Happy times on tour, Havana, Cuba, August 2012. Me and Mark Antee, waiting for the bus. And waiting, and waiting, and waiting some more. Mark’s last show with She’s Still Dead was this past Sunday.
Age 18. Hair growing out, dressing like I’m in Metallica. This was back when you could do things like walk into a downtown building on an empty-city Saturday and mess around and take pictures.
Chris took this.
Western Russia, in the countryside somewhere. That’s Gogol Bordello soundman Frank Lievaart standing in front of me, photographed – by monitor engineer Jon Lammi – in such a way that our faces are perfectly melded together. Frankie does not have a moustache, nor is he as pink as I am, and I do not wear glasses.
I have to check my photos from that trip, because I have no idea what we’re looking at.
1993, or thereabouts. Photo by Lisa Johnson, Rock Photographer.
A photo I accidentally took of myself yesterday.
July 25th 1982, Club 950, Chicago. The second time I played guitar in public, opening for an English band called Chron Gen. They left, and we cheekily plugged into, and played our set through, their amps. This was our last song, a free-form noise-jam cover of Naked Raygun’s Bomb Shelter. On stage, L→R, Mike ( playing my guitar ), me ( screaming into the mic, wearing my Exploited Punk’s Not Dead shirt ), Anthony ( behind the drums ), Alan, Chopper, Steve, Ron.
Loch Ness. I looked and I looked and I looked. I stood for 20 minutes and watched the water, but I saw no monster. It was winter in a place at about the same longitude as Norway, and it was wet, but there was a pub with a roaring fire, and I got a pint of heavy, maybe two, and then I didn’t mind so much.
The later 1990s, a few weeks after I’d cut my dreads off – you can see the stumps trying to work themselves out. Although it was pretty clear at this point that the band had run its course, cutting my hair was not symbolic of that; pure and simple, times were changing. At the end of 1987, when I’d just moved to NYC, I was intrigued by the sight of Dave Insurgent, the first white guy with dreads I’d ever seen. Ten years later, the style was everywhere. Gutter punks were starting to do it, and I think this is where the idea that dreads are dirty or smelly comes from ( the notion can’t come from Rastafarians, who are usually fastidiously clean ), and it’s ironic, because the way you get your hair to start clumping up is to wash it. You know how if you shampoo your hair but don’t condition it, it has a kind of harsh, horsehair-kind-of-feel and snarls up really easily? Bingo. People started to get the ridiculous idea that we’d had our hair done at a salon, and I was particularly annoyed that several hairdressers were going around saying that they’d done our dreads for us. I hadn’t had a haircut since 1985, and people asked if I had extensions, another sore point. Hippies, too, had dreads now, and being mistaken for a deadhead was, at the time, very, very irritating. I guess the final straw was the question of appropriating black culture. One night, a rasta followed me down the street, enraged, screaming abuse. Fuck it, I said to myself, and I went home and got out the scissors.
Bluebird were a band from L.A., active in the late 90s – early 2000s, who I’ve been thinking about recently because a bunch of their material has been re-released on a deluxe 3XCD set – Saguaro, available here. I was friends with them when I lived in L.A. ( I talk to them still, actually ), and in Summer 2001, when they lost a guitar player, I filled in on some west coast dates. We finished the tour off in Seattle with a gig at the Experience Music Project, and Krist Novoselic came out and played with us : super double Gibson bass attack! The stage was barely big enough to fit all of us, but the sound was explosive and we burned through our set, Sam hanging off of the lighting truss. I did that tour with my 1970 Les Paul Custom and 1978 Marshall JMP 100 watt head, which I’d never consider doing today, but ten years ago, choice vintage gear was still reasonably priced, and lots of similar equipment was in hard daily use. It occurs to me too that most of my friends at that time drove 1960s cars, had land lines, etc.
