Interview: Joe Gore.

Joe Gore is that rare thing, a relentlessly creative and successful guitarist (including credits on seminal Tom Waits and PJ Harvey recordings, as well as work with Courtney Love, DJ Shadow, Aimee Mann, Tracy Chapman, Kimya Dawson of the Moldy Peaches, the Eels, Les Claypool and John Cale) who also excels at a number of other pursuits. These include journalism - he was the senior editor of Guitar Player magazine for several years in the late 1980s and early 1990s - and large scale creative projects, like the gargantuan Clubbo website, a fictional record company with a deep back catalogue, all fake. I've admired Joe Gore's guitar playing and writing for many years, and am grateful that he agreed to answer a few of my questions via email.

You have a new project coming out this week - can you tell us something about this?

Mental 99 is a new band with my pal, drummer Dawn Richardson. We'd been wanting to do something together for years, and we finally got around to it. It's an instrumental duo, exploring the question of how much racket two players can create. 

There are a couple of things that I find exciting about the project, beyond the pleasure of playing with such a cool and creative drummer. 

1. Phantom bass syndrome. For various reasons, many of the projects I've been involved with for the last decade have had no bass player, and I've gotten increasingly into the idea of playing the bass and guitar roles simultaneously. Not necessarily in the Ted Greene/Charlie Hunter sense of true multi-voice counterpoint, so much as creating parts that straddle those two roles. I've played bari-guitars, or just low-tuned regular guitars, for ages, especially on the records I did with Tom Waits and PJ Harvey. Along the way, I just started hearing less in terms of bass vs. guitar, and more in terms of low/dark vs. high/bright. (Having said that, Dawn and I got to play a show recently in a quartet with Tracy Chapman and Flea, and it was exhilarating to play with a bassist again, especially one that talented!)

2. Pure sound fixation. For the last few years I've been geeking out on guitar sound — pure sound — to an unhealthy degree. I've done consulting/development work for various audio companies, some of which involved scrutinizing classic guitar tones. To better understand how those things work in the digital realm, I started building analog stompboxes and amps, and that became a parallel obsession. But it got to the point where I felt like a painter who had learned to mix amazing pigments, but never got around to painting anything. So one motivation for Mental 99 was to actually use some of the tools I'd worked on. 

3. Those who can't sing, don't. Playing instrumental music has always been a can of worms for me. I was a classical musician till my early 20s, and I still love classical music, though I don't play it. And while I dig jazz and have played it with some amazing artists, I've never really been a jazz musician. Plus, the jazz I'm drawn to tends to be highly arranged/composed stuff — I've always responded more to Ellington than to bop. (And I sincerely hate Real Book blowing sessions with round-robin soloing.) On the other hand, I love lots of kitschy instrumental music, like surf, easy listening, and Euro-cheese soundtracks. But my ear is too dissonant to play that stuff in a literal way. So I guess Mental 99 sounds at times like the Ventures playing Ellington, or Gang of Four playing the Ventures. Basically, people attempting music they have no business playing, sometimes with cool results. 

Anyway, I play everything on one guitar, a standard-scale James Trussart tele tuned down to CGCFAD (like regular dropped-D, transposed down a whole-step), into a laptop running Apple's MainStage. There are no amps or stompboxes, though the signal runs through a hardware looper before it reaches the mixing board/PA. I've done a zillion digital guitar recordings, but this is the first time I've been dumb enough to try it live. 

Here's a free song if anyone's curious. It was cut live in the studio with no overdubs — just drums and guitar/laptop going straight to disc. Though we did actually play a few minutes longer and edit out the boring bits. (Hey — Miles did it too!)

Could you talk about the Clubbo project from a guitar perspective? Specifically, how do you approach the faking of outdated guitar sounds?

Well, Clubbo was an over-ambitious project I co-created with Elise Malmberg, a great singer, composer, engineer, and audio geek. It alleges to be a web site documenting the half-century history of Clubbo records, complete with music, album art, biographical essays, and various "historical" debris. It's all fake, of course. (BTW, here's the secret page with the real credits.) The site is hundreds of pages deep — even many of the "external" links are faked, leading to other bogus websites we made.

Guitar-wise, it was fun, because it was an excuse to play everything I never would have been caught dead doing under my own name. Southern rock? Shred metal? Jam band noodling? No prob! 

As for the recording techniques, 90% of it created in software — mimicking various historic recording chains via digital distortion, EQ, compression, and effects. One secret trick: heavy use of impulse-response reverbs made from quirky/crappy old gear.  

