A sticker for discipline...

… The guitar as sandwich board.

When Woody Guthrie emblazoned the legend “This Machine Kills Fascists” on his guitar in 1942 he may not have been the first musician to write on his axe but he certainly became history’s pre-eminent guitar graf-writer. Whether anybody in the audience at the Whiskey-A-Go-Go was aware of that heritage, when Rage Against The Machine took to the stage fifty years later, probably isn’t all that important. I’m sure it had no bearing on the impact that early RATM gig had on the audience. But whilst the band’s pivotal performance that night in 1992 was certainly momentous, there was also a provocative non-aural message that the punters couldn’t ignore. Because prior to soundcheck Tom Morello had scrawled the words “Arm The Homeless” in big letters on the front of his guitar. As philanthropy it might seem a conceit, but as social commentary it was nothing less than incendiary.

It’s possible that musical instruments have always been decorated, either by their makers or by their players. Stringed instruments surviving from the very earliest civilisations are often ornately adorned with carving and inlays. And there’s evidence that instruments were given names from early history, much as weapons often were, whether those weapons of music were taken up in arms in the name of freedom or otherwise. But who, I wonder, was the first person to inscribe a written message to spectators on their instrument, and what were they trying to say? Could it have been as trite as an insult? “Yo Mesopotamians, you suck!” You would hope it was something more positive and inspiring than that. So before you reach for the rattle cans, and start spraying “This Machine Arms The Homeless” on your dad’s ’62 White Falcon, consider this. If you’re going to make a declaration with the look of your instrument the only real caveat is make sure that what your saying is worth saying. I mean, can there be any more powerful statement than a pink guitar with a portrait of Hello Kitty? Just keep it real — and I’m not suggesting you carve 4 REAL into it with a razor blade — though as we’ll see, some musicians have felt the need to scratch their words deep into the timber.

In the popular era of 6 string slingers, most of the earliest writing done on guitars happened at the manufacturing stage. Country & Western musicians were notorious for decorating their guitars, a tradition Gretsch upheld in a rather kitsch way throughout the 1950s with varying degrees of ‘the cowboy treatment’. And of course a lot of early Western artists had their names put prominently on their guitars. Maybe it was a way to identify yourself to the drunks all the way back at the bar, peering up at yet another rhinestone cowboy in a ten gallon hat. Many, like south paw Tex Fletcher, would have their name inlaid right up the neck — something C.F. Martin & Co. later did in tribute with two custom made guitars for Fletcher fan Bob Dylan. The guitar as billboard with mother-of-pearl letters — and the bigger the letter, the better — an early way of advertising your brand. Perhaps the first singer to have this done was Jimmie Rogers, whose custom-ordered 1927 Martin 000-45 had his name along the fingerboard in MOP inlay. And it wasn’t the only writing on his guitar, it also had the word “Thanks” written on the back. The word was written upside down so he could flash his appreciation to his audience, a tradition that his friend and acolyte Ernest Tubb maintained for forty years after Rogers’ widow loaned him that same guitar. Now that’s a long term loan. I knew a guitarist who would flash the back of his instrument at women he liked the look of in the audience, however the message on his guitar was a little more personal and referred to the size of a different instrument in his possession. Like they say, it pays to advertise, you’ve just got to be shameless about it. Joe Strummer sprayed a big, white question mark on the back of his famous black Telecaster. I don’t know how often he flashed the audience with it, nor what that quizzical symbol might have meant. I’d like to hope he was trying to encourage Cartesian doubt. But then as we’ll see later, for such an outspoken spokesman-of-a-generation, Strummer was less than transparent with his guitar sloganeering. Along with a Martin 00-18 in the Country Music Hall Of Fame, Jimmie Rogers’ custom 000-45 is his best documented guitar and supposedly his favourite. During his career Rogers was known as “The Singing Brakeman” and also as “The Blue Yodeller”. These days, in the light of his legacy, he is usually just appended with the simple epithet “The Father Of Country Music”. His Martin 000-45 now sits framed in an antique bank safe, behind glass in Rogers’ own museum, where you can see a note pasted inside the sound hole that says: "To Jimmie Rodgers, America’s Blue Yodeller, with all good wishes — C. Fredrick Martin III July 27, 1928."

Labelled With Love

And then sometimes the message in the guitar is not on display at all. Joan Baez discovered someone had once pasted a missive inside her Martin when she sent her 1929 0-45 back to the factory (the same guitar that Dylan played at Newport in ’64). It wasn’t the nicest note ever conveyed by guitar but she took it in good humour: "An amusing story about that guitar is that when it went in to be fixed in 1996, the repairman took it apart and found a scroll inside which said, 'Too bad you're a communist'. It must have been done by a repairman years ago who disputed my politics. When the 0-45 was replicated for a 1997 edition, a backwards label bearing the same slogan was adhered to the inside of the soundboard so that it could be read with an inspection mirror.” A run of 59 signature models by Martin was released in ’98 with that political slur replicated in every one. Baez describes a label, but I have seen a photo of a Martin under construction where the same message is stamped into the heel block, under the fingerboard support without being mirrored, and accompanied by the signatures of Dick Boak & Dale Eckhart. Martins are beautiful guitars but people do love to write on them. ‘The Queen of Rockabilly’ Wanda Jackson, a woman who really rocked out, and long before the birth of the Riot Grrrl, painted her name on her 1950 D-18, along with two five-point stars which she further decorated in rhinestones. Indeed, stars are a feature of personal decoration that seem to crop up with regularity on guitars, maybe that’s just the inevitable aspiration of most musicians.

Stickers and labels have been pasted inside the bodies of stringed instruments for centuries, usually as maker’s marks, but it took a man on a mission to start pasting them on the outside. In 1942 Woody Guthrie wrote a song called Talking Hitler’s Head Off Blues. While some might say that writing this song was the direct trigger for his famous guitar slogan, similar stickers were already being pasted to war work machinery in US factories. Some writers have tried to make out that this version of events diminishes Guthrie’s act. Surely anyone can see that the genius of appropriating one of those stickers from a war production factory and applying it to his guitar — with the consequent association in the observer’s mind — is a greater act of propaganda than deciding to awkwardly misrepresent a musical instrument as a machine. In it’s first incarnation Woody’s slogan looked like a hand penned sticky label stuck to a Gibson, perhaps an L-00 model — though he later made it a more permanent statement in huge blue painted letters on a 00-18 Martin. Guthrie was obviously pleased with the slogan as he appears to have done it to his guitars again & again. There are pictures of him with Cisco Houston from around 1944 in which both singers are playing what look to be “banner headstock” Southern Jumbos. Gibson weren’t afraid to put “Only a Gibson is good enough” in a banner scroll on the heads of their machines in the war years, hence the soubriquet. In that photo Woody’s guitar has a much larger banner pasted above the sound hole and his now famous mechanised threat looks more like a large, printed ‘bumper sticker’. Perhaps this is one of many that rolled off a press to decorate production lines in Detroit or Willow Run, MI. It’s almost harder to find a picture of Guthrie with a guitar that isn’t proclaimed as a socialist weapon — it was obviously a statement he felt very strongly about.