Here’s the main thing, though. This was twelve days before the 9.11 attacks, and I look at the photo and can’t help but think, ” Happy guys, look at you. Summer’s over, and you have NO IDEA what’s next. “
L → R : Barry, Krist, Sam, Bryan, Jim, me.
Shooting a spot for Brazilian MTV with horror master Coffin Joe in his São Paulo lair, January, 1996. I hacked off most of the length of my dreads, which had been long enough that I could put them in my pants pockets, the night before we flew down there. My chief memory of this experience is that Coffin Joe had very long, yellow fingernails, with which he smoked long cigarettes. Benson & Hedges menthols, I think.
As fotografias eo texto não devem tocar!
As fotografias não devem tocar!
As fotografias não devem tocar!
Havana, Cuba : messing around on a rooftop.
Here’s what I was looking at :
Since you asked, a lot, here’s my White Zombie early guitar timeline :
Guitar #1. Gibson Firebird : purchased for $200 at the south side Guitar Center, Chicago, in 1986. At some point it had been stripped of its finish and covered with white latex house paint, its metal parts were corroded, and it had been played a LOT. The serial number was long gone, but it had trapezoid fret markers, full-size humbuckers, banjo tuners, extra-thin headstock, and it came with its original case – black tolex, white logo, purple velvet interior – so, a 1972-1979 Firebird V.
At that time, electric guitars weren’t really collectible unless they were rare variants (I remember that there were certain Fenders which had a particular cachet ; custom colors with matching headstocks were desirable, as were Jazzmasters and Jazz Basses with block inlays and reverse maple necks.), had originally been very fancy and expensive, or were particularly good players. Les Pauls could push an amp the hardest, especially if you raised the pickups as far as they would go, so those were good. Everything else was just an old guitar, which you could buy at a pawn shop. Look at photos of bands from the 80s ; rockabilly guys had beautiful old Gretsches, which nobody else wanted. Metal players routed out 1960s Stratocasters to install locking tremolo systems and active pickups.
This guitar, while it looked like it had been stored in a basement in Manila (or underwater, possibly), was within my meager budget, and it had that voodoo quality that you learn to recognize after you’ve been playing for a while : you can pick up a guitar, and by the heft and balance of it, the way it feels in your hands, the way the wood resonates when you tap it — you just know when you’ve got a good one. You don’t have to plug it in. You don’t even have to play a note.
I tossed all the hardware except the pickups and tuners (I know, I know, but remember, that stuff wasn’t worth anything in 1986), stripped the latex off, and spent days carefully applying thin coats of dark blue spray paint. I got a new black pickguard, chrome tailpiece and tune-o-matic bridge, knurled chrome knobs, and I had it all put together at a little guitar store in my neighborhood (I cringe, now, to think of how I used to bug the guys who worked there, but what else was there to do? All the boys and girls who want to be in bands still do the same thing) and it looked great, triggering a collective ooooh every time I took it out. It sounded great, and it was unbelievably easy to play. A keeper.
I moved to New York at the end of 1987, sat out the following year (worked, took the bus, failed to meet anyone who wanted to start a band, wrote long letters to dispersed friends, went to CBGB by myself), and joined White Zombie in the beginning of 1989. I quickly acquired a more suitable pointy-headstock-and-locking-tremolo guitar (see Guitar #2), but the Firebird served as my on-stage spare through early 1990, when the headstock snapped on the way back from our first European tour.
1990-91 : we played shows, hustled, got signed, recorded La Sexorcisto, moved to Los Angeles. We brought what we could fit in the van, which, outside of (functioning) gear, wasn’t much. Our friend Damien (the character in the Thunderkiss video in long johns and skull mask, that’s Damien) lived with his grandparents in a big apartment in Brooklyn, where he let me store my meager stuff – the Firebird, a few crates of LPs, some books. The building burned down a couple of months later, destroying everything. As far as I know, there is no surviving photograph of that guitar, either in its original blue/black/chrome incarnation, or after Rob and Sean covered it in glittery/prismatic silver, red, and green flames.
