music Guild, where I studied with Russ Mumo. It was $100, which seemed like a lot at the time, but I’d saved up for it. The label inside said Hauser but I didn’t know what that meant. When I went to audition at the Hart School of Music, I was told my guitar was not a Hauser and I was like, “Yeah, okay, whatever,” because but I didn’t know what that meant anyway. When I first started teaching, I loaned it to an adult student and she took it with her when she moved. Strangely enough, I still have an affinity for Hauser guitars though that one was apparently never a Hauser.
My huge thrill was the second electric guitar I got, which was the same guitar that John Lennon played in his early days — a Gibson J-160E from my friend Dave Achelis. On my website I used to have a photo of me at age fifteen holding this guitar with my hair in my face. It was an acoustic electric guitar, and I believe The Everly Brothers played the same make.
As a kid, I was guitar crazed. I constantly looked for someone who knew something I didn’t know and then I learned it. I also lived for new record releases — I remember walking five miles into town in the middle of winter to buy a copy of The Beatles’ White Album, and I paid for part of it in pennies.
I’m an all-around John Lennon freak, and I’ve even done an arrangement of “Happy Xmas.” Lennon had the greatest voice, and his song “Imagine” is his equivalent of Samuel Barber’s Adagio. I also love Jimi Hendrix and Jeff Beck. To this day, I would love to meet Beck — my heart just leaps when I hear him play.
I heard Hendrix play the national anthem at Woodstock, and it was the most powerful thing I’d heard, given the time of the Vietnam War. It was an extraordinary statement.
My father was a minister, and from an early age I was lucky enough to hear a lot of Bach organ music in church. Even though I was immersed in rock, Bach’s music was creeping into my musical psyche, particularly as an early teenager. It is probably why I always include a Bach work in my programs. For classical guitar music, my mother had bought me a Julian Bream album — classic Julian Bream where he is playing Giuliani and Aguado. Segovia was not really in the picture for me. I was really very lucky to meet and study with Leo Brouwer in 1974–1975 at a master class when I went to Arles, France. This was back before anyone had really heard of Brouwer. He’s an incredibly dynamic teacher, and John Williams and Abel Carlevaro and Alirio Díaz also came there to play. As far as teachers go, I studied at SUNY Purchase with Phillip de Fremery and then Frederic Hand, both of who have become dear friends.
I have two stories about how my family dealt with my increasing guitar obsession. One is that I was intent on practicing for an audition to college — I started relatively late in the game at eighteen — but here I was playing Sor’s “Study No. 12,” which is all thirds up the fretboard. I was nervous about making a mistake whenever I reached the 10th fret and inevitably I would lose it at right about this point and start screaming obscenities. It was as if it was written into the music — “dum-dee-dum, dee-dum, goddammit!” This was all that my mother heard from upstairs, the same étude and me bursting into a fit of shrieking of obscenities. At one point I became so upset I kicked over my music stand and sent it flying. That’s when my mother said, “Benjamin, come here right now. If you don’t stop it, I will take that guitar away from you, and you will not see it for a week.” Now, this was a bit ridiculous because I was already eighteen but, still, the thought of not being able to play for a week struck me as such a startling and awful concept, it just stopped me in my tracks to consider it.