Because that’s at the heart of what we’re talking about here folks. It’s easy to mock sensitive, artistic types, but they are often more emotionally attuned to the zeitgeist. People like Woody felt very strongly about what was happening around the world as the violence of the 1930s really ramped up. While the rest of the planet was trying not to think about the horrific atrocities in Nanking and Guernica, some people had a terrible foreboding of how far into the depths of Hell human beings might descend in the immediate future. In Guthrie’s song You Better Get Ready the Devil appears to him in a dream and promises him that if Woody pulls on his fighting pants and drives out the fascists “I’ll never raise Hell on Earth no more.” And until the fascists were driven out of all the territories they’d invaded, well, most people really had no idea of the kind of Hell-On-Earth they had created. Human vivisection, as perpetrated by the Imperial Japanese as well as the Nazis; the processing of human remains for profit; enforced famine; mass murder of civilians, in the millions; the torture of children. Guthrie really wasn’t joking when he had the Devil say this:

" He read off Adolf Hitler’s name
         And said 'Old Hell just ain’t the same,
   Compared with the fascists, brother I’m tame!' ”

Much has been said about Guthrie’s politics in his formative years, especially given his conservative father’s alleged membership of the KKK. But Woody Guthrie learnt a lot about the roots of American music and in so doing he learnt a lot about the roots of American racism. These days there always seems to be somebody who’s keen to claim that Guthrie wasn’t as ‘woke’ as a modern, educated liberal. Sometimes it’s like they’re trying to say that if he couldn’t be completely unprejudiced & nondiscriminatory by modern standards then everything he stood for is invalid. By the time Woody became a serious musician he was steeped in American roots music of every colour, and he had done so by playing with musicians of colour. He learnt some of his Folk stylings from the Piedmont Blues* he learnt playing with musicians like Brownie McGhee & Sonny Terry. Terry and McGhee, who also played a lot of Jump Blues together in the Forties, would both become frequent collaborators of Guthrie, as would an interesting ex-con by the name of Huddie Ledbetter. In fact Lead Belly played with Guthrie many times, in a variety of groups and would sometimes bring Woody onto his radio show. Woody Guthrie’s Folk “super-groups” of the 1940s were largely inter-racial. This is not the behaviour of a committed racist. Nor is it a very good way to promulgate segregation. The Headline Singers, for example was made up of two black men and two white: Lead Belly, Sonny Terry, Cisco Houston and Woody Guthrie. The group was formed in the Fall of 1942 and christened after Woody was advised by one producer to “quit trying to sing the news headlines”. The Union Boys were a similar band that Guthrie contributed to, made up as it was of the Afro-American musicians Brownie McGhee, Sonny Terry again, and the hugely influential Josh White, along with whiteys Pete Seeger, Burl Ives and Tom Glazer. Yeah, that Woody Guthrie was no better than a slave owning, baby lynching, SS oven operator, I tell ya.

Dear Landlord

Woody Guthrie also sang about injustice on the home front, a crusade he took up with great fervour once it became clear in the immediate post war years that banishing the overt fascists wasn’t going to banish racism or poverty. War machines the world over were being scrapped, but while everybody else was beating their swords into plowshares, Woody refused to decommission his guitars. Interviewed in the 2012 movie Greenwich Village: Music That Defined a Generation, Pete Seeger said “After the war was over, he kept the sign on and we said, ‘Woody, Hitler’s dead, why don’t you take the sign off?’ He says, ‘Well this Fascism comes along whenever the rich people get the generals to do what they want…’ ”. Woody could see that fascism had spread far beyond the imagination of Mussolini. Frederick C. Trump was a rich person and in 1950 Woody became his tenant at a property in Brooklyn. Until, that is, Woody realised there was a colour bar on black people occupying the development, so of course he wrote a song about it:

“I suppose Old Man Trump knows
      Just how much Racial Hate he stirred up
  In the bloodpot of human hearts
      When he drawed That color line
  Here at his Eighteen hundred family project… ”

The Department Of Justice eventually settled with the Trump Organisation over racial discrimination in their property lets in 1975, and both sides claimed victory: which gives you an idea of just how little was achieved by that particular round of litigation, beyond massive law firm profits. Frederick Christ Trump, son of Bavarian immigrant Friedrich Trumpf (or possibly Drumpf) would become famous during his lifetime as a hugely successful East Coast property developer and frequently investigated war profiteer. After his lifetime however, his fame hangs more on the career of one of his sons, who managed to bankrupt the family business, become a reality TV star and even the 45th POTUS — an office he managed to defile to such a degree he made Reagan and Bush Jr. look statesman-like. Fred Christ Trump was described by his own granddaughter (clinical psychologist Mary L. Trump), in her 2020 book as a high-functioning sociopath. Fred’s father Friedrich was a Bavarian draft dodger, illegal emigré and Yukon brothel owner who had come to the USA in 1885. Friedrich started the family real estate business, that would later grow fat on public money, during the Klondike Goldrush. After the Goldrush, Friedrich returned to Bavaria a rich man, but Bavaria didn’t want him — or his money. He was formally exiled and after his return to America in 1905 his son Fred C was born in the Bronx. After keeping a low profile like many German Americans during WWI (both Fred and Donald since tried to claim that he was a Swede), Friedrich became one of the first victims in North America of the Spanish Flu pandemic and died on May 30th 1918; son Fred died of pneumonia in 1999; grandson Donald proved more resistant to respiratory disease and managed to recover from Covid in 2020.

Placard Goose 

When Tom Morello played with Prophets Of Rage in 2017 the ‘Arm The Homeless’ guitar wore a message on the back covering it’s usual inverted hippopotamus. A message that was, you guessed it, written upside down so that it could be flashed at the crowd. In large black letters on a white rectangle that covered the entire rear of the body, it said “Fuck Trump”. As much as Morello probably agreed with Woody Guthrie on the issue of colour bars in residential property development, it was of course a remark directed at Fred’s son Donald. When Morello posted a picture of him flashing that message to the 45th President in 2017, it got plenty of reactions on Twitter including the glib jibe "Another successful musician instantly becomes a political expert.” Presumably from someone so enamoured of the Donald that like his hero he gets busy with the rhetoric with no regard whatsoever for any kind of objective truth. It’s not like Tom Morello (political ingenue that he is) had been raging against the machine for a quarter of a century or anything. Morello couldn’t resist this superb riposte: "One does not have to be an honours grad in political science from Harvard University to recognise the unethical and inhumane nature of this administration but well, I happen to be an honours grad in political science from Harvard University so I can confirm that for you."