Guitar #2. Charvel 6 : known to fans as the STP guitar, or, 666 guitar.
This:
Basically a made-in-Japan version of a Jackson soloist. It has a faintly clunky, slightly miniature quality that an actual U.S.A Jackson doesn’t, but it is totally playable. Features include neck-through construction, bound neck and headstock, Jackson-licensed Floyd Rose (with a snap-in whammy bar that you were sure to lose), Jackson humbucker and two singles (everybody who bought one of these replaced them). It came with a funny silver plastic case that looked like a NASA equipment container.
In February 1989, right after I joined the band, Sam Ash (or was it Manny’s?) on 48th St. got a big shipment of these and blew them out for $350. Sean and I went up there together and I bought one, and she bought the matching Charvel bass. Now that I think about it, half the bands around then in NYC (Prong, Biohazard, Lunachicks, and more) had one of these on-sale model 6s, or some other inexpensive Charvel. At that time, people didn’t want Gibsons or Fenders, which seemed old fashioned, or cheap garage-band guitars, which everybody appreciated but which were strictly for display. They wanted high-functioning heavy metal guitars, hot-rod parts strats, pointy headstocks. Install a better pickup, cover your guitar with stickers, get your strings good and stretched-out the night before the gig. Go!
There’s not much to say about this one, except that it was solid, a workhorse, sounded pretty good, and was my main guitar from my first show with WZ through my first tour (USA, Summer 1989), second tour (Europe, Winter 1989-1990), recording of La Sexorcisto, and the first half or so of the tour for that album. I didn’t do anything to it except drop an EMG 81 into the bridge and an EMG single into the neck (I left the middle rout empty) – there were mini on/off switches for each pickup, which I thought was dumb, so I installed a Gibson-style 3-way selector. I’ve been asked many times if the White Zombie logo on the headstock is a custom inlay. It’s a sticker, and the question always surprises me, because I had no more access, at that time, to a skilled luthier than I did to a spaceship.
A funny thing about a guitar with a locking tremolo system is that it will often stay in tune better than one with a standard stop-tailpiece (how d’you like that G string, Gibson players?). However, restringing is a drawn-out, even stressful ordeal (you get used to it, but it sucks) and the bridge sometimes requires a daily bit of adjustment to perform really well. I didn’t have a guitar tech until much later, and I didn’t have access to the wealth of information available today about every aspect of guitar maintenance – and I sure didn’t know much about set-up and intonation ; I just wanted the thing to be stable and play in tune, so I put a block behind the trem – actually a piece of hard rubber, so you could pull back just a tiny bit, but basically just dive forward. In 1992, we played MTV host Riki Rachtman’s birthday party at The Palace in Hollywood, as did Pantera. They used our gear because their stuff was somewhere else, and Darrell couldn’t do any of his signature whammy-squeal-harmonic tricks with my guitar, which I’m sure seemed like a toy to him. He reacted with characteristic good humor, but kept catching my eye with a “What the FUCK am I supposed to do with this thing?” look. There’s a photo, somewhere.
What stands out in my mind about that period is how much I didn’t know about my gear, which I was using every day, traveling with, depending on. My Firebird broke in the cargo hold of an airplane because I had no idea you’re supposed to loosen a guitar’s strings when flying. The first time I played in L.A., my Charvel 6 mysteriously stopped working and I had to finish the set with the Firebird (which sounded pretty good, actually). The next day, I was .. to put it lightly, concerned, and L7’s Jennifer Finch, who was kindly showing us around, said, “Well, when’s the last time you changed the battery?” — I was like, “There’s a .. battery?” – I had no idea what ‘active pickup’ meant. In the studio, during the recording of La Sexorcisto, the tubes in my JCM-800 started to glow superhot and then the amp blew — Oh no, what have I done to this thing? Producer Andy Wallace said, “When’s the last time you changed your tubes?” — I had no idea tubes don’t last indefinitely. You can hear a marked difference in tone between the songs on the album recorded pre-and-post amplifier meltdown. Thunderkiss ’65, appropriately, features the sound of a Marshall that’s about to explode.
