Electric History: Guitar Stories by The Music Zoo. Mike Hickey - '59 Les Paul Connoisseur and Guitar Tech to the Stars

Yeah, I have I have I only have two cameras. They're not for to secure the guitars. Uh they're to check on the dog, make sure he's sleeping or not getting into, you know, peeing on a 5150 combo or something, you know.

And you know, as far as the guitars, I brought them all and the amps. I carried them all in myself. So, you want that trouble, come get it, you know.

You go to see a band and there's no backline. The two of us grew up seeing walls of Marshalls.

The thing for me with the amps is when I go to a gig and I don't see any amps, I don't feel like I'm going to be terrified by anything.

If I see somebody took the time to at least bring one stack, that gives me a lot of hope that what I'm about to see and hear is going to be blistering in one way or another.

I've got nothing against modelers and a lot of them sound good.

If you're already playing at this volume and then your clean sound is at that volume too, where do you go?

There's a you lose a lot of the in-the-face dynamic.

There's nothing more spiritual than that. And I feel like the guys that are just running these units into the front of house are missing all of that.

You lose that in your bones feeling.

Touring's so expensive. Unless you're a big boy or big girl, you can't afford to ship all that stuff around.

The logistics is hard, the finances are hard. It's so hard to make money playing in a band.

Consistency to sleeping in the same bed in your own bed is a nice thing.

So that was Venom Incorporated. Venom Inc.

Mantis has some heart problems and then his wife had some medical issues and he couldn't do this US tour. So Tony Dolan approached me and said, you know, would you be interested in doing it.

I relearned songs. I sat on Zoom with Mantis and made sure I was playing stuff more correctly.

We were coming through Georgia to Florida and I don't know what happened cuz I was sleeping in the van and so we hit a trailer truck.

Luckily, nobody was severely injured. The van was torn apart, but it still kind of ran.

So now you're a New England guy, so Berklee's not how far is Boston from you? Even when you were a kid, were you still as a kid? It was about 45 minutes.

So we started like this little metal fusion band.

Everybody starts getting, you know, I'm trying to join any band, you know, I'm looking in the Music Connection paper.

Berklee's biggest feature is not that you can learn harmony and arranging and seventh chords. It's that people from all over the world end up on this one street and they all want to jam and they all want to play.

We would get the same room for six hours and then we'd, you know, we were like playing Mr. Crowley and things.

It was a great learning experience.

Joe came to the Music Zoo to do, you know, like we're Gibson dealers, longtime Gibson dealers, and we're made to measure dealers.

I'm the guy that's just like, I'm going to build a one pickup Les Paul with a wraparound and but not a Junior.

Joe was here last week and we still have he did a rendition of Snakebite and the Custom Shop remade that guitar like as close as they possibly could get.

We're going to do a giveaway for charity for the guitar.

He's got a knack for guitar buying and haggling and what have you.

When you're buying a rare guitar or a coveted guitar you got to make the deal.

I'm trying to get down to having like two Hammers, two Les Pauls, two Telly's, you know, Noah's Ark of guitars.

We were totally into Van Halen and we had built like from the Music Emporium catalog.

We bought parts and stuff and I bought an early Floyd Rose out of the local advertiser paper and grabbed a drill and just we put it in a Strat and we striped it.

Getting the Charvel was the changing of the guard.

You could play that style on those guitars much easier than a Les Paul or certainly a 335.

So, I got that in 81. I kept it till 83.

Fast forward to the early 90s. I'm watching my friend's little guitar shop and I see this kid walking down the street with the ML.

I got this ML in the car.

We agree on a price which was very low. And you know, he whips out the cash.

I had a Dean Z. It was Cherry Sunburst and I had purchased it at Manny's on 48th Street.

They brought in an ML and it might have been Brazilian burst, I believe it was.

I played a Cadillac, I played probably seven or eight guitars and all of them had like this twist in the neck.

People would make a guitar safari, right? You just go to five or six stores looking at guitars.

The dealer would select the specs.

Kramer comes along, they get the Floyd Rose exclusive.

When Grover decided that he was going to start making just guitars and not selling the parts, a lot of those were just oil finished guitars.