A late ‘40s Martin 0-17 is one of Steve Earle’s favourite guitars, or so he told the godfather of guitar repair Dan Erlewine in an instalment of Guitar Talk in the July 2009 edition of Vintage Guitar magazine. While it’s unlikely that he would ever scrawl anything on it’s antique mahogany he did have another Martin scribbled on when he came up with a pithy epithet for a guitar that got relic’d for a TV show. For the 2010 series Treme, set in New Orleans, LA, after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, Earle needed a prop for his character ‘Harley’. In Offbeat magazine in July 2010 Earle laughed: “That’s a brand new Martin guitar that we fucked up to look like that. The water stains are duck sauce from Suzy’s Chinese on Bleeker Street. We antiqued it and then painted ‘This Machine Floats’ on top, which was my idea at the last minute.” Earle had visited New Orleans in 2006 in Katrina’s aftermath for a Future of Music Coalition activism retreat, and the first Musicians Bringing Musicians Home benefit concert, with non other than Tom Morello.

Bob Dylan’s first Martin was, similarly, a 1949 00-17 that he got hold of in Minneapolis in 1959. This of course was the notorious period in his development when the electric “Judas” outraged Rock N’ Roll fans by going acoustic. As Dylan himself recounts in Chronicles, he got the Martin acoustic by trading in his electric guitar. C.F. Martin & Co.’s own Dick Boak has said Dylan was “no doubt inspired by the small bodied 00 sized Martin guitars that Woody Guthrie played. Woody Guthrie often played the small 00-17s, 00-18s, 0-17s. Woody would often call (for a new guitar) and after a month or two he would give the guitar to a young musician and get another one.” I wonder if one of those hand-me-down Martins had ended up in a shop in Minneapolis by 1959? As Dylan describes it, the ten year old mahogany guitar definitely had a certain something, though he reckons he got into the guitar before he got into Guthrie (but then in the following quote he also misremembers the exact model). We can’t be certain what electric guitar Dylan traded but it may have been a catalogue classic. In an interview with Kurt Loder in Rolling Stone from June 21st 1984, Dylan said that his first electric was “a Silvertone guitar from Sears”**. A few paragraphs later he said “I sorta got into folk music. Rock & roll was pretty much finished. And I traded my stuff for a Martin that they don’t sell anymore, an 00-18, maybe, and it was brown. The first acoustic guitar I had. A great guitar. And then, either in Minneapolis or St. Paul, I heard Woody Guthrie, that was it, it was all over.” Not twenty lines later in that same interview Dylan also mentions The Clash: “Yeah, I met them back in 1977, 1978. In England. I think they’re great. In fact I think they’re greater now than they were… It’s interesting. It took two guitar players to replace Mick.”

Unwriting the future

Another influential “protest singer” who used his guitars as a message board was a certain John Graham Mellor. In 1976 he stencilled the mission statement NOISE with a white rattle can on the upper bout of a Telecaster that had already been sprayed black. Noise — it’s as good a rallying cry at the birth of English Punk as any. Mellor was most definitely a Guthrie fan and politically simpatico. In fact, it was only around the time he bought that Telecaster in 1975, that he stopped going by the nickname ‘Woody’ and took the stage name Joe Strummer. He also put down his Gretsch White Falcon and picked up a more workmanlike axe to swing. The guitar that would become so iconic it got a Shepard Fairey worked, Fender Artist Series model in 2007, started life as a 1966 Sunburst with rosewood fingerboard. In the year that guitar was made, the 14 year old Johnny Mellor spent his time between boarding school in Yorkshire, England and visiting his parents in Africa — and listening to Little Richard, The Beach Boys and local Malawian music along the way. The story goes that Strummer got the £120 he paid for the guitar in ’75 by marrying a South African woman who wanted British citizenship. He said he wanted the Telecaster because fellow pub rocker Wilko Johnson wielded his black Tele like a weapon. A year later the Sunburst, including the white pickguard, was over-sprayed with grey primer and a black top coat in a car body shop and the ‘Noise’ stencil was added. Strummer was also keen on Jamaican music and early in it’s life the lower horn had a Rastafarian tricolour of red, yellow & green electrical tape wrapped around it. Around 1974 Woody Mellor had been a regular punter at a Saturday night reggae club down Newport Docks, South Wales, called the Silver Sands. By the end of 1976 another notorious, esoteric message had been stuck to the black Tele, an instruction that has been the cause of endless speculation ever since: Ignore Alien Orders.

A square silver sticker with a blue line box bordering three words in red, one above the other. An imperative, a caveat, an order that itself should be ignored? And is it just that — a joke about the redundancy of it’s tautology? Why has it caused so much discussion over the years, and just where does the sticker come from? Outer space or inner visions? Was it just a hidden message that appeared in Grateful Dead packaging? There’s been as much speculation about the origins of that sticker as there has about it’s meaning. After a fair bit of digging around online I found an origin story for the slogan from somebody called Rockets that dates back to the spring of 1970:

“Ted looked up, smiling, said ‘Hey, Rockets, look at this!’ He held out a beautifully-machined, very colorful, thick metal plate that read, ‘IGNORE ALIEN ORDERS’ and continued, ‘Last weekend I dropped some righteous White Lightning and tripped in the hills above Berkeley. Here I am, whipped outta' my mind and really digging the walk in the woods, across those bright green open meadows, when I bumped into a barbed-wire fence, blocking my way. Really brought me down, and then I saw a metal sign, just the size of this one, (the one he was showing me) that said, Government Property. Do Not Trespass! Blew my mind, I mean, we are the people who make up the government, and I say to myself, I give you permission to enter, and I crawled under the fence. Right then the words just came to me. What I heard in my head, plain as day, was, IGNORE ALIEN ORDERS. When it's finished, I'm going back up there and mount this sign right next to the No Trespassing sign. What'dya' think?’ ‘Right on!’ I replied.”