You recorded seven albums with Tom Waits, a musician with a singular aesthetic - did he give you any directives about what he wanted from you?

The direction is continuous — he directs every part, sculpting your performance with his facial expressions, body language, and amazing turns of phrase. ("Make it sound more poor." "Not bluegrass banjo — death banjo!"). He never suggests particular notes or parts, but directs the proceedings so completely that it always comes out sounding like Tom Waits music. Example: I was thrilled to bits to track a couple of Tom's song with Stewart Copeland on drums. Tom had Stewart play one of his fucked-up old circus drums, and coached him on the performances. In the end, Stewart sounded pretty much like the drummer on any post-Swordfish Waits album — which is to say, fucking amazing! Almost all Waits recordings are first or second takes. He hates when it starts sounding too rehearsed, or like you've worked out the perfect part. Better to sound like you've never played it before, mistakes and all. And not using a tuner is a definite plus.

I've heard some of your looping with the Apple MainStage software - what are the advantages to working with software, rather than a standalone device like the JamMan or the Boss looper?

I did some work for Logic, GarageBand and MainStage. (For those who don't use the software, I'll explain: Logic is Apple's pro recording software, sort of competing cousin to Pro Tools and Live. GarageBand is a light version of Logic, based on the same audio engine, that comes installed on most Macs, though sometimes GarageBand innovations trickle upstream into Logic. And MainStage is a Logic spinoff optimized for live performance.) 

The latest version of MainStage includes a powerful looping tool, but I haven't worked it into live performance yet — I use a hardware Boomerang III looper instead. The all-software looper is more powerful and open-ended, but I find it difficult to drive onstage, in large part because no one has made an ideal hardware controller for it. (Apogee's GIO is a great-sounding I/O that performs fantastically onstage, but it doesn't have enough footswitches to operate several loops simultaneously AND switch programs.) I prefer the Boomerang to all other options because of its great ergonomics — creator Mike Nelson put a lot of thought into creating a device you can truly pilot in real time. I also use a Kenton Killamix — basically, just a row of controller knobs and switches. Summary:  I loop with the Boomerang, switch programs and toggle effects with the GIO, and tweak virtual knobs with the Killamix. It's all very awkward, and it's taken me six months to obtain the vaguest hope of making it through a song without screwing up.   

I find it a bit ironic that I'm even talking about looping. Like many musicians I know, I've moved away from looping over the course of the last decade. Today's zeitgeist just seems to be more about imperfect, realtime playing. It's been years since I used a drum loop on anything (except maybe Clubbo tracks making fun of bad drum loop music). 

Still, I find that looping presents huge challenges — both hugely exciting and hugely daunting. The biggest problem is that looping tends to lock you in a specific musical structure: Play a part. Add counterpoint. Get thicker and thicker, then go silent or fade out. You can compile stunning textures, but the process gets tiresome. It's harder to make stop-on-a-dime changes, alternate between contrasting sections, introduce variations, or deviate from the itinerary on the fly. Those are the things I work on these days. I haven't mastered any of them, but I'm slowly improving. Or so I tell myself.  

Your tenure at Guitar Player magazine, from the late 80s to the mid 90s, represents some of the most interesting guitar journalism of the magazine's long history. Yet you told Steven Ward in 2008: “In retrospect, I was probably a bad fit for the gig. I hated the music industry. I hated guitar heroism. I hated guitar collectors. My passions were music and culture, where guitar occasionally plays a role. I love making music on guitars, but I have no sentiment about them. They’re hammers and nails to me." Are you proud of your work there? For you, what is missing from mainstream guitar journalism?

Well, I stand by those words. But at the same time, I loved working at the magazine and always felt extremely lucky to have been part of it. It was amazing to get paid to do so much stuff I probably would have done for free. I don't reread my work unless I have to, but I suspect that if I did, I'd be of two minds: I'd wince at how self-important I sounded, but I'd probably give myself a bit of credit for documenting some great music while it was being made. 

What do I dislike about mainstream guitar journalism? The same thing every guitarist hates about it: It's doesn't always reflect my personal taste! But I feel the editors at the top mags are doing a stellar job in the face of the dual declines of the music industry and the print medium. Theirs is not an easy gig!

If I did anything valuable, it was being a conduit: exposing readers to something great they might not otherwise have encountered, be it a new player, a forgotten one, a great stompbox, or a cool tuning trick. Fortunately, players can now obtain all those things more easily than ever online. It's a trade-off — the "experts" usually can't make a living writing for consumer music mags these days, so we must rely on the amateur fanatics. The things we encounter online might not be especially well written or edited, but they're passionate and intense—and often shockingly good. 

