Thursday, December 8, 2011

Coffee Talk

 

This is not the update about the new hyper-cool Fender mutant.  But I can’t have a guitar blog without mentioning the odd man out, the weirdo, the fifth child (droppin’ a sick Doris Lessing ref there if you wanna know), the black sheep in the bunch - a guitar I affectionately call THE COFFEE TABLE.
I did not ever set out to want to like one of these things. I did not see one in a magazine or on TV or in a dream and think, “Man, I have to be seen wearing one of those.” I guess I do sort of care that The Edge played one. That is pretty nifty, because it was an odd choice for him. I mean, he was all post-punk and reserved, whereas the last famous dudes to play them before he did were definitely deep 70s hairslingers like .. well, I don’t really know. Except I think the not-as-good-as-the-good-guy from the original Heart lineup played one. And you cannot sesh with Molly Hatchet without having your ass whupped real bad by one of these things. I’m talking about the Gibson Explorer, people..

You look at it and I bet the first thing you think is, “That’s one of those ridiculous heavy metal guitars from the 80s.” I bet most of y’all think it was designed by metalheads for metalheads too, right? Well, guess what - you’re fuckin wrong. Gibson designed this thing in 1958! This is Don Draper shit, not Dimebag Darrell shit. The design is totally mid-century modern, maybe even googie. Look at it again now. See that reachy angular shit? If this thing were a house, Jackie Treehorn would live in it.

But so as I was saying, I did not want one of these. A few years ago I was in another music store phase. That’s the kind of phase in which, for whatever reason, once a week or so I go into retail music stores and fondle the gear, chat the creatures up, things like that. I didn’t even have any kind of aim to buy anything at that time. But one day at Music Unlimited in San Leandro, I looked up at the wall and saw this natural finish Explorer and thought “ha ha metal guitar - I have to play it.” Like it was going to be funny. Well, I wasn’t laughing when my fingers touched the thing and four new songs came flying out! It sounded fantastic. It felt fantastic. And it wasn’t even a Gibson - it was an Epiphone (Gibson’s made-somewhere-un-American downmarket brand). I’m not a Gibson guy, so with Gibson-like guitars I’m not susceptible to the same kind of snobismo I have about Fender-like guitars. Still, I don’t ever just buy a guitar on a whim, because all guitars are expensive. So I kept coming back and playing the thing, looking at it online, watching the video of “11 o’clock tick tock.” Until a couple months had gone by and I’d satisfied myself that it wasn’t just a whim, went down there and slapped the money down.

Even though I don’t play it a ton, I have not regretted buying this guitar at all. I didn’t really like the pickups it came with, which are some kind of really dark-sounding retro Gibson PAFs. This all-Korina guitar is actually pretty bright, and those pickups weren’t doing it justice at all. So I put a Seymour Duncan pearly gates in the bridge and a Jazz Model SH-2 in the neck. I had to get gold pickup covers and fit them to keep the look the same. I fucked up the hole that the volume pot sticks through by overdrilling it. Oh well. Anyway, here is an example of The Coffee Table in action with the original pickups - in the luxuriously / self-indulgently long second solo (starts at 2:24) in The Bruises Of Unknown Origin’s runaway hit Charles Glympse.

XOXO

~Chuck G 

Posted at 1:33 PM 8 notes Tags: 11 o'clock tick tock bruises of unknown origin charles glympse epiphone explorer gibson hugh dickey john dickey molly hatchet pie the edge u2 richard bitch