I watched Jim Jarmusch’s movie Mystery Train during the first Covid lock-down, for the first time in decades. In Mystery Train Joe Strummer’s character ‘Johnny’ shoots a liquor store night clerk played by the comedian Rockets Redglare. Rockets was born a congenital junkie as Michael Morra in New York, NY, into a mob connected family of rag-trade jazz fanatics. He was most notorious for selling the Dilaudid that did for Sid and would sometimes tell people it was actually him who did for Nancy too. Somehow I don’t think this story comes from the same Rockets however. There was an origin story from another on-line source that differs slightly in some details, but which attributes the stickers to the same bay area artists, and furthermore explains how they got to Strummer: “Ted and his friends pasted up a press-type master and made a photo silkscreen. He printed them in several color combinations; red on yellow, red and blue on white, and red and blue on silver, and gave them to his musician friends (some quite successful) to be passed on and posted all over the world. That’s how Joe Strummer got one of the silver ones on his guitar and made the phrase semi-famous. I still see Ted in the East Bay. My family was friends with Jon Sagen, a music promoter who knew Bob and Ted when they created the stickers in Berkeley. He helped distribute them to musicians around the world.”

The origin of the slogan in reaction against a government sign is significant in itself. Because it’s a message that appealed to those who take delight in subverting both official signage and commercial advertising. By the time Strummer got hold of the sticker it’s message had already been adopted by others. In the late ‘70s the slogan Ignore Alien Orders was painted on signs around Cleveland, OH, as part of a campaign of urban art and graffiti by the Regional Art Terrorists, who once famously decorated the entire Detroit-Superior Bridge with pink and silver mylar streamers. Not so much a select cadre as a collective formed from assorted groups of artists and students, the RATs perpetrated all kinds of semiotic propaganda which often involved modifying billboards and erecting fake signs. Their use of détournement in this way was surely directly influenced by the Situationists — a post-war European group also fond of the printed sticker as an instant way to communicate dissent. The Situationist International in particular was as much a political movement as it was artistic. Détournement as an artistic weapon would later become one of the most crucial artistic influences on punk rock, but also the direct antecedent of the Culture Jamming and Subvertising crusades of the 1980s and ‘90s. Any band worth it’s salt in the late eighties had a T-shirt logo that ripped off a famous trade mark and it went all the way back to that hippy favourite, the Ford logo ‘Fuck’ T-shirt.

Situationism was a movement born of Lettrism and sired by Dada; both Surrealism and the post war Avant-Garde were clearly evident in it’s heritage. Lettrism, the movement it grew out of, had already played games with the literal as well as the literate: it was a ‘new poetry’ that transcended the word and wallowed in the sound of language. It was forward-looking too, a truly multimedia art-form. And it was an art movement that was fundamentally rooted in the comprehension of satire. The Lettrist International understood that ridicule and parody are the sharpest blades to pierce the thick skins of powerful sociopaths. On the surface Lettrism may appear to have been frivolous at times, but in 1946 it was a direct response to the absurdity of a world that had allowed itself to wallow in a decade of chaos and carnage at the hands of a gang of German psychos. The origins of the Letterist International splinter group are also tied in with a printed sticker — their “If you Believe you have Genius… ” recruitment campaign of 1955. It was an artistic technique that the Scottish outsider artist, humourist and songwriting genius Ivor Cutler would later adopt with great success. I always wanted to put an Ivor Cutler sticker on one of my acoustic guitars, if I could have got hold of one. It would have to be the one that said FRESH AIR MACHINE. Although he did have another sticker that said Amplification Is The Curse Of Civilization that would work well on a folk box.

Blonde Rock 'n' Roll

Even when Strummer’s message was completely transparent, however, far too many people took it the wrong way. Joe also owned a rosewood neck Blonde Esquire, which he decorated variously over the years, but it’s best known for the message “1st May — take a holiday”. The ghost of this slogan, looking like faded felt marker could still be read in places when the guitar appeared in the recent City Of London Museum Clash exhibition. Whilst this “1st” is very clear in early pictures of the guitar, you can see in later images that it got worn away at the top. It got blurred by forearm wear, particularly the superscripted “st” ordinal indicator — leading to the misreading “I may take a holiday”. This is a myth that is still circulated today — despite JH Tomkins writing in the December 17th 2012 issue of Spin: “In the spring of 1980 some friends and I followed the band from city to city, hoping to convince the guys to play a revolutionary May Day benefit. Although Strummer eventually passed, he heard us out, was never less than courteous, and taped “On the first of May Take a holiday” to his guitar for a 1981 appearance on Tom Snyder’s Tomorrow talk show.” Watching that program back on grainy VT on YouTube, the guitar used looks like it is one of his other Telecasters, the one with the aluminium pick-guard and natural finish. Like Wanda Jackson’s D-18 it also had two five-point stars on it: the Clash “Take A Gamble” & “Give It A Spin” yellow & purple star stickers. Around 1980 this Tele had been quite a dangerous instrument, by all accounts, when it was also stickered for 240 volts and had radioactive warning symbols on it. (When The Jam played 'Pretty Green' and 'Funeral Pyre' on Snyder's Tomorrow show on May 27th that same year, Paul Weller used a Jetglo 330 Rickenbacker with large £ and P stickers on it, but we'll come back to Weller's decorated 330s later.)

In the Tomorrow show Clash footage it looks like there’s a white strip with black print across the bottom of the pick guard. So it’s possible that the first time he used that “On the first May…” message it was a newsprint clipping, or cut from some literature from Tomkins — which he then made into a more permanent statement on the Esquire. In the USA of course you can’t go celebrating International Workers Day on the 1st May with the rest of the world, you have to celebrate that peculiarly American holiday Labour Day, at the end of the summer when the holidays are over and capitalism gets all it’s labour back under the yoke. I guess it’s because May Day has too many links to labour unions and socialism around the world. Of course in earlier centuries the Beltane feast and the Queen of the May were symbolic of more than just economic productivity. On the 23rd December 2016 Tom Morello tweeted “Today is the anniversary of the passing of Joe Strummer, my principle inspiration for being a rebel rocker.” He attached a great black & white image of Strummer with the “Take A Holiday” Blonde Esquire which I’ve borrowed for the gallery above.

