Gearbox
May 1996
EQUIPMENT PICKS FROM THE AUSTIN LOUNGE LIZARDS, ROBERT EARL KEEN, EMMYLOU HARRIS, AND LONNIE JOHNSON
lead guitarist, Conrad Deisler, plays a Collings OM-2. "I love this guitar," Deisler says. "It's real loud and well balanced, and it fits in the overhead rack of an airliner." He prefers John Pearse medium phosphor-bronze strings and a Dunlop extra-heavy flatpick "for that punchy sound--that chunk sound."
Deisler's Collings is fitted with an L.R. Baggs pickup in the bridge and a Rane phantom-powered condenser mic in the body. "I run a stereo cord to a Rane preamp and EQ each input separately to blend them," Deisler says. "But I still prefer the sound of a standing mic on lead. I use the internal pickups for rhythm but walk up to the mic to play lead."
Rhythm guitarist Hank Card has played his Guild D-25 since 1980. "This is a real nice guitar," he says, "real solid."
Tom Pittman works out on a dazzling custom banjo composed of a Gibson pot and a neck made by Austin luthier Tom Ellis with an eye-popping lizard inlay on the headstock. "It's a real hot rod," Pittman says. His pedal steel is a Williams D-10 keyless. On the Lizards' latest album he plays a 1929 National Tricone Hawaiian guitar and a dobro made by R.J. Deneve.
Richard Bowden's mandolin is a Givens A-style with a Fishman pickup in the bridge. His fiddle is a 100-year-old German model that was salvaged from a bulldozed house outside of Lubbock, Texas. "It's not fancy, and it's not pretty," says Bowden, laughing. "It's got dings and cracks all over it, but it plays great." He has a Barcus Berry bridge pickup on the fiddle, but he likes to step up to the mic for lead breaks on either instrument.
Boo Resnick loves his Schecter Jazz bass for its "punchy, boomy" intonation.--
John Herndon
brought one guitar on the road with him for his latest tour, his Collings C-10. "It's set up really well," he says, "but I worry about it, because I don't want to bust it up. I'm hard on guitars, and I don't have a guitar tech." Keen met Collings in Houston through Lyle Lovett in 1978, and Collings repaired his Martins and other acoustics for a long time, until he got too busy making guitars to be a repairman. "He said, 'Buy one of my guitars and you can rest assured it will be in good shape,'" Keen recalls. "So I said, 'OK, it's a deal.'"
Keen uses only D'Addario strings. "They should give me an endorsement where I get free strings," he quips. "I change strings every day." When he strums his guitar, he uses medium and light Tortex picks. For fingerpicking, he uses a thumbpick and his fingernails. "Fingerpicks are too much to worry about," he says, "I'm already always digging for things on stage." He's very particular about his thumbpicks; they have to be plastic Golden Gates, which he says are generally hard to find. "They fit well and they work well," Keen says. "They're shaped a little differently than Nationals and Ernie Balls, and they're thick." Keen never changes tunings on stage ("That would be a nightmare") but frequently raises his pitch with a Shubb capo. Keen's Collings is equipped with an L.R. Baggs pickup and a Tube Works DI, which works as a preamp as well. "It has a really warm sound," says Keen. --
Simone Solondz
plays a big, blonde J-200 from the '50s--clearly a guitar with a lot of soul. "This is my main stage guitar--and it belonged to Gram Parsons," says Harris.
After country-rock pioneer Parsons died in 1973, his road manager Phil Kaufman--the same guy who honored Parsons' request that his body be burned in the desert--gave Harris a little Martin New Yorker that had been Parsons' first guitar. It's now on loan to the Country Music Hall of Fame. "And this guitar [the J-200] he gave to Nancy Parsons," Harris says, referring to Parsons' first wife. "A few years later, Nancy approached me at a show and asked me if I wanted to buy the guitar. "When I got the guitar, it was almost in pieces. I didn't even know or care what it sounded like; I just wanted it. But once it was put back together, it was just a monster. And it's one of these guitars that will stay in tune. It's like a Timex guitar: it's almost like it doesn't matter what you do to it, it always sounds good." On the J-200, Harris uses a Sunrise soundhole pickup, medium picks, and D'Angelico bronze-wound medium strings.
In addition to Parsons' J-200, she's got a houseful of other vintage and specialty instruments. "I have a 1946 SJ-200 that I played on pretty much everything on Wrecking Ball," she says. "It's a sunburst--a beautiful guitar. It was almost in mint condition before I started playing it. Certainly it was never played by anyone who wore a belt buckle. And I have my second guitar, which is a Gibson SJN, which actually is the one I keep in open-D tuning. That's what 'Prayer in Open D' was written on."
Other goodies include a Martin J-40M, a Martin M-38, and a little Martin 00-28--"not the real rare one, but it's a real pretty little one." Harris also has an Everly Brothers guitar and a rosewood SJ-200 that Gibson made especially for the TV program A Day in the Life of Country Music. "My day in the life was to go into the Gibson factory in Montana, and they made the guitar for me," she says. Her electrics include a pink paisley Telecaster and a Joe Glaser six-string bass.
"And I also have my very first guitar," says Harris, "a Kay. It has a neck like a baseball bat and strings that are about six inches off the neck."--
Tommy Goldsmith
played a number of guitars during his life. A beautiful photo from the 1920s shows him with a custom 12-string of Mexican manufacture that is heard on many of his early recordings. On the Duke Ellington sessions of 1928, he was purportedly using a National. My favorite image from the '30s is of Johnson flatpicking a 12-fret Martin 000-18 (similar to the instrument he plays in film of a 1963 London show). Another photo from a session with Blind John Davis has him play-ing a sunburst Vega acoustic. In a 1960 vintage shot, he's seated with clarinetist Barney Bigard cradling a Martin archtop. Jerry Ricks recalls that Johnson sometimes used a Zim-Gar solid-body, but his preference in electrics generally ran to hollow-bodied Gibsons.--
Steve James