She Sleeps With Electric Guitars
"Range roving with the cinema stars" Pavement.
The first guitar I owned was a black and blue zebra print acoustic from the pawn store one block down from my high school gates. My grandfather took me there and bought it for $50 so he could teach me the Holly Golightly version of ‘Moon River’ from Breakfast at Tiffany’s and some neat jazz chords for ‘At Last’ by Etta James. The strings were steely and grubby and the action (the height of the strings above the fretboard) made it harder to play, so that by the end of the week I had my first calluses -something young guitarists like to brag about as a measure of how much and how hard they’ve played. Calluses were a matter of pride. If you bled, even better.
I wanted to be better than all the boys I knew. I wanted to shred. My uncle (who is still a full time guitarist specialising in disco and funk) taught me Jimi Hendrix “Foxy Lady” and The Beatles “Blackbird” to start off -because they were ‘tricky’ and got you props. I played them over and over and over in my bedroom, hours upon hours, staring at the white porridge concrete ceiling in my basement bedroom, dreaming away of the life I dreamt of having on stage. It was a portal to another world. My mother taught me 3 chords to get started songwriting -“three chords is all anyone ever needed”, left me alone for an hour and I had already written a song by the time she came back. That was it for me. The guitar became my best friend, confidante and consumer of every glorious waking hour of time.
I never learned how to read music or the cycle of fourths or anything like that, so the guitar was this beautiful body of endless possibilities of sound. Every combination I could dream up was new and exciting to me. I didn’t know that I was playing a G Major 7th in a 2nd inversion, I just found notes in a combination that sounded beautiful to me or had the right sound to fit the melody I was singing. I learned to play visually using shapes and by ear, no theory. Eventually I learned some songs with tabs (dots and numbers on lines that correspond to the strings and frets of the guitar) and was particularly interested in finding complicated finger-picking patterns to learn. My best friend Pia played Spanish and classical pieces on a nylon string and my other friend Daisy played indie-folk music which was always heavy on that technique. She played violin as well, so she could really do the finger work with ease. The three of us bonded over Cat Power and Elliot Smith records. I found that power chords and rhythmic strumming was my forte and ended up being the rhythm guitarist in our band, you know- holding down the fort.
A man called Haydn Johnston, who worked as a tour, event and production manager at all the big music festivals must have seen I had a little fire inside of me he wanted to fan the flames of, and made sure I got into every notable festival and show that swept through town- backstage, side of stage. I watched so many shows I can barely remember them all. I was addicted. White Stripes, The Strokes, Yeah Yeah Yeah’s -all side of stage- even Kings of Leon to a crowd of about 100 before they became mainstream. I felt like I was a student of live performance. Every time I watched someone on stage (and still to this day) all I could think about was how badly I wanted it to be me, how I could do it better and what I could learn from them. I was taking in all the most electric elements, crowd manipulation tricks through musical drops, dance moves. I was soaking it up like a sponge.
Haydn heard I had started to write my own songs and one day dropped off a brand spanking new Rickenbacker 330 electric guitar in Fireglo for me to ‘borrow’ as long as I wanted. He explained that the Beatles played these and it went perfectly with a Vox AC30 amp if I could get my hands on one. We didn’t have the money for that but luckily I learned most venues had amplifiers you could use for shows, or the main band would let the support band use theirs if they could mark their settings. My mother had a vintage Music Man valve amp at her house I’d borrow sometimes and then I found a $100 amp at a supermarket in Bali I brought back to have at my dads house, but mostly I played this tequila sunrise looking thing acoustically. I slept with that guitar in all her voluptuousness. I fell asleep playing it, riffing on the same three notes until I got into a trance and woke up in the morning with it still curled up in my arms.
One sunny morning, I got a phone call from a producer called Chris Townsend (who owned the studios we had been recording at) saying he had a 60s Japanese supermarket guitar that quite literally had my name written on it and he thought I ought to have it. It was short, black, with just two basic cream TV knobs (tone and volume), a red burst in the centre, with my name hand painted in white paint on the headstock. It had an old wooden floating bridge that would drive my band mates insane because once we got off flights it was always out of tune and a total bitch to fix (wait no, that was the next guitars). I actually still have nightmares about not being able to get my guitar in tune for a show and my band mates yelling at me. I sacrificed reliability for the unmistakable rounded warm tone that it gave.I even found a small ‘Holiday’ amplifier on eBay that I had sitting in Los Angeles for ten years (until we used it in the Tra$h Can Luv music video.
I don’t remember what year it is, but I find myself at Zeppelin Guitars in Highland Park (when it was still a scrappy suburb of Los Angeles). The guitars have layers of dust on them, but I am thrilled because they have all the dodgy supermarket guitars that I love -Sears brands, Supros and so on, and they are cheap as dirt! To get these type of guitars on ebay and shipped to Australia cost a fortune and made them rarities. They were kind of just seen as junk here. I bought a Burgundy Danelectro and a sparkly black Silvertone with a matching case (that had an inbuilt amplifier!!). The Silvertone had lipstick tube pick ups and chevy dashboard on the edges. The case was lined with a thin red felt. The label had hired this same guitar from a local dealer for $2k when we were tracking our album. I considered starting a guitar imports business.