Another punk rocker who famously stickered the front of his guitar with a provocative slogan was Lead Belly fan Kurt Cobain. His black 1991 MIJ, HSS Fender Strat bore a white bumper sticker with black lettering which opined “Vandalism: beautiful as a rock in a cop’s face”. It’s a provocative and brutal statement. But perhaps we need to think of it as entirely amoral — at least until the abstract cop in question is determined to be a public protector or a tyrant’s thug. I have met some tolerant peacekeepers around the world. But I’ve also been mugged by the police***. It all depends where you are in the world — but maybe also when you are in time. Personally, I have always found New York’s Finest to be friendly and confidant sentinels of the streets — and yet back in 1927 they arrested poor old Fred Trump — dressed in full Ku Klux Klan coverings at the time — for marching in protest against the NYPD and its alleged Roman Catholic bias. The “Vandalism…” sticker on Cobain’s Strat also stated, in smaller letters underneath, “Courtesy Of The Feederz Office Of Anti-public Relations”. The Feederz were an anarchic punk band from Arizona well known for their Situationist approach to music and art, and the sticker originally came with the band’s 1986 album Teachers In Space (the album title a rather cruel joke about that year’s Challenger disaster).

Cobain played the black Strat throughout 1991, including famously at that year’s Reading festival on 23rd of August exactly a month before their second album was released. The album did rather well, I think we can use the phrase ‘game-changer’ without risk of hyperbole. By the time 1992 got going, on the 11th of January actually, Nevermind would even knock Michael Jackson’s Dangerous off the Billboard no.1 spot. Nirvana were 6th on the bill at Reading in 1991, a year later they headlined. Another notable appearance of Cobain’s black Strat was at the Paramount in Seattle, WA a month or so after the album’s release. As with all Kurt’s guitars the black Strat had a hard life and as the Nevermind tour steam-rollered on it went through several necks, including a Fender MIJ, a Kramer and even a Fernandez, before getting smashed at a show in Paris in the spring of ’92. It lay in pieces after his death, until it was rebuilt by roadie Earnie Bailey and displayed at Seattle’s Experience Music Project (now the MoPOP Museum). I saw Nirvana on the Nevermind tour at Manchester Academy in December 1991 (records show it was Wednesday the 4th) and I remember Kurt playing his humbuckered sunburst Jaguar — and also playing Krist Novoselic’s natural finish Ripper bass during the encore. I don’t remember him playing the black Strat though. Cobain’s lefty Jag is possibly his most iconic guitar but, according to Earnie, it started out as the primary spare guitar to the Vandalism Strat, so maybe the Strat was out of action at the Manchester gig.

Pulled into Nazareth, was feelin’ about half past dead...****

Kurt Cobain was yet another owner of one of those acoustic guitars from Nazareth, PA, that is famous beyond it’s pedigree. On November 18th 1993, less than 5 months before his death, Nirvana made their much lauded appearance on MTV Unplugged in New York. A few weeks before the performance Cobain got together with William Burroughs to record The “Priest” They Called Him. Burroughs said of the meeting in retrospect “It wasn't an act of will for Kurt to kill himself. As far as I was concerned, he was dead already.” In June 2020 the 1959 Martin D-18E, with DeArmond pickups that Cobain used for Unplugged, and in particular the searing cover of Lead Belly’s 'Where Did You Sleep Last Night?' sold for $6,010,000 breaking all auction records for guitars and rock memorabilia*****. It overtook the auction record for a guitar of $3,975,000 set the previous year — which happened to be another black Strat, owned by one David Gilmour. When I toured with Moby on his 1996 Animal Rights tour he was playing almost the negative of Cobain’s Strat — it had a white body and was right handed, but it too was a factory HSS Japanese Fender. It was also covered in stickers: it had an orange sticker with wording in blue about photographic exposure that may have been some sort of political pun, and three or four of his own orange-on-black Animal Rights stickers across it. Those two words separated by his name in much smaller letters repeated 7 times like a ticker-tape and one of his sigils at either end. Both a vegan protest and self promotion worthy of Tex Fletcher I guess.

For about half of that tour we were supporting Soundgarden. Their stage-right guitar tech who was looking after Kim Thayil and Chris Cornell, and who was incredibly accommodating towards me, was the self-same Earnie Bailey who put Kurt's strat back together; however I was the one who had to put fix Moby's smashed guitar. I remember shopping for tools with Earnie in Clas Ohlson in the centre of Oslo. I bought some rather nice large wooden cam clamps there, in order to glue Moby’s guitar back together again, as a couple of days earlier he’d smashed it on stage, à la Cobain. Actually I think it may have been his back up ‘strat’ that he trashed: an Ibanez Roadstar II that he’d had since his teens. I’ve just googled it and found that actual guitar listed on Reverb for £776.77. It’s described as having “a long crack in the neck finish down the center” which I believe was actually through to the truss rod channel, not just the finish. But I can attest that the body was also in three separate pieces and spent three days lying in a tour bus bunk while drying some quality aliphatic resin glue, that I’d also got from my trip to Clas Ohlson with Earnie. Mr Bailey has some good points to make about joining the Backline dept. or what’s known in The Biz as The Country Club: “Before working as a professional technician, I believed they were these ninja masters of guitar repair and electrical knowledge. After I took the job, I soon discovered that most guitar techs were friends of bands who knew how to live on the road and change strings, and that several of the technicians that I had read about, did no repair work. Only a small subset had advanced level skills, and were willing to leave home and the workshop to practice their craft with limited tools on the road.”

Ziggy raid guitar

Sometimes on tour you don’t get much time to try and effect guitar repairs on the run. I toured with Paloma Faith for nearly five years (June 2009 to March 2014), over her first three albums and had the pleasure to look after the marvellous Seye Adelekan for a good part of it. At one point Gibson loaned Seye a Steve Jones signature model Les Paul. It looked fantastic, all tobacco yellow and faded pin-up cowgirls — except it had it’s headstock hanging off. The re-issue Lester had fallen off a stand and despite a period correct neck volute the head had snapped. Some careful cleaning, a judicious application of the same resin based wood glue, and some careful clamping and bungee application sorted it out — even though it all had to be done ad hoc on my folding guitar bench in the old Music Bank Studio B. Since we were starting a tour I didn’t have time to try and restore the finish properly, but it didn’t look too bad and was a lot stronger afterwards. Of course that original '74 Custom with it’s pin-up girl decals is one of Pop history’s more famous stickered guitars, which is why there was a factory-issue doppelgänger for us to play with. Gibson issued the LP Custom in Alpine White for the first time in 1974 to celebrate the 20th Anniversary of the classic black version.