Do you still see the beauty in the Charvel and the Jackson guitar?

Some of the music that we grew up with wasn't made with those guitars. It was made with Charvel.

Edward, Randy, all these people were able to figure it out without playing a burst.

That's what the beauty I find in it.

The first thing that's got to happen is you need the Strat headstock.

There were so many of those guys that were playing this, obviously Holdsworth, and they were still really kind of like set on, 'Oh, it's going to be a big problem.'

We started releasing all those guitars with Strat headstocks.

The oil thing actually happened for two reasons.

He's making his own neck. He's got Eldred in there. And he's got Todd Krause.

Then he gets Henry Bole. Henry starts working on the Holdsworth guitar.

Every other company followed suit and copied Grover's ideas right down to the cast neck plate with the logo and the address.

We're lucky in our generation there were so many forward-thinking guitar people.

The Floyd is if you're not going to be able to handle a vintage tremolo, which is really hard to keep in tune, this is the answer.

The spacing on the DiMarzio bridge wasn't F spacing. It was Gibson spacing which made the guitar feel a lot different too.

Swamp ash is another important part of the picture.

The production versions, I tracked about 33 of them in the old days.

I had to make a decision at some point. Am I a guitar dealer or am I a guitar collector?

They're mostly sentimental because I had to make that decision.

I have an 80s Les Paul that I gigged with back in the days when I had a band and I was doing my thing.

That guitar is sentimental to me because I look at the guitar and I remember all those days and clubs.

After you handle a couple hundred bursts, you get comfortable, for lack of a better word.

When they change everything in 1960, the paint, the neck angle gets steeper, the bridge is higher, the tenon is shorter, those guitars sound different.

I can just tell you five great bursts.

The Black Burst, near mint, couple of dings, kind of unplayable at this point, but as a guitar, it could be a pink burst. It doesn't matter. That guitar is just on fire.

I don't know that it's magic but what it is is you pick it up and you know that you've heard it.

Even if you play Greeny, it's not a rough ride. Greeny's had a hard life. But it has a certain sound.

Through a real Hiwatt-powered Twin or a Dumble, when you have the headroom, you can come and get all those nice little tones.

I owned a 59 335 was really clean.

That guitar hung out at the Music Zoo for years and most of the staff played it and that was one of the best sounding guitars ever.

I get why people like 335 so much.

I think Gibson makes great guitars. I think Fender makes great guitars.

For some reason they never feel like a 59 or a 54 Strat.

Even if I go find a maple neck 50 Strat that's unplayed, as soon as I touch it, I know, oh yeah, this is it.

With Korina, there's specific things that the replica makers don't know.

I can literally look inside at the routing.

If these features are not in the guitar even if everything else is the right pots, the right pickups, the patina, blah blah blah, it's not the same.

When people are talking about the totals of the Korina, they always quote these numbers, which are shipping totals.

This is a factory that makes batches of guitars.

I've been tracking all this stuff for 20-some years.

My Gibson ledger is missing and all this. And so I have my own ledger starting in 58 going to 60.

If you're going to play in those leagues in that thin air, you're up on freaking Mount Everest. You're gonna bring a friend, hopefully a knowledgeable one.

Just because you're wealthy doesn't make you wise.

Especially now with the prices that people are paying, you really have to do your homework and find reputable people.

A real guitar reveals itself as soon as you open the case to a trained eye.

The Charvel Jackson thing we may have a slightly different take on because you got to look at it from an age group perspective.

The people that dig those guitars are at the moment, let's call it 45 years old to 65 or so.

A burst is always going to be a burst and a V and there'll always be those people.

The guitar never goes away, which is amazing.

It can be a work of art. It can be an instrument. It can be a tool. It can be a financial thing.

We should, like I said, we could keep going and maybe we'll do a second one of these, but at the two and a half hour mark, we're probably good.

You have a great value in the guitar world, my friend.

You know, like with collecting guitars valuewise, Joe and I have always said, you got to be ready for this thing to be worth $1 tomorrow.

You have to love what you know.

Thanks for spending time. And we'll talk more. There's more stuff to do.