Here's a personal example from when I started building stompboxes a couple of years ago. I didn't know electronics, yet I fancied myself an expert. I'd reviewed hundreds of pedals. I had access to amazing collections of museum-quality gear. I knew the big-name manufacturers and got paid to scrutinize their latest creations. I owned a formidable collection myself, and had used them in great studios with great artists, engineers, and producers. So I ventured into the DIY community with the most condescending of attitudes. I thought it would be, "I built me my very own Tube Screamer, and it's durn-near good as a store-bought one!"

Needless to say, I was a fucking idiot. 

I learned far more about stompboxes from the collective wisdom of the DIY community that I would have learned in 50 years at a guitar magazine. That's no swipe at the magazines — it's just that old-school print can't rival the depth of such a large and vibrant virtual community as the one at, say, freestompboxes.org. And I can't believe some of the amazing labor-of-love websites, like beavis audio and gaussmarkov! They're packed with great info, beautifully presented. So while it's bad time to make a living dispensing that information, it's a great time to consume it!

My thanks to Joe Gore for taking the time to answer my questions.

Guitar Player magazine.

The first issue that I ever bought of Guitar Player was this one, from 1982. The cover story was on John Entwistle's vintage guitar collection, and I could not have asked for a more enticing entree into the world of guitar journalism. I had been playing about four months when I started to reach for more information about the instrument, and I've never stopped reading and thinking about it.
I'm currently enjoying this multipart oral history on the Guitar Player editors through the years and cutting a videotaped interview with boutique effects pedal manufacturer Andrew Kilpatrick that will appear in the next few days.

Fender Pro Junior: I'm lovin' it.

I'm loving my Fender Pro Junior again. This amp, that I got in trade for my Blues Junior a few years ago, has been an up and down affair for me. On one hand, it's a great-sounding little amp, with a warm and organic overdrive that's hard to find on modern amps.  On the other, it has given me quite a few problems, like excessive hum and hiss, a disintegrating input jack and melting tube sockets. These problems are well-documented on forums and I've had it repaired three times now.

I've used the Pro Junior primarily as a jazz amp - my former employer Jeff Healey used one as well in his Jazz Wizards and it works very well with archtop guitars. But since this last repair, I've found the rock and roll voice of the Pro Junior. There's something vocal and pretty about the EL84 overdrive, something that I've found rare on Fender amps of late. I'm even tempted to buy another one, as David Barrett does with his Rivera Super Champs, to chain together for bigger gigs.

Interview: David Love.

David Love is a versatile and busy professional guitarist and singer based in Toronto. He has been a member of the Randy Bachman/Burton Cummings band (featuring the two principals from the legendary Canadian rock band the Guess Who) since 2005, and has played with Cummings since 1996. He has performed all over Canada and the United States, and earlier this year travelled to the Canadian Forces base in Kandahar, Afghanistan to perform with his band the Carpet Frogs. He kindly agreed to answer a few questions via email.

How important is authentic gear when trying to get vintage tones?

Well, it’s important to me to be inspired by the tones I’m getting. Having authentic gear – the same model of guitar and amp -  gives me a sort of confidence in my performance. I think the audience enjoys it too – at least the guitar players in the audience do or so they’ve told me.

Could you describe your guitar rig?
 

With The Frogs, we do anything from Johnny Cash to Led Zeppelin so I have to have gear that allows me to dial in a wide variety of tones. With Burton, I have to try to replicate the tones of some pretty iconic records. Burton is quite insistent on trying to reproduce those sounds faithfully.  Primarily, I use my Koch Multitone 100 watt three channel head and a Koch 2 X 12 cabinet. Some guys gasp at the prospect of somebody still using high powered heads but I like the clean headroom I can get from it. It will give super clean sparkly Fender tones as well as that dry Marshall bark.

I always take my Rickenbacker 360-12 string with me because we like to do a lot of British invasion stuff. It is strung with Pyramid Gold flatwounds like Harrison, McGuinn, and Townsend used on their Rickenbacker 12 strings.

My main six string guitar is a 2005 G & L ASAT Deluxe which is Leo Fender’s spin on his Telecaster design. Mine has Seymour Duncan pick ups that I can switch from single coil to humbucking which allows me to cover a lot of ground sonically.