And of course everyone knows that Steve Jones put the stickers on there to disguise it’s identity, having stolen it from Mick Ronson when Ziggy & The Spiders played Hammersmith. Except that’s just another Sex Pistols myth that won’t go away, despite being frequently debunked. Because the original white Custom (wherever it went, Jones has sold several of them) has an even older punk pedigree than Jukebox Jonesy’s stewardship. The funny thing of course is that he invented a heritage for this guitar when it already had a pedigree that would become iconic anyway. Jones claims he added some pinup decals but the guitar already had some applied by the guitar’s previous owner and punk pioneer Syl Sylvain, an erstwhile White Falcon strummer himself. The cowgirl & guitar decal is already on there in some photos of Syl but the girl sat on a platter is at a very different angle to some pictures of Jones. Maybe he had to replace it when the Bigsby came off, but also Jones has claimed to have sold more than one version of the guitar. Sylvain's use of the guitar is clearly documented in some appearances by The New York Dolls and there’s at least one image online of Sylvain playing a white Custom with twin black bobbins, no pickguard, (what look like) exactly the same pin-up decals and a Bigsby. In that photo it also looks like it had two gold and two black bell knobs for volume & tone controls respectively — much like Mick Ronson’s stripped top black Lester Custom, of course — "hakuna matata" folks. The following was said in interview with Alan DiPerna in the August ’96 edition of Guitar World:

"Malcolm was managing the Dolls for a while," Jones explains. "And when he finished managing them, he brought this guitar back to England with him. I guess they owed him money or something and gave it to him as payment. It had a Bigsby bar, but I took it off because the thing kept going out of tune." Then there are the peeling, vintage Forties girlie stickers that give the instrument its tacky je ne sais quoi. "There were a couple on there when I got the guitar off Syl," Steve says. "A couple of them came off when I had this guitar coated, and I put a couple of others on."

In Sylvain’s own words it went like this: “We had no money again and half of us were junkies. Just before the band broke up, Malcolm, who I’’d met through my interest in the rag business, became our personal manager. He was a friend and a big fan of the Dolls, and Malcolm and his girlfriend owned a clothes shop called SEX on King’s Road in London. He said that if I gave him my white Les Paul Custom— — it sounded so beautiful; it was a ’73 or ’74 with P-90 pickups and it had a sticker of a pin-up girl on it, which I did with a lot of my guitars -— he would mail me back a plane ticket and build a new band around me in England."

Presumably Syl meant to say PAFs — but meaning in actuality, Patent No. T-Top humbuckers. There are still other people around the world who will insist that Jones stole the guitar from Paul McCartney, Brian Ferry and even Stevie Wonder. So Stevie Jones may have added some stickers to “his guitar" but what about slogans? The only written statement he appears to have made on his equipment was to scrawl ‘Sex Pistols’ and ‘Guitar Hero’ across the grill-cloth of his Silverface Twin Reverb. Maybe I should do that to my 1977 Twin Reverb that lives here at New Cut Studios — none more Punk, hey? Except that my ’77 has been modded slightly to be more ’60s. Again, there are various legends that Jones stole that Fender Twin from Bowie at the Hammy-O, or Bob Marley at The Rainbow, or even from The Glitter Band. What is certain is that he stole the slogan at least, from The New York Dolls’ other six-string-slinger Johnny Thunders, who had written “Guitar Hero” on several pieces of the Heartbreaker's gear during the ’76 Anarchy In The UK tour (which also featured The Clash, as well as The Damned). Maybe the Twin originally belonged to Thunders and Jones just wrote Sex Pistols on it and gave him some smack. Continuing the western sticker theme Thunders used a double cut, TV yellow Les Paul Junior on that tour with a decal of a cowboy on a bucking bronco. Punk irony or no, guitars were still getting "the cowboy treatment".

A working class hero is something to be...

At the start of this article I suggested it was a bad idea to scratch or carve a message into your guitar. I mean it’s not going to do much for it’s re-sale value is it? Well of course that depends on who you are. A fairly unremarkable 1974 Fireglo Rickenbacker 330 sold at Christies in July 2008 for £10,000 despite some ragged scratches, which clearly said “I Am Nobody”, that had been carved into the upper horn. On May 19th 1977, fresh off the back of supporting The Clash on the White Riot Tour, The Jam made their Top Of The Pops debut. It was six days before Paul Weller’s 19th birthday. Paul had been out on Denmark Street and bought several Rickenbackers with the advance they’d just been payed by Polydor. One of them was that Fireglo 330, serial no. NG4292. As the band ripped through 'In The City', the Rickenbacker gleamed — it was immaculate. But by the time they came back to TOTP again on 3rd of November to perform 'This Is The Modern World', the Ricky was scratched up. The Jam had started their first US tour at, coincidentally, the Whiskey-A-Go-Go in Los Angeles, CA on the 8th & 9th October 1977. They then played The Rat in Boston, MA, on the 10th & 13th before heading to the CBGB Theatre for the 15th & 16th.

By the time they got to New York, NY, the 330 was sporting a sticker that said ‘Gill Price’ and two rather ugly battle scars. Photos of Weller from one of the two gigs they played at CBGB’s show a big scratch in the Fireglo finish down to the bare wood. It looked like a shallow, mirrored tick, starting from the guitar’s waist, that then takes a 120º turn into the upper horn. other photos show a very similar scratch below the cats-eye sound hole suggesting a definite (or even deliberate) scrape against something with two sharp protuberances. When we can finally do some shows again I must ask Paul how it happened. As I write this paragraph (26/9/20) we should have been playing Bogarts in Cincinnati, OH tonight. When The Jam played Top Of The Pops again at the start of November the scar had become a cue for Weller to carve the self-effacing phrase. A statement of existential angst perhaps, or maybe a more complex reference. A working class hero is something to be but Paul Weller, it seems to me, is someone who has tried to fanfare the Common Man despite possessing an uncommon gift. When he makes you a cup of tea or asks what you want ordering from the Ripley Curry Garden he is Paul. When he holds a field full of people enraptured because they feel like he is telling each and every one of them that You Do Something To Me he is Weller. He’s a damn sight more than nobody in my eyes: he paid me, and the rest of his crew, several grand when we couldn’t tour last year.

“Take a drink in the Whiskey,
      Move on to the Rainbow” — On Sunset, Paul Weller, 2020.

Heading back to Sunset Strip, and back to the Whiskey-A-Go-Go on December 14th 1992 (a mere fifteen years after The Jam’s LA debut) and a Franken-strat guitar that wasn’t really consummated until it was scrawled on. There have been plenty of accounts of how Morello’s custom built guitar was initially put together and later adapted by him over the years; it’s origins in 1986 with Performance Guitar USA in Los Angeles, CA, and the various evolutions that have left almost nothing but the body original. Morello has said variously: “As for my other change to the look of the guitar, this was in the early days of Rage Against The Machine. We were set to play at the Whiskey and just before going over to soundcheck I scrawled 'Arm The Homeless' on the guitar. I liked the juxtaposition of that kind of provocative and militant Situationist slogan with those four smiling hippopotamuses all facing in one direction.” and “I decided to take a Magic Marker and thought of the phrase, kind of echoing the provocateur artistry of the Paris commune in the back of my mind,” Morello said. “In the city of Los Angeles, where you have Bentleys and Rolls-Royces driving by these homeless tent cities, it just felt like a fine, provocative artistic statement.” It should be noted that the Hippo on the back is painted upside down so that it can be flashed at the audience, (except when obscured by words to the wise). Never underestimate a hippopotamus, they are deadly creatures. Back in that hotbed of Situationist provocation, the great state of Ohio, one year after the debut of the ‘Arm The Homeless’ slogan, and with Rage... by now a household name, an interesting outrage occurred.

