1989 Kramer Gorky Park Electric Guitar

Let’s start with Kramer. Kramer began back in 1975-76 with the cool idea to make guitars with aluminum necks inspired by Travis Beans, in itself a neat story. The main people were New York music store owner Dennis Berardi, and Gary Kramer, who subsequently hooked up with former Gibson marketer Peter LaPlaca of Chicago. Kramer quickly left and Kramer (the company) went on to create some truly great guitars. In the early ‘80s, as Strat-style guitars began to take the world by storm, Kramer began a transition to wooden necks. Guitars like the Strat-style Kramer Pacer became extremely popular. Big endorsements by top players like Eddie Van Halen, Richie Samboro, and Elliott Easton didn’t hurt either!

By the mid-‘80s Kramer’s pointy droopy headstock, while an anathema to snooty vintage guitar fans, was in the hands many top and aspiring guitar slingers. In 1984 Kramer made the fortuitous decision to start selling budget versions of its own guitars, Focus from Japan and Striker from Korea, to further cultivate fands for the brand. By the beginning if 1987 Kramer was making and selling more guitars than another other guitar company! What could go wrong?

1989 Kramer Gorky Park Electric Guitar

Many of the guitar players who favored Kramers were in the hard rock and pop metal bands that had become popular in the mid-‘80s as interest in punk and New Wave began to wane. Centered in L.A., this rock movement mostly featured guys in tight glam Spandex outfits with long, ratted and teased poofy hair. “Hair bands!” Catchy melodies, a hard backbeat, and lots of rifferama.

Enter Mother Russia. About the same time Kramer began importing guitars, 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev took control of the Communist Soviet Union and began a process of liberal reforms. Among those were a toleration of underground music such as rock and a relaxation of travel restrictions.

In 1987 singer Nikolai Noskov, Sasha Minkov on bass, Sasha Lvov on drums, and Jan Ianenkov on guitar formed a rock band called Gorky Park, named after the big public Moscow park in honor of Maxim Gorky. The band was able to travel to the US and soon acquired champions including Frank Zappa and Kramer advocates Jon Bon Jovi and his axeman Sambora. In 1989 the band’s self-titled album debuted and they scored three successive hits and MTV rotation, the first popular Russian hair band.

1989 Kramer Gorky Park Electric Guitar

Probably through the Sambora connection Kramer’s Dennis Berardi became interested in the band and formed a management company to handle them. The Kramer Gorky Park was intended to be a promotional item in support of that effort.

Built for Kramer in Korea and introduced in 1989 or early 1990, the Gorky Park had a cool balalaika shape and graphics and signature of the band. Ballalaika. Russia. Geddit? The guitar really wasn’t all that bad, actually. It has one hot Seymour Duncan humbucker and a licensed Floyd Rose.

Unfortunately, the Gorky Park arrived just in time to see everything crumble. In 1989, the Iron Curtain came down, as Berliners attacked the Berlin Wall and dismantled it. I still have a piece in a box my parents gave me as a present! Gorky Park returned to the exuberance of liberation in Russia. Alas, the enthusiasm for hair bands in the US was also beginning to crumble as alternative rock represented by the Seattle Sound was coming on. Lastly, Kramer guitars itself had become a house of cards and was beginning to crumble. Bad management and other bad things began to undermine it—it probably didn’t help that Berardi was off focusing on Gorky Park. By the end of 1990 Kramer guitars also collapsed.

Whether the Gorky Parks were ever even distributed is unknown. How many exist is also unknown. Many of them were bought up (or turned over) to some large dealers, as I recall, and were liquidated for like $149 apiece. Gorky Park, the band, continued to be popular in the former Soviet Union, but became mostly a footnote to ‘80s rock and guitar history. Today these guitars show up every so often and can actually trade for quite a bit more than the clearance price! In the early 2000s the Kramer name was sold to Gibson by its owner, Henry Vaccaro, a former principal in Kramer, in order to finance the now-defunct Vaccaro Guitars venture. Like the Gorky, modern Kramers are budget imports, but with no connection to the former Soviet Union!

Hair Bands, Soviet Russia & the 1989 Kramer Gorky Park Electric Guitar from MyRareGuitars.com

Frank Zappa

One of the greatest musicians of the 20th century was also a damn good guitar player, he stands alone as a composer, instrumentalist and satirist beyond compare. His name was Frank Zappa. Frank is still IMHO the most underrated musician in the rock and roll era.