My pedal board consists of an Ernie Ball VP Jr. volume pedal, a Peterson Strobostomp II, a Diamond Compressor, a Keeley compressor, a Keeler Push overdrive, a Diamond Memory Lane analog delay, and a Catalinbread Semaphore tremolo and is powered by a Voodoo Labs isolated power supply.

My acoustic rig is either my Gibson J-185 or my Gibson J-160E into a Peterson Strobostomp II, Fishman Spectrum DI, and a Radial JDI Direct Box.

I use Evidence Audio cables.

You've been working for some time with Randy Bachman and Burton Cummings. How did that come about?

The Carpet Frogs had a Thursday night residency at some joint in Toronto many years back. One night, a friend of ours, who happened to be Burton Cummings’ road manager, walked in the place with Burton in tow. Burton was in town doing one of his Up Close and Alone shows and our friend, Sam, said “Come and see this band with me – you’ll love them.” We invited Burton up with us to do some of his favourite cover tunes and 5 hours later, we were friends. Burton got an offer to do a show but the promoter requested that he have a full band with him. Burton remembered our jam that night and called us to ask if we’d like to do a gig or two with him. Of course, we jumped at the chance. That was 12 years ago. We’ve been his band ever since.

When talk of a reunited Randy Bachman/Burton Cummings project came up in 2005, Burton insisted that they use our band. It’s been a pretty cool ride playing with those guys – they are Canadian music royalty. Playing for Randy and Burton has taken me all over the U.S. and Canada.

How do you approach working out guitar arrangements for the Bachman/Cummings live shows?

We are told what songs to learn. I go to the original recordings, the internet, youtube.com, tablature sites, sheet music – whatever - to nail down the parts. We all show up at soundcheck – there are no rehearsals – and you had better know your parts. Usually, the other guitarist (Michael Zweig or Tim Bovaconti) and I will watch what Randy is doing and try to pick the alternate part on the record and stay out of Randy’s way.

The same thing goes when learning a Burton Cummings tune. We’ll assign each other the parts and play them for him to get his reaction. Usually, if he nods his head and just rocks out, we know we’re on the right track!

I’ve been pretty fortunate to be able to play in Bachman Cummings and The Burton Cummings Band with a couple of outstanding Toronto guitarists: Michael Zweig and Tim Bovaconti.

You've been in the music business for quite a while. Do any hard-learned lessons come to mind?

Yes – you ain’t all that and a bag of chips – even if you are. If one is serious about being a professional musician in Canada, one soon realizes that you’re not going to be on a tour bus playing stadiums every week. Being a player means working and gigging – period. You may play for 160,000 people one week and playing the local pub the next. It goes with the territory in this country. If you can scratch out a living doing what you love in the Canadian music business, you are a raging success in my book.

What is your philosophy of teaching guitar?

I work primarily with adult learners who come to me to fast-track the art of singing and playing the guitar. I am not a very learned musician or a technically gifted player – I don’t read notation very well so my emphasis is on blending performance skills with guitar ability. My expertise lies in singing and playing the guitar and entertaining. That’s something that a lot of people want to know how to do and I help them do it.

Any career highlights that you'd like to share?

I am a child of the 60s and I grew up on The Guess Who so the first time I played "These Eyes" and "No Sugar Tonight" with Randy and Burton on a big stage in front of tens of thousands of people, I had an out-of-body experience!

Highlights? Let’s see…. (in no particular order)

Playing Live 8 in 2005 and ending up on the DVD

Doing a CBC special with Randy and Burton

Recording with Randy and Burton

Opening for Bon Jovi

Flying in a private jet

Seeing Canada from a tour bus

Watching Deep Purple sidestage

Playing for 160,000 people in Tennessee

Playing on the same bill with Mark Farner of Grand Funk

Playing on the same bill as and meeting Sir Elton John

Playing on the same bill with The Moody Blues

Having my Mom and Dad watch me play at the Molson Amphitheatre

Playing the 2010 Olympics with Burton

Playing in Afghanistan for our troops

Being interviewed for Gitbox Culture!

Thanks very much to David Love for taking the time to answer my questions.

The life and times of the Fender Jeff Beck Tribute Esquire Relic

Stratoblogster has a good post about a Jeff Beck Tribute Esquire Relic, a purported exact replica of Jeff Beck's battered Esquire, which he used in the sixties with the Yardbirds. The price? $7999.99.

As a working musician, a price like that on an electric guitar, especially one that is so baldly utilitarian as the Esquire, is, to me, laughable. I'm sure that I part company here with many pros, who point to the six-figure prices of some violins. But I just can't get past the cold fact that an Esquire like this, under the painstaking relic-ing, is really just a plank.  A beautifully engineered, mass-produced plank. Am I missing something?