Columbus, OH is the second biggest city by population in the Midwest after Chicago, IL and the state capital. In the first week of December 1993 the city’s newspapers & TV companies started to get press releases about a new charity and it’s Christmas appeal to provide more than just food and shelter to the city’s most vulnerable people. “The Arm the Homeless Coalition will be collecting donations to provide firearms for the homeless of Columbus…” The communiqué went on to state that “Funds are to be used to provide arms, ammunition and firearm safety training for homeless individuals who pass the coalition's rigorous screening. Homeless are selected for the program on the basis of need, mental and emotional stability, and potential value to society at large.” The media reaction was quick and querulous. Various Ohio newspapers and the Charitable Solicitations Board were up in arms, if you’ll pardon the pun. The Coalition’s spokesman Jack Kilmer’s response, in an interview with the Associated Press, was “Who more needs to exercise their constitutional right to have a weapon for protection?” noting that there were already homeless charities to deal with shelter, food, and jobs, but none that trained the homeless to protect themselves. The media furore finally died down when the Coalition was exposed as a hoax by some Ohio State University students.

There has always been an element of precise, controlled aggression in Tom Morello’s guitar playing, music that is as focused and as incisive as the verbal messages in his various musical projects. But there have always been visual slogans as well. For Tom Morello a guitar is most definitely a political placard as well as an instrument. In a transcript from an interview with Q104.3 in New York Morello said “Woody Guthrie’s, uh, famous mantra that he had on his guitar: 'This machine kills fascists' was clearly inspirational to me - and I've scrawled different stuff on my guitars… ”. Back in 2008 he performed Woody Guthrie’s anthem This Land Is Your Land as his acoustic alter ego The Nightwatchman. For that project he uses an Ibanez "Galvador" nylon string acoustic with the black Sharpie’d message “Whatever It Takes” (oh, and yet another one of those five-point stars) decorating it. I found a quote from Morello on Equipboard.com where he talks about his use of a classically strung guitar: "That ended up being the Galvador, which turned out to have a really beautiful sound. Much of The Nightwatchman catalogue was composed, from that point forward, on the Galvador, because it did have a pickup – you could plug it in anywhere. I went on a tour in 2003 with Billy Bragg and Steve Earle, and with the Galvador I could be a professional performer (laughs). So it's the 'Whatever It Takes' guitar." ******

The Nightwatchman also plays a black Gibson J-45 that has “Black Spartacus” in white block letters around the upper curves of the body. Behind the bridge it has a ‘coat of arms’ to represent his heritage made up of elements of the Kenyan, Italian and US flags with a hammer & sickle. But Tom Morello has two more black guitars that should be mentioned. One notable weapon in his armoury is yet another black Strat, this one with a bound-body, that has “Soul Power” scrawled in big silvery white letters across the top of the body — a guitar he used mainly with super-group Audioslave. But his other famous guitar and his main guitar for drop-D tunings for many years (usually played on the neck pup incidentally) has always been a battered looking, black Telecaster with a scabby white guard, covered in bits of sellotape with various stickers all over it. Morello got this 1982 Fender in a swap for a Marshall head from his room mate, the late Scott Tracy. The main message this guitar proclaims in faded paint is “Sendero Luminoso” the name of the Peruvian Communist group more notorious to us pinches cabrones by the name Shining Path. It also has a sticker that says ‘I.W.W. One Big Union’ in support of the Industrial Workers of the World. Another of the things taped to this guitar is a black & white image of protestors with the placard “Go Home, Honestly We Hate You” — not a message to the audience we hope. But more than anything, of course, this guitar looks like Joe Strummer’s black Tele.

Recently in the February 2021 issue of Uncut magazine Tom Morello said: “I love using the guitar as a canvas for additional sloganeering but it all goes back to Woody emphasising that these are not just songs to sing and dance to, there’s serious business at hand with three chords and the truth.” It looks like people will be stickering and writing on guitars for years to come, but what they’ll be saying in the coming decades may be more shocking than anything we’ve seen so far. Time to shoe-horn in a few actual quotes here, I think.

“The folk singer’s commitment to these instruments was ideological - moral even. They were the honest tools of those in service of a righteous cause. Woody Guthrie famously emblazoned his guitar with the slogan THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS, thus beginning a long tradition of using the guitar as a political statement - a tradition that would come to include both Jimi Hendrix and Guthrie’s fervent admirer Bob Dylan.” — Play It Loud, Brad Tolinski & Alan Di Perna.

“Here’s to Cisco an’ Sonny an’ Lead Belly too
An’ to all the good people that travelled with you” — Song To Woody, Bob Dylan (1962).

“I ain't a communist necessarily, but I been in the red all my life.” — Woody Guthrie.

“No, among the rock and roll generations, Guthrie’s truest heir may be Clash vocalist and songwriter Joe Strummer. Ironically, while Strummer briefly adopted the name “Woody” in his earliest days as a performer, he never cultivated identification between himself and Guthrie, and he dropped the name years before becoming even remotely well known, much less famous. During his peak years of fame, few Clash fans knew that Joe Strummer had once been “Woody Mellor”. Neither was a true Marxist or Communist, of course; Guthrie famously tossed off the line “left wing, right wing, chicken wing - it’s all the same to me”. They were artists first and political theorists second, but both could be called truthfully “fellow travellers.” — Punk Rock Warlord: the Life and Work of Joe Strummer by Barry J. Faulk & Brady Harrison.