Frank was a master at the use of wahwah (check out his early wah solo on Orange County Lumber Truck from the album Weasels Ripped My Flesh), one of his techniques was using the wah as an EQ boost. His feel for the wah was so good he could feel the notch in the pedals throw that would give him (for most part) that growling round sound that Frank was known for during the 70’s. Try it yourself plug in your SG (or any humbucking solidbody guitar) and get your favorite distortion sound. Now go to the neck pickup crank it up but do not roll off the treble as you would if you were trying to cop the Clapton ‘Woman tone’, leave it up full and roll off the highs using the wah. This will give the wah a full spectrum signal for it to work with.

Another Zappa secret was his uncanny ability to combine exotic scales with the pentatonic blues scale. If you watch any videos of Frank playing you will notice he is not in the “normal guitar boxes”. Viva la Frank!!!

Speaking of Frank Zappa, it is well documented that growing up two of his favorite guitarists were Guitar Slim and Johnny Guitar Watson. Frank in a Guitar Player magazine interview said that his favorite guitar solo of all time was Guitar Slims Story of my life. This solo has a tone and approach that is very Zappaesque.

Guitar Slim

One of the secrets of Guitar Slims sound was the fact that he preferred to plug his guitar into a PA amp as opposed to a guitar amp. This was probably a Bogen or Premier. What Slim liked about these amps I am sure was the loudness (I have seen p.a. amps from the early 40’s using 2 6L6’s way before Fender used these tubes for his amps) their high end, and most important their reaction to the signal of his guitar (Slim was reported to be using a Strat and a 52 Les Paul) which gave out more signal than the microphones of that era. End result? Distortion mmmm yummy yummy!!!

Jimmy Page with his Fender Telecaster

How come I don’t sound like Jimmy Page when I play the intro to Heartbreaker when I use my Les Paul? Is it because I don’t own a 59 Burst? What can I do to make my Les Paul sound like Jimmy’s? Well first of all you would have to transform it into a Telecaster. That’s right a Telecaster. Now let me explain how this happened.

A young Jimmy Page was the protégé of British studio legend Big Jim Sullivan. Jim was a member of an elite group of cats who like their American counterparts the “Wrecking Crew” played on most of the hit records of the 60’s recorded in England. The fact is that 95% of the records we grew up listening to in the 60’s were made by the same two dozen or so musicians. The truth is no producer (the music industries version of a movies director) would put his reputation on the line using some prettyboys who were signed because of the haircuts or their trousers. (Rutles 101). This fact by itself is what separates the Beatles, the Stones from everyone else, they were the first truly self contained band.

Now back to Sully, Page and the Tele. Sullivan could be seen weekly in the UK and US as a featured player on the Tom Jones Show. Sullivan was known for his swarthy good looks and his White Telecaster. Being a studio player Jim knew the merits of the Tele, how it cut through the mix and was a safe bet at sessions as far as its versatility. (A side note; there was a guitarist across the pond making ground breaking records with his Telecaster, his name was Joe Messina one of the house guitarists of Motown’s Funk brothers).

When Jimmy took his formidable talent and studio experience to the studio to produce the first Led Zeppelin record Jimmy had an early 60’s rosewood board white Tele in tow just like Big Jims.

Jimmy had already toured with the Yardbirds using the Tele as well as the first go round with Zeppelin in the UK (check out Zep on the DVD Supershow). But Page felt that the Tele was not fat enough sounding for a power trio setup, Jimmy soon switched to the Les Paul for good.

Jimi Hendrix in Studio

Jimi’s tone using the Fuzz boxes of the 60’s. We all know how thin sounding the fuzz boxes of the 60’s were. Whether it’s a Big Muff, an Octavia,or a Tonebender, they were all pretty thin sounding. Jimi Hendrix used all of these at one time or another, yet his tone was mostly pretty fat and round sounding (unless he was looking for a special effect) This leads us to Jimi’s secret tone maneuver.

