My present guitar tech, Alan Rogan, came to
me sometime in the very early ‘70s I think,
and after a while I developed the Les Paul
Special with a middle humbucker set for
feedback. Those guitars were heavy. But
by that time my stage work involved less
jumping and a little more punk posing. I
was still using that guitar on The Who’s last
tour in 1982. Gibson did a signature Pete
Townshend model Les Paul, which works well,
though it’s still a heavy guitar. The middle
pickup is meant to be set close to the strings
to allow instant feedback. It is on a separate
on-off switch to allow machine-gun staccato
effects. The other two small humbuckers are
wired in the conventional Gibson manner but
with a phase switch. In the studio I could get
almost any sound I wanted with that guitar.
In 1989 when I briefly gathered the band to
do a 25th anniversary tour, I played mainly
acoustic onstage. But here and there I
picked up a Strat to rock out. By that time I
had spent nearly seven years off the road. I
had practiced a lot, maybe more piano than
guitar, but I had a terrific studio and really
tried to learn to play better. The Gibson
SG still has a place in my arsenal of sounds,
but when I found the Eric Clapton Strat I
got the best of two worlds: a clean Fender
sound when I wanted it, and with the built-in power booster, the ability to make the
sound dirty for slab-drive chord work. I have
often tried SGs again, and I still love them
and use them for recording, but I love the
Strat-style whammy bar.
INTERVIEW
I built my first home studio in 1963, and
again, somehow this relegated the guitar
as a musical instrument to a different role. I
just wanted something that suited the song I
might be working on. I kept a basic collection
of guitars for my home studio right through
until Who’s Next, when I made my first
spending spree at Manny’s in 1971. On that
visit, I bought my first Martin D- 45, a Gibson
mandolin, a couple of Martin ukes and a
tiple, a pedal steel, a Guild Merle Travis, and
a beautiful Guild 12-string. I have some of
these instruments still. Prior to that, for my
home demos, I had a Harmony 12-string (very
basic, but it sounded great, you can hear it
on the Tommy recording), a Danelectro bass,
an old-school cello I sometimes used as string
bass and whatever electric guitar I was carrying to and from gigs at the time.
Ruffled Ruffian: Townshend winds up with a Gibson doubleneck circa 1966. Photo: © Trinifold Management
get the Neil Young sound). He also gave me
a Flying V (that I am sad to say I sold to help
buy my first big boat—he’s never quite for-
given me). I bought two or three D’Angelicos,
and started to really appreciate what a fine
guitar really was. The acoustic solo in the
middle of “Who Are You” is played on my
D’Angelico New Yorker (also sold to help buy
a boat!) and you can hear that I am playing
eloquently at last…
first [electric with a built-in piezo] I’d seen,
and when I got home Alan tracked down a
couple and we started to experiment.
I met Pat Martino in 1993 while I was in
New York working on the musical Tommy.
He was still fighting his way back from his
brain damage, and I don’t think he was too
impressed with me as a guitar player. He was
courteous, but it was quite clear which of us
was the fan. I’m nuts about his work, early
and late, pre and post brain operations. But
he brought me his Paul Reed Smith (which I
felt was far too lightweight, by the way) and
it had a built-in piezo pickup. This was the
What is useful to me onstage is that I get a
sizzling string sound from the piezo, to give
color and detail to the sustain sound I use
these days for solos. There are some added
benefits. One of my techniques is banging
the bridge and back pickup with the palm
and wrist, and I do this quickly to create a
kind of thunderous explosive sound—like a
heavy machine gun. The piezo plays a big
part in this sound, because it relays the sound
of the body of the guitar being thumped.
Fishman has gone a long way to make these
piezo systems extremely silky sounding.
From 1971, everything changed. Alan Rogan
helped me track down a lot of cool guitars.
Joe Walsh gave me a Gretsch and a Fender
Bassman combo with an Edwards pedal (to
www.premierguitar.com
PREMIER GUITAR APRIL 2010 129