I was once Joe Strummer’s fellow traveller in Australia, in January of 2000 during the Big Day Out travelling festival. I was outside the hotel waiting for a shuttle to site, and didn’t dare intrude on him as he was with his young family, but when we got on the van he introduced himself and was as down-to-earth and friendly as you would hope. During that tour I got to see him play a volcanic set with The Mescaleros featuring a lot of Clash songs at the Corner Hotel in Melbourne. I blagged in, as I knew a couple of the crew well — my mate Andy Boo was doing backline and old-school noise-boy Justin Grearly was running righteous FOH. I’d already toured with Martin Slattery around ’96 when he played keyboards with Black Grape. Strummer’s drummer on that Australian run was Steve ”Smiley” Barnard, after Pablo Cook and Ged Lynch had vacated the drum throne. I had looked after Ged on Black Grape (and would tour with him again on Goldfrapp) — and I later toured with Smiley for several years when he played for Archive. Pablo, as well as being a rhythmic genius, was a right character who was ubiquitous on the London scene at the turn of the Millennium. I can’t remember just how many different artists I saw him play with back in the day. I woke up on his sofa once, somewhere in Camden Town I think — we were much the worse for wear and his daughter made us breakfast. She was so much more domestically capable then he was, despite being only about ten years old.

A little under two years after that Big Day Out tour, my missus and I left our flat in Notting Hill and legged it up Westbourne Grove to Paddington Station, heading west to visit family for Christmas. As we ran into the station concourse off Eastbourne Terrace the Evening Standard news stand said ‘Clash Legend Dies’. My heart sank. I remember doing a TV show with Aimee Man (Later With Jools I think) from whom I got a plectrum that said “Elvis died for your sins”. Now whilst I won’t say anything against The King, I don’t know how far I could believe in his redemptive powers (any more than I would in those of Frederick Christ Trump). In Jarmusch’s marvelous Mystery Train, Johnny “Woody” Mellor, billed as Joe Strummer, plays a character called Johnny — but everybody else in the movie calls him Elvis. Maybe Joe died for all our sins: Strummero Redemptor is a saint I’ll go marching in with. I just went and found that Daphne Blue plectrum with gold “Elvis Died Fer Yer Sins” legend. At the exact moment I took it out of the zippy, 'Should I Stay Or Should I Go?' came on the radio. Try and tell me that’s not a nudge from the Universe Herself, I dare you.

*   Piedmont Blues was on the wane as the USA came out of WWII, in terms of record sales anyway, but the Piedmont style would become a big influence in the American folk music revival in the ‘50s & ‘60s, and thereby come back into pop. It took it’s name not from the original Piedmont region in the great lakes of northern Italy (one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been), but from that part of the Piedmont plateau, stretching from Richmond, VA, to Atlanta, GA. The style came about when Delta blues coming up from Mississippi met with ragtime and string band styles that had already spread all the way down the east coast, and crashed into both early country music and the more urbane popular song off the metropolitan radio stations. Piedmont Blues refers mainly to a guitar finger-style, marked by a syncopated thumb bass ostinato that uses earlier parlour guitar & banjo techniques to mimic ragtime piano rhythms. The previously mentioned Josh White, a ferocious performer & guitar player, as well as a great songwriter, often used Piedmont stylings. In it’s heyday, between about 1925 and 1945, Piedmont Blues sold a lot of records for artists like Blind Boy Fuller, Blind Blake and Buddy Moss. Bob Dylan is alleged to have composed the decidedly Piedmontese Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right after meeting the singer/guitarist Etta Baker on his 21st birthday (May 24th, 1962). Baker was from North Carolina, home to what is usually acknowledged to be the most ‘authentic’ Piedmont Blues style.
 

**   Going by some early photographs, it’s possible Dylan’s (first) electric was a Silvertone Aristocrat 642 archtop with Gibson P13 style ridged pole pickup, made by Harmony in Chicago, IL. We have a lovely Harmony H82G Rebel here at New Cut Studios made in the spring of 1969. It’s a green-burst semi-acoustic with two “moustache grill”, DeArmond gold-foil pups with quite a Rickenbacker vibe about it’s feel but more of an ES295 tone.

***   Or "fined" at gunpoint, if that’s how you want to look at such tourist taxes. It was in Odessa, around 1999 during a Red Snapper tour. We were stopped for the heinous crime of walking two blocks between a bar and our hotel after drinking 2 whole pints of beer. Two furry hatted, camouflage clad men with AK-47s got out of a Police Lada and told us we were drunk. By Russian standards that was hilarious, since we’d only had a couple of beers. Yes I know Ukraine had been independent for nearly a decade by that point, but most of the people I met over the age of 30 were scared of the future and were highly vocal in their desire for the return of Soviet rule. Right, in the light of recent events I feel I have to qualify that remark. Not only were such people the older generation but they were also the kind of people who would interupt us to proffer their opinions about 'the West'. The two cops were very different in their attitudes. The old guy with the sidearm and grey Stalin moustache who did all the talking was clearly practiced in turning over tourists. The young guy with the AK-47 was obviously uncomfortable with what was going on and wouldn't look us in the eye. You also have to bear in mind that in 1999 Ukraine was much closer to the shadow of the USSR than the chance to join NATO or the EU.

****    … to quote Robbie Robertson, who often played a customised copper coloured Strat with black pickguard and white pickup covers and which can be seen to advantage in the The Last Waltz. Dave Gilmour’s black Strat, again with black guard and white pup covers, is so famous it got it’s own biographical coffee table book. Only the two single coil pups of Cobain’s black Strat were white, not the humbucker, but with it’s black pickguard it was very reminiscent of both Gilmour’s and Robertson’s iconic axes.

*****   Just before launching into 'Where Did you Sleep Last Night?' Cobain announces that their closing song was written by his favourite performer and after some prompting from Novoselic, wryly mentions that “This guy representing the Lead Belly estate wants to sell me Lead Belly’s guitar for five hundred thousand dollars”. I’m sure he would have been amused to know the guitar in his hands would sell for twelve times that amount.

****** Many modern Ibanez Spanish guitars have a label inside that looks like it says Galvador Ibanez in gothic lettering. I am pretty sure the 'G' has been miscopied in the Far East from an S — with a very small modification to the middle of the left hand side of this initial letter. I can see how it reads now, but a gothic G does not look likes this. In Spanish "Galvador" is meaningless, whereas Salvador not only means Saviour but is also an extremely common christian name. The clincher is that parent company Hoshino Gakki began importing classical guitars from Salvador Ibáñez é Hijos from Valencia around 1929. But in 1933 the Ibanez & Sons family luthiers was bought out by rival makers Telesforo Julve, so in 1935 Hoshino started to make their own guitars in Japan using the name “Ibanez Salvador”. In Japan, as in many countries, the family name usually comes first. After the 1945 destruction of their factory they eventually started making Ibanez guitars again in 1957, just in time for the Rock N' Roll boom, little knowing how big a part they would play in the history of the electric guitar.

©️ Mark Vickers 12th December 2020.