And now for something completely different…
When I was in 4th grade I decided to follow in my big brother Rhett’s footsteps and join school band. He had played percussion and I chose french horn. Now, if you know me you know I am not a french horn player but rather a guitarist. This is because the french horn didn’t really stick. I played it for a year and then decided I wanted an electric guitar. I left the french horn in the music teachers office with a note saying I had decided to quit playing it. She was very upset and called my parents, telling them I had musical talent and she hated to see it go to waste. I am fairly comfortable that I made the right decision… 
Anyhow, I saved up my paper route money and headed to Schmitt Music at the Burnsville Center mall to shop for guitars. What I acquired was this:
To my 12-year-old eyes it was pretty wicked cool although the guitar pictured, a Fender Squier Katana, is generally considered to be the ugliest thing Fender ever made. The picture above is not my actual Katana, it’s a pic I found on the Internet. Here is the only known early photo of Rhett and I as The Lavone circa 1986, me with my Katana.
I had the Katana for three years and learned to play the guitar (rather poorly) with it. I finally sold it in 1989 but that wasn’t the last I ever saw of it. In 1997 I actually encountered my very same Katana at a pawn shop in White Bear Lake for sale for the exact same $160 I paid for it in 1986. I had only stopped in there to kill time on a lunch break and suddenly, there was my first guitar right there in front of me. I know it was mine because of the unique pattern of dings in the finish that I had touched up with model paint. Strange.
By the time I was 15 I was aching for something better. I went to all sorts of music shops (most often Knut-Koupee in Burnsville, which went out of business years and years ago) and I dreamed of owning the really sweet guitars they had on hand. Eventually I made up my mind to get a Rickenbacker 330 12-string when I found one for sale used at K-K for the absurdly reasonable price of $600. I got my parents to sign for the financing and started saving every cent I made working as a bus-boy at the China Seas restaurant to pay it back. I took delivery of the guitar immediately (thanks to the financing) and three months later I paid it off in full without any interest acquired.
Over the next couple of years I also acquired a couple more cheap experimental guitars. One was a Casio DG-10 guitar synthesizer, which was a strange plastic thing that combined all the cheese of a late-80′s Casio keyboard with the sexiness of a guitar that looked like it was designed by blind aliens:
This guitar can be heard most prominently on The Lavone’s 1991 album “A Concert For No-one”, especially on “The Sun”, which is available for download (free) here:
http://www.archive.org/details/AConcertforNoOne
Another guitar I acquired around this time was a nice sunburst semi-hollow bass made by, oddly, Toyota. I can find no information of any sort about this bass online, but fortunately I still have a pic of it to prove that it really existed:
I have no idea what ultimately became of that bass. Rhett probably sold it so he could buy some Chinese food or something. He had a moderately annoying but also somewhat endearing habit of selling instruments that I had either partially or completely paid for without consulting me. Oh well.
Around this time I was in a photography class at school and my friend Sue Shepherd offered to sell me a guitar she had for $40. I took her up on the offer and the next thing I knew I was the proud owner of some sort of odd nameless Japanese guitar from the 60′s that I name “Spot”. I have since discovered that it was a Teisco Del Ray. The pickguard was actually black with a silver vine inlay pattern on it but somebody had painted it white. I discovered this when I took it apart and attempted to build a new plexiglass body for it as an art project. Unfortunately, I had an accident with a drill press that destroyed the plexiglass and led to the only swearing outburst of my high school career when I yelled “SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT!!!” in wood shop and shocked all my classmates who knew I was a goody-two-shoes Jehovah’s Witness who didn’t swear.
Sometime in the next year or two I was at a pawn shop and came across a particularly obscure guitar MIDI system from a company that was no longer in business called, I think, Photon (not to be confused with the company of the same name that currently exists). The MIDI system consisted of a rack-mountable synth box and a special “MIDI pickup” that mounted to a regular guitar and sensed the strings for MIDI data. I never got the MIDI part to work, but it came with a nameless Ibanez-ey guitar that was painted white with a silly looking hand painted cloud and thunderbolt on it. I couldn’t stand the cloud/thunderbolt design so I covered it with a collage of pictures of my various musical heroes (Charlie Parker, Jerry Garcia, Mozart and Tiny Grimes were all on it) and used it for a few years as a normal guitar until one day I decided to retire it and just hang it on the wall of the recording studio as artwork.