It’s a really simple one. We all know now that Jimi used Marshall’s most of his career and we also know that Jimi made use of the channel jumper cable (as seen in many of Jimi’s live video’s) Jimi’s trick was to boost the bass sounding channel to even out the thin sound of the fuzz box. This gave Jimi the desired fat tone he was accustomed to when he came up using Fenders and Ampegs. The other benefit was that when Jimi would simply turn down his volume for his rhythm sound it was still quite big sounding. Rarely in the videos I have seen (many) did Jimi ever step on a fuzztone for a lead, when you have seen him go to a pedal for a lead it was to a wah for the tone boost.

Surf guys outboard reverb unit trick. Boy did the surf records of the early to mid 60’s blow my mind. Imagine guitar records with no singing, simple melodies that almost everyone could cop, and tons of self important guitar slinger attitude. I ran into a surf guitar legend years ago and I asked him how he ran his reverb, because I could see that he had something funky going on there as I saw that his guitar was plugged directly into the amp.

He smiled and told me that he and some of the other cats of that era were using a primitive effects loop so to speak. Here’s how they did it.

He ran the guitar into input one of his Showman and then ran a cable from input two to the input of his Fender reverb unit and ran the output of the reverb to the input of channel two (or normal channel). This way he could not only tailor the sound of the unit with the onboard controls he could also utilize the second channels volume and tone controls.

One benefit he did not realize too, was that the guitar running direct into the first channel did not have its dry input signal colored by the reverb unit! This setup is also called the poor mans effects loop.

Adrian Belew - The Twang Bar King

What the hell is all that duct tape doing on the stage? Did you ever notice that when you have a single coil guitar plugged in that the amount of noise changes as you turn or move around? Yeah me too! Did you also ever notice that there were certain spots on the stage that you could get really good feedback if you turned a certain way? Yeah me too!

Over the years I have heard stories about how Hendrix would spend over an hour at his sound check finding those hot spots on the stage. Legend has it that Twang Bar King Adrian Belew took it to a new level by incorporating this feedback and sustain into his tunes as part of the melody and arrangement. This made it necessary to make these markings on the stage part of his setup. No room for spontaneity for Mr. Belew, he needed what he needed when he needed it.

So here’s the trick after the band sound checks bring out the tape and find your hot spots, even if you don’t utilize feedback you will still benefit from knowing where on the stage your guitar will be most responsive.

Joey Leone with his amps

That’s it for now my friends so, “keep those cards and letters coming in.”

Secrets of the Great Guitar Players from MyRareGuitars.com

This past month or so I found myself having the same conversation several different times with several different people. That conversation centered around the question, “what were the greatest guitar solos on record”? I tend to go for the usual ones, but there are some great guitar sounds, not necessarily just solos, that are also worth mentioning. So folks here are my thoughts on the ten “Greatest guitar songs”. My list is a list not in any particular order, so here we go.

Mike Bloomfield (Super Session): Albert's Shuffle

#1. Mike Bloomfield [Super Session]: Albert’s Shuffle

This is the most flawless 5 minutes of solo guitar I have ever heard. Mike’s tone and note selection here are perfect. Period. I marveled over this song at 13 years old and still do. A 59 “Burst” through a blackface Twin Reverb, if not for this record you could probably still buy a ‘Burst” for $500 (not really).

Frank Zappa (One Size Fits All): Po-Jama People

#2. Frank Zappa [One Size Fits All]: Po-Jama People

Frank’s tone on this cut is similar to his tone on many of his 70’s era tunes like Inca Roads, Punky’s Whips and cuts from the Apostrophe album, but this solo in particular is so chock full of nuts I can’t say enough about it.

The SG sound here sounds like he’s choking the guitar to death. What a solo! There was magic in the studio that day, for sure.

Jimi Hendrix (Band of Gypsies): Machine Gun

#3. Jimi Hendrix [Band of Gypsies]: Machine Gun

Not much to say here aside from the fact that this is the greatest guitar solo every printed on tape! Unlike the Bloomfield cut I referred to earlier, this is not a seamless, flawless solo; it’s just the most riveting, gut wrenching piece of guitar work I have ever heard. I turn people onto it who are not fans of Jimi, rock, or guitar in general and they are stunned. Jimi, Jimi, Jimi.

Link Wray: Rumble

#4. Link Wray: Rumble

This song actually made me shiver when I was a kid hearing it for the first time. It’s what rock and roll guitar should be, raw, slightly out of tune and showing very little dexterity (off handed compliment if I ever heard one). The guitar Link is using on this cut is a Danelectro Guitarlin set in the middle position, with the pickups in series.