This is not to imply that I don't shamelessly slaver over the picture of the guitar that I've posted here. But that's just because I love Teles, and I love the look and feel of old, beaten-up guitars. I still remember, as a 14 year old, picking up a battered sixties Tele with a Bigsby at Burlington Music (later Lakeshore Music, later still co-opted by Long and McQuade). But they wanted $700, so I couldn't afford it!

Hitting the Google oracle, I see that this guitar listed for $15,000 when it was first offered in February 2006. Here's a blog post from August 2006, reporting the street price of the JB to be $10,000. By December, the street price had dropped to $8,000, according to this forum thread. It has hovered there ever since, as evidenced by the $7999.99 EBay price tag (at this price point, by the way, I find "99" prices tacky) and this listing on Elderly's website.

Fender's extremely expensive guitars, which tend to be relic'ed reproductions of classic Fender guitars used by celebrities, exist in a sort of netherworld to me; a netherworld populated by guitar-dabbling lawyers and doctors, some perhaps buying guitars as investments. Why did the Jeff Beck Tribute Esquire Relic fail as an investment? Were qualms about its accuracy damaging to its reputation?

The trade in reproduced famous guitars can be understood as a particularly fetishized aspect of guitar culture. It depends upon a strain of gear lust that values highly two factors: rarity, and the perceived aura of a celebrity's guitar. The Jeff Beck Tribute Esquire Relic certainly has rarity on its side - only 150 were made. But it's possible that Beck lessened the impact of the Fender model by also allowing Gibson to use his name on their Custom Shop repro of a famous Beck guitar, in this case his "Oxblood" Les Paul.

But what about the aura? The 'Masterbuilt' line of Fender guitars is built by named craftsmen, in this case the late John English. So there is a connotation of the old-world artisan here, rather than the monolithic Fender brand, which has been somewhat cheapened these days by the company's major Chinese, Mexican and Korean operations, along with their Southern California base. The 2007 death of John English might have been expected to affect the price, though perhaps English's role in the manufacture of the guitar is not significant to the actual customers who would purchase these guitars.

And of course, we must take into account the formidable aura of Beck himself. There has been an assessment in some recent sources that Beck is one of the most highly regarded rock guitarists still working. It's entirely probable that the value of both guitars will increase when Beck dies, though the admittedly less rare Danny Gatton and Stevie Ray Vaughan models have not had a renaissance as of yet.

Bob Dylan, guitar hero

Bob Dylan has surely employed some wonderful lead guitarists over the course of his career, including Bruce Langhorne, Robbie Robertson, Mike Bloomfield, David Bromberg, Norman Blake, Billy Cross, Mick Ronson, Mark Knopfler, Danny Kortchmar, Fred Tackett, Mick Taylor, G.E. Smith, Daniel Lanois, Mike Campbell, Mason Ruffner, Jerry Garcia, John Jackson, Larry Campbell, Charlie Sexton, Cindy Cashdollar, Stu Kimball, Cesar Diaz and Denny Freeman. But what of Bob himself as a lead guitarist?

Don't laugh, Bob played a mess o' lead in the nineties. When I saw him in Philadelphia in 1994, after not seeing him live for eight years, I was surprised by how many solos Bob was taking, often at the same time as his lead player that night, John Jackson. His style, as I saw that night and heard on subsequent live recordings, tended to be a simple one, with a heavy reliance on repeated riffs. In that way it was reminiscent of his harmonica playing.

Even earlier in Dylan's career, some noteworthy guitar playing can be heard, if not really 'lead' in the classic sense. His first album, titled Bob Dylan (1961), is chock-a-block with guitar goodies, including the lipstick-holder slide on "Highway 51" and "In My Time of Dyin'". "Only A Pawn In Their Game," from The Times They Are A-Changin' (1964) features some very strange Carter picking (alternating single picked bass notes with strums) and "Don't Think Twice (It's All Right)" from 1963's The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan is a model of Travis fingerpicking. "Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat" from Blonde on Blonde (1966) starts off with some Tele lead scratching from our man before Robbie Robertson takes over, yet Bob is credited with 'lead guitar' on the album cover.

Dylan seems to have curtailed a lot of his live lead playing recently.  Mostly I hear about him playing keyboards on tour, and not really much guitar at all. There's not much out there that I know of on Bob's lead playing in recent years, but here's an article on Dylan's guitars,