A hundred shows later, we find ourselves in New York perousing a vintage guitar store down the road from The Bowery Ballroom (where we are billed to play a show supporting a band called Autolux that night). Im dragging my fingers along a string of boring guitars when another ‘Holiday” guitar appears in front of me like an angel, backlit by the sun setting in the centre of the window. I can barely contain my excitement. It’s $800, which is pretty cheap for a guitar. I have to have it. I have to play it at my first show ever in New York Fucking City. The store owner tells me that someone famous owned it before me but made them promise not to reveal their name until after the purchase. We didn’t mobile phones and I asked the store if I could phone my dad long distance and see if he would pay for it with his credit card over the phone. This was an extreme measure, I never had and never have since taken.
“Dad. It has my name on it. I’m about to play my first show in New York City! It’s a sign!!”
“Mmm…. Only if you promise to sell the Danelectro when you get home”
“Consider it done!” (The Danelectro was the most practical, but my least favourite guitar).
The store owner told me that a local artist called St Vincent had owned the guitar before me. I wasn’t that familiar with her work then, but I was pretty thrilled it belonged to a female artist and I knew it had some magic in it. That night, the stage manager said to me before I got on- “Just remember that Metallica played on this stage”. It made me laugh. A few years ago at Osheaga Festival in Canada, our bass player Maddie was playing a game of basketball with Annie Clarke (St Vincent) backstage and introduced us. I told her “this is really left of field, but I own your old Holiday guitar” and recounted the story. Her eyes nearly popped out of her head “holy shit! I got a lot of songs out of that guitar. Did you?”. Yes. Knowing that a guitar has passed through hands of songwriters and bore them songs that then passed through the ear canals of however many places all over the world is a trip. A guitar is almost like it’s own person. Another band member. Not just any instrument, but some instruments in particular carry a spirit in them, that you are immediately aware of, imbued with the blessings of the owners before you and the original creator.
Around the time I found Annie’s guitar, Haydn told me he was getting married and needed to sell the Rickenbacker. I couldn’t afford it. I knew this time would come, but it still hurt just a teensy weeny bit to be separated. I couldn’t tell if I was happier or slightly bitter that he sold it to my friend Paddy (who was my friend and some time crush, but the lead guitarist in the teenage boy rival equivalent of my band). I saw her many times again in his hands at shows we were both billed on and I occasionally check in with him on her. I love that she’s with him still, and I’ll be honest- she suited him better. He was all over that The Beatles, Oasis, Brit-pop-invasion vibe that fit her so well. I was in deep with my dusty and warm little supermarket guitars with my name tattooed on their asses.
Looking back, I can safely say I have been blessed by so many people along the way, saying without words, but in kindness, clues and generosity- “go forth, my friend, this is what you were meant to do, we believe in you”. There is a man called Kenny Gormly who played guitar in The Cruel Sea (a band my father slammed through the stereo 24/7). The lead singer, Tex Perkins (and his family), was about as close a family to mine as you can get -his daughter, who is my age, was named Tuesday. Anyway, I can’t say I even knew Kenny all that well at the time, but he had a myriad of guitars that he would trade sometimes and phoned me up to say he had found a Holiday guitar and immediately knew I had to have it. He was breathless with excitement. He didn’t even know I was collecting them! This guitar was the natural progression for me. It looked like a Jag (complete with tortoiseshell plate), but it was lighter and smaller, perfectly fitting her curves on mine. She was sexy as hell, and mirrored my coming of age to a time where I felt sexy as hell. I wore her up high, but a little lower than my previous guitars. Men tend to sling their guitars around their hips (dicks) and play them like they are literally wanking (rocking back and forth). * Cue Ween’s ‘For A While I Couldn’t Play My Guitar Like A Man’*. Me and my girls wore them so they fit just under the cup of our breast or above the top of our hip line, letting our fingers do the talking, maybe a little sway to left and right. It’s trite, but making music can really be like making love. There is a pleasure spot when you are one with your instrument, and beyond that, sometimes whatever sound you are making together locks in with the other musician and their instrument in such harmony and bondage that the hair stands up on the back of your arms, and there is nothing you can compare that joy and pleasure to than love making. I mean, it’s actually better. It’s just so rare and transcendent.
“When you find that you don't love her, when all the glitter rubs off of her, I'll be waitin' just a smile away.” Nancy Sinatra, Good Time Girl.
Like most lovers, at some point when you figure out the mystery of them, when you know their body like it’s your own, the music of their talk is like the morning birds you don’t notice so much with the morning coffee -at some point, they lose their newness, wonder and excitement. Maybe they lose their possibilities. Only in your mind, of course. My guitars weren’t singing to me anymore. They didn’t make my fingers tingle to look at like they used to -like a chest full of treasure awaited for me to sift my hands through and get their glittering gold dripping all over me.
In a last ditch attempt to fall back in love with this instrument, I bought a 1930s Australian Parlour guitar with built in pick up, from Katy Fox (who used to manage Alex Cameron’s band ‘Seekae’). It was $1000 I barely had, but I knew it had to be special, it had to be the key. It was a sign to return to the soft acoustic moments, the Bob-Dylan-before-he-went-electric era. I should’ve known you can never go back really. The guitar had that warmth of sound I always sought out like the heat seeking missile I am, but the action was impossible and hard to play, like my first guitar. It was a dark wood, cracks and sun bleaching in the lacquer like it had lived on the porch of an outback sheep farmer who played in the evenings with a cold beer and a wife in white cotton frills fresh off the clothes line. This guitar blocked me though. She didn’t want me to play her, she just wanted to sit pretty on the wall.
So I found a new musical partner in crime who’s story I’ll chronicle next, “While my guitar gently weeps” (The Beatles).
*BTW all the Holiday guitars have been lost or stolen, so if anyone sees them let me know!!