I've been buying guitars since 1964, and you fool yourself into thinking it's the last one.
In 1965, Gibson made the red one I use now, and a black one, which was the first black 335 they ever made.
I love Gibsons, and Nationals, too. There's something magical about them.
One of the key guitars in my career has been an early-Seventies Fender Telecaster Deluxe that I had before Sonic Youth started and that I played pretty much throughout Sonic Youth.
I've got a EC3-35 Gibson, which is pretty cherished. I've got a vintage Reichenbacker 330 in fireglow, which is the other one I look after and don't let the kids touch.
I love to collect guitars made in the 1950s. I like preserving and playing them.
I've been collecting some more high-end guitars. I have an old Martin D28 from the '60s, a beautiful, classic Martin that I know I played on 'Mariachi.'
Guitars are kind of just, you know, sexy, especially old vintage ones.
I've tried lots of different guitars, including some Lados, and they felt great and were really well made, but the sound just seemed to lack richness in the bottom end. My main Precision is a '71, and I also have a '59 that I don't use very often.
I'm a kooky collector and own a couple of hundred guitars.
When I was in Nashville, Tennessee in 1970 with Derek and the Dominoes, I went into this shop and they had a rack of Strats and Teles - all going for $100.00 each. I bought a handfull and made Blackie out of the body from one, the neck from another, and so on
I'm a Telecaster connoisseur, and I love my Teles. I have one from almost every year since the very beginning, in 1950. I'm so obsessed with them.
The only thing I ever really wanted was a Strat .. I started playing guitar after seeing Jimi Hendrix on TV the day he died...then I got Deep Purples' Fireball album which was also a big influence .. I have a collection of more than 200 of them that includes Strats from every year since March 1954 - the first month the Strat was made
There's great cars, and then there's Aston Martins. Same thing for the 1959 Les Paul - it's an authentic piece of art that can never truly be replicated, and its mysteries are special.
I really enjoy working with luthiers, and have a couple of really old Les Pauls and one of my original Strats that I still carry on the road.
Basically, I try to let the song dictate what guitar I use. If it's a really loud, crazy song, I'll pull out the cheapest, oldest guitar I own, one that feeds back easily. But most of the time, I just use whatever's around.
I don't collect the way other people do. Some people collect rare guitars, like, 'I have a '54 Strat worth $50,000.' And I don't collect the way Nash does. Nash has Duane Allman's guitar and Johnny Cash's guitar. I bought guitars because they sounded good. I played them, they sounded unbelievably good, and I couldn't resist.
The ones I have got great necks; of course, all of the Fenders from that era are incredible.
I have a lot of guitars. Yeah, I'm not like a guitar collector, I don't have all vintage instruments. I don't even own a Strat or Les Paul. I don't have one.
I'm always scouring the universe for great old instruments from the '50s and early '60s. That's really, for me, the golden age of basses, when they had just been invented within 10 years of that period and they had just started to come into their own, especially the old Fender jazz basses and old Rickenbackers and Gibsons. I'm always on the lookout. It's fun.
I was reading an article with Stevie Ray Vaughan a long time ago, and the number '1959' stuck out to me for some reason. So I started searching those out as the band got more popular and I could actually afford one. And I found this one in Los Angeles. That's what introduced me to the whole world of 1959s.
I worked at a vintage guitar store, and the owner had ties with a lot of Japanese manufacturers and U.S. manufacturers that were beginning to pop up. So I was ordering parts and screwing them together and contacting local luthiers to finish and do frets and things, and I had put together two guitars, a red one and a black one.