Guitar #3. The WZ guitar : the guitar from the Thunderkiss ’65 video, subject of much speculation, email, and more than one drunken late-night phone call. Lent to the Hard Rock Cafe in the 1990s, finally purchased by them in the 2000s. Spotted in various locations around the world.
This, in a photo I found on Flickr :
In early 1990, the cracking of the Firebird’s headstock forced me to get serious about finding a spare. It would need to be a metal guitar, with a Floyd, but being able to afford something like that, used, even, was out of the question. The Kramer Focus body I’d gotten from my friend Chris for $30 two years previous was an option. On the back of the photo below, which Chris sent me soon after I left Chicago, he wrote (under the banner “Feeling homesick yet?”) : “More about Kramer : I feel some words of praise for Mr.Floyd Rose are in order. Even though the headstock broke off months ago, the guitar is still in tune and playable!”
I met Chris through the Chicago hardcore scene, and during the period where my contemporaries and I were drifting away from punk, then leaving it behind entirely, then scattering to go to college, work, or off to something else, we were inseparable. We both dropped out of school at the same time. I lent him my guitar, which he proceeded to learn how to play better than I could in about 6 weeks. He got me a job at the photo lab where he worked (the contraband-containing metal Kodak film can, see it?), which allowed me to save up enough money – so I thought – to move to NYC. We consumed music voraciously (not only Metallica, Slayer, Venom, the metal bands we were obsessed with, but everything – notice the Residents LP), which we listened to on cheap turntables through big 3-way speakers made of chipboard. Here are guitars (the broken Kramer, to the left, and an early 80s Hamer Special, a common sight in Illinois pawn shops then), and several items that are particularly evocative of the era ; shelves made from stolen milk crates, empty Augsburger bottles, guitar tab books.
I collected some really excellent prismatic hot rod stickers at swap meets (unless we had to get somewhere fast, we always pulled the van over and went to flea markets), which I plastered on the Kramer and sealed down with a layer of urethane. I bought a neck from the ESP shop on 48th St., begged and borrowed other parts, and cobbled everything together. I got an EMG pickup and pots and installed them myself (my first attempt at doing my own soldering), not that I knew how, but I copied the wiring from my Charvel, and it worked. The assembled guitar didn’t intonate correctly, and thus was never quite in tune, and my main guitar hardly ever broke strings (I mean, like, never) so I probably only played it once or twice on stage, although it did make an appearance in some early experiments with tuning down in 1992-93. The guitar tracks on La Sexorcisto are 99% the same set-up : Charvel 6 → Pro-Co Rat → Marshall, but I did use the WZ guitar, which had a twangier sound, for some leads and overdubs : for example, check out the little tri-tone symphony that happens in Starface from 3:24 to 3:40.
As for Chris, he stayed in Chicago and formed a band which was about as different from mine as possible. Trenchmouth ( I did a vinyl-grab of a track I particularly like back in February, which is here) were an indie – that meant something, then – group who evolved from a muscular postpunk sound (think Dischord Records, kind of) into something else that I really can’t pigeonhole : a trippy, dub-inflected, acience fiction vibe that was groovy yet angular (I know that’s not saying anything, I guess you’ll just have to go listen to them). This was the grunge era, yet they were spiffy guys who somehow kept their suits presentable on van tours. I ran into them from time to time. They slept on my floor once, in L.A., and they played me heavy dub and electronic records, music totally outside of my experience. Today, in a widening of divergent paths, Chris, who I talk to occasionally, is a chemistry professor.
That’s right – I set a guitar on fire and smashed it. In fact, I’ve gotten to do that twice. Breaking a guitar is harder than it looks.