There are several versions of this song available. I like two of the earlier ones, one of which is the version where Link switches on the tremolo in the fade. Cool! The other version, which is my favorite, appears on a Link Wray compilation, on the Edsel label.

Eric Clapton (Fresh Cream): Sweet Wine

#5. Eric Clapton [Fresh Cream]: Sweet Wine

EC at his best. His entrance on this cut is what a solo should start like. Bang! Here I am. Eric’s tone is big yet cuts through. To my ear, it sounds like Eric is playing an SG. Clapton’s work on this whole album is unparalleled (see NSU and Dreaming) but this is “the” one. His enharmonic approach is refreshing and different. Most of his work in the future was mostly root or relative minor based. You’ll know what I mean when you listen to his solos on “While my guitar gently weeps” and “Something”. I have always felt that Clapton’s best work was when he was around musicians he did not tower over like Bruce, Baker, The Beatles and Duane Allman.

Johnny Marr (The Smiths): How Soon is Now?

#6. Johnny Marr [The Smiths]: How Soon is Now?

Rarely do you find a song with a great guitar hook in it, a song in which the guitar sound defines any sound you hear afterwards that, even remotely sounds the same. This song has two of them. I don’t know much about Mr. Mars or the Smiths, all I know is that when I heard this song I stood with my mouth open thinking “my God that is a sound I will remember for the rest of my life.”

The first one is a rhythmic heavily tremoloed effect while he’s playing a chord. His strumming is in sync with the trem, where as, you don’t hear his attack, only the chord. A very powerful sound indeed. The second is when he slides back a half step using a fragmented voiced chord up an octave or so from the first hook, also breathtaking. BTW Morrisey’s vocal on this tune is also spectacular.

Roy Buchanan: The Messiah Will Come Again.

#7. Roy Buchanan: The Messiah Will Come Again.

Even without knowing Roy’s story and subsequent fate, if this tune does not bring you to tears or at least give you a case of “chicken skin” you are dead already!!!

Hearing this song on Roy’s 1972 PBS TV special was a defining moment in this mans life. I could not believe anyone could put so much emotion into a song. To this day for me the actual playing of this tune has to be done at the right time in the right place among the right people. The Telecaster at its greatest moment is when it’s in Roy’s hands. The simple act of switching pickups in this song is earth shattering. This is more a spiritual experience than a musical one on my opinion.

Mark Knophler: Sultans of Swing

#8. Mark Knophler: Sultans of Swing

I knew that this song would be a hit based solely on the guitar playing. When was the last time you heard that statement? It was the 70’s for Chrissakes, and here comes this upstart Brit playing a Strat so clean you could actually hear his technique. And it was good, very very good!

I love this song for the sheer reason that it gives every guitar player the hope that if you play good enough you can play yourself into a hit record. His tasty playing during the song is so restrained and tempered that when in the last part of the song he goes into that famous triplet riff it sounds like the world is coming to an end.

Jerry Reed: The Claw

#9. Jerry Reed: The Claw

That’s his name and that’s his nickname. If I could play like any guitar player in the world it would be Jerry Reed. This guy is a monster picker, for sure, as well as, a talented songwriter and a not half bad screen personality (the Snowman in “Smokey and the Bandit”). Check out Jerry’s chops on this particular tune, he’s finger picking a gut string and it sounds like a multitracked guitar part being played by several great guitarists, but its not. It’s just Jerry being Jerry.

Freddy King: Going Down

#10. Freddy King: Going Down

The first time I heard this song as I am sure I am not alone was by Jeff Beck on the second Jeff Beck Group album. Upon hearing Freddy’s version, a few years later, I initially still had Beck’s version in my mind as the reference. As time went on and I listened to King’s version more, eventually I fell in love with the simplicity in his approach. The stunning fact is, that like many of Freddy’s solos, he never moves from the one position he starts in. This was to me. to become a very important lesson on how to play the blues authentically. We sometimes get caught up in moving around and that movement becomes the idea, not the bending and squeezing of the few notes. Larry Londin’s simplified drumming also lends a hand to the tasty feel set up in the recording as well as Leon Russell’s signature piano sound, all simple and all tasty. Yummy!!!

Well boys and girls that’s it for now. Please contact me with your comments criticisms and suggestions I love ‘em!

10 Greatest Guitar Songs from MyRareGuitars.com