My buddy Sy is playing the nameless collage guitar in this picture, although you can’t see it all that well:
Notice too, in the above photograph, the sweet imitation Rickenbacker bass I’m playing. That is an Ibanez clone of a Ric 4001 made in the mid-70′s. Rhett and I purchased that bass along with our sound system at Lavonne’s Music and it is probably the most heavily used and longest lived piece of musical equipment we have ever bought. Here it is, over the years:
Purple Triangles, 1992, Me with the Ibanez
SP3!, 1998, Reed with the Ibanez
The Lavone, 2000, Me with, you guessed it, the Ibanez
Pop Riveter, 2006, Reed playing… surprise, the Ibanez
The thing about that bass is that I actually picked it out, paid for half of it and considered it to be my bass until Rhett gave it to Reed one day without asking me. This explains why he’s seen playing it so often. I don’t mind. It really is a pretty sweet bass.
In 1993 I had to sell my Rickenbacker because I was a newlywed and broke off my ass. I got a measly $300 for it at a pawn shop and for a few years I didn’t really own any guitar to speak of. I had an acoustic that my wife Tabithah had purchased when she was a teenager and had given to me. It was an Alvarez 6-string and here is a pic of Cindy Ivy playing that guitar at a 1998 Kloey show:
I also had a Yamaha 12-string acoustic at the time but for the life of me I don’t remember where I got it or what model it was. I know that it was at my dad’s house and somebody knocked it over and snapped the head off the neck, killing it. RIP Yamaha. It basically looked like this (although this is not the same guitar):
In need of an electric guitar but also fairly broke at the time I bought a red Fender Strat around 1996. I had recently seen King Crimson perform at the State Theater on their THRAK tour and was enamored of Adrian Belew’s fluorescent orange Strat, so I decided against my previous life-long antipathy towards Fender Stratocasters and got one. It was a Mexican Strat and I got it for, I think, $300. Here is a suitably dorky picture of me from that time with my red Strat:
Sometime around 1999, knowing that The Lavone would be doing some live gigs for the first time in the better part of a decade I went out and bought a purple 5-string Fender Jazz-Bass which was, IMO, pretty damn cool. I only had it for a couple of years and this is the only picture I have of it.
In 2000 I went to Dublin to meet up with my girlfriend Tricia (who was already over in Ireland on vacation). When I got there she broke up with me, which sucked. We went together over to Liverpool by ferry and then I told her to head back to Dublin without me. I bought some whiskey at a liquor store and a guitar at a pawn shop because that is the natural reaction to a musician getting his heart broken in a strange land. The guitar was a Hondo 12-String acoustic. Here I am playing it in my hostel room in Liverpool, probably inebriated…
After I got married the second time (on the rebound from Tricia) I bought another guitar and gave my red Strat to my wife Amanda. As far as I know she still has it because when we divorced in 2004 she took it with her. The guitar I bought to replace the Strat was a 1972 Harmony Rebel, which for Harmony was actually a really nice guitar. The Rebel was Harmony’s attempt to actually compete with the Rickenbackers and other high-end guitars of the day. Needless to say, they didn’t compete well, but the Rebel is still a pretty cool guitar.
Interesting note… The Rebel officially ceased manufacture in 1969, but my guitar had a stamp inside indicating that it had been built in 1972. A little research led me to learn that when Harmony was closing down their facilities because of an impending bankruptcy they decided to take whatever guitar parts they had lying around and clear out the lot. They apparently had some Rebel bits left over and built a handful of them, one of which was mine. So, I not only had a cool guitar but it was a cool, RARE, guitar that officially never was built. Neato, huh?
One more guitar I picked up during this time was a mid-60′s 3/4-scale acoustic sold by, oddly, Decca (yes, the record company). It seems that in the mid-60′s when the Beatles were all the rage everybody wanted to learn to play guitar. Decca decided to try to get in on the fun by selling Japanese import guitars to the beginner market. My Decca was purchased by a man named Mason Thatcher, who I knew when I was a teenager and he was in his 60′s. He had apparently owned this guitar for many many years and the headstock even has his name written on it. Mason was a kindly, gentle, friendly and funny guy and I loved him and his wife Edna when I was in their Bible study group back in high school. Mason eventually developed Alzheimer’s disease and died. His daughter Sandy gave me his old guitar to remember him by. It ain’t much to look at and it’s not the best playing guitar I have, but I love it and I’ve even recorded with it (“Pessimist Song” from my EP “The Context” features this little guitar).
As cool as my Rebel was, I eventually sold it on eBay and decided to get something a bit more versatile. In 2004 I purchased my current primary guitar, a Line6 Variax 500. The Variax intrigued me because of it’s ability to mimic the tones of other guitars and I’ve become a big fan of it in the years I’ve had it. Here I am playing it on-stage with Trumpet Marine in July 2007:
I currently have one other 6-string electric guitar, a First Act guitar that came free with our car when we leased a 2007 VW Jetta Turbo. Considering that it was a freebie and also considering that it’s made by First Act, it’s a surprisingly cool little guitar. It has a built in amp of sorts that has distortion and chorus (I think) for when you want to play it through your car speakers (a very practical thing…heh). It has our cars VIN engraved on a plate on the back. It’s also not bad looking or bad playing. When my Variax wound up with a fried motherboard I used the First Act as my stand in and it performed adequately. Officially I’ve given this guitar to Syd, but he’s not really taken to playing it yet. Hopefully he will someday when his hands get a little bigger and better for playing the guitar.
Around the time I bought the Variax I also bought a new bass. Now, my budget was extremely limited at the time so I bought pretty much the cheapest Chinese imitation Fender Jazz Bass I could find. My previous legit Fender 5-string Jazz Bass was long gone by this point, pawned in a time of financial crisis. The new one I bought (for, I believe, $200) was made by some company called S101. It was black with a white pickguard and I’ve had it for about 3-4 years. Here I am playing it on-stage with Cindy Ivy at the 400 Bar:
After that gig I decided that I was not happy with the sound of the bass. The tone was too muddy and the electronics were too buzzy so I decided to undertake a renovation on it. First things first. I bought new pickups, Fender Samarium Cobalt Noiseless jazz-bass pickups, the same ones that are installed in the real Fender American Deluxe jazz bass. I then decided to remove the S101 logos from the headstock and replace them with 40′s-era pinup girls. Last but not least, I decided to repaint it a nice vintage off-white and replace the pickguard with a brushed aluminum copper-colored metal one. I also added copper shielding to the body cavities to reduce hum. The result is my new S101/Fender-hybrid custom j-bass, which sounds about 1000 times better and looks better too. I just finished the project last night (although I still want to redo the grounding since there is a tiny bit of remaining hum even with the noiseless pickups and the shielding). Here, in all it’s newfound glory, is my S101 j-bass after customization:
Headstock Detail of my S101/Fender Hybrid J-Bass
Last but not least, I recently decided that it was time that I got an acoustic guitar that didn’t suck. Sure, I have the Decca and sure I have the Hondo, but hey, they’re a 40 year old Decca and a 15 year old Hondo. Not really good for much anymore. I went out and bought a Martin DX1K acoustic which is officially my newest guitar. It’s cheap for a Martin, but it sounds great and plays great and I’m very happy with it.
And there you have it. My menagerie of guitars. Until I wrote this post I hadn’t realized that over the last 22 years I had owned 18 different guitars and basses. Huh.
One final note. I currently own 6 guitars, 4 of which I have purchased in the time since I began dating my lovely wife Esther. As she pointed out when reading this post, I mentioned guitars acquired in connection with two ex-wives and an ex-girlfriend in this post but not those acquired with her assistance and endurance of my obsessive shopping process and long-winded discussions of the merits of what I plan to buy. She is truly a long-suffering woman, a wonderful wife, and the main reason I have a home with a recording studio in the basement in which to put my current stock of guitars to use. It would be a shame to leave her part of the story out.
More From Ryan Sutter
- God As I Knew Him – Part 2
- The Long Dark Night of the Soul
- my last post as vioman
- God As I Knew Him – Part 1
- a list for my 30s
