Whether Barney Kessel intervened to get his guitar into Bruce Forman’s hands is a matter of one’s belief in the supernatural, but it certainly seems as if it was meant to be.
“Does an instrument really contain or possess a part of the person’s soul who plays it?” ponders guitarist Bruce Forman. “Probably not … I don’t believe in that shit.”
With his ever-present cowboy hat, and radiating a mustachioed grin, it’s hard not to get swept up in Forman’s skepticism-laced enthusiasm for the question. He’s been meditating on the idea since May 2020, when he purchased the Gibson ES-350 that belonged to his mentor, the one and only Barney Kessel. “The instruments can tell stories,” Forman preaches. “The instruments can tie generations together and they can bring people together. That’s basically what our soul is.”
If any guitar has a soul, Kessel’s guitar is it. Despite popular—and snazzily outfitted—signature models that were once offered by Gibson, Kay, and Airline, he stuck by his beloved ES-350, playing it almost exclusively on stage and in the studio. In one short YouTube video, “Barney Kessel talks about his guitar” (an excerpt from the DVD Barney Kessel: Rare Performances 1962-1991), he speaks briefly about what makes his ES-350 so special, pointing out the “high-quality” cobalt and copper in its 1939 Charlie Christian pickup, highlighting its bridge, which he says was made custom “along the principles of a fine violin bridge,” and praising the exceptionalism of the replacement knobs he took off a record player. Off camera, an interviewer asks Kessel how he feels when he plays this guitar, and he responds, “Pretty close to being in heaven.”
Kessel’s career was nothing short of legendary. In addition to his extensive and exemplary work at the forefront of the jazz world, where he advanced technical expectations and the vocabulary of the instrument, his membership in the Wrecking Crew found him recording countless pop hits and film soundtracks, making him one of the most recorded guitarists of all time. Given his close affection for his ES-350, it’s probably not overstated to say that the sound of this very guitar is embedded into our collective consciousness, which makes it a treasure.
But for Forman, the ES-350 is so much more than that. It’s a living artifact of his mentor.
“Barney was really funny. He had a great sense of humor, and so did Ray and Shelley. They could have been standup comedians.
Putting On the Gloves
Forman’s relationship with Kessel goes back to the mid-1970s. The Texas-born guitarist was a jazz-obsessed teen, which he says made him a bit of a “Mr. Magoo” once his family moved to San Francisco, where he was disinterested by the city’s thriving rock ’n’ roll culture. Rather, he attended jazz concerts and workshops frequently enough that Kessel began to take notice. Forman was eventually able to impress the older guitarist with his playing, and by 1978, Kessel hired the young devotee, who was just 21 or 22 years old.
“The first official gig where I was hired to play with him was in San Francisco,” he explains. “We played duo, then we both played solo, then there was a rhythm section, so we’d each play a trio tune. Then, he chose me to go on the road with him for a European tour of established master and upstart young guy—that was a big thing in the ’70s and ’80s.”
Kessel didn’t just choose Forman because he was a young talent that he wanted to support. He was looking for a sparring partner, and Forman had proven himself a worthy adversary. “When you play with him, it’s like a knife fight. He’s there to compete in a very cutthroat manner,” says Forman. “He wants to win, even though he appreciates you when you play great. He doesn’t want to make you play bad, but he wants to push it to the edge of his ability.” Forman insists he rose to the occasion and says, “It wasn’t easy for him, and I got him a couple of times. I knew what we were doing, and I was there for it. I think he liked that about me, as much as he might have hated me a couple of moments in the middle of it.”
TIDBIT: While Forman and company would have loved to work in the studio where the Poll Winners recorded their albums, the Contemporary Records building in Los Angeles no longer exists. Instead, they chose guitarist/producer Josh Smith’s Flat V Studio, in San Fernando Valley, and found photos of the original sessions in order to approximate miking techniques.
The two remained close as Forman’s career blossomed. Soon, he was playing alongside other jazz legends such as Dizzy Gillespie, Ray Brown, Oscar Peterson, Freddie Hubbard, Bobby Hutcherson, and Shelly Manne, simultaneously building an extensive discography, which includes releases on the Muse and Concord labels. He also became a committed educator through his work as a professor at University of Southern California’s Thornton School of Music, where he’s become a mentor to countless students—most notably guitarist Molly Miller.
In 1992, Kessel—who was born in 1923—suffered a stroke that left him unable to play. Forman says that he would visit him and his wife, Phyllis, at their San Diego home and he would play the ES-350 for them. “Phyllis would bring it out. I don’t know if Barney really wanted me to play it for him,” he remembers. “He had a stroke and it was hard to read his emotions. She really wanted to hear it, and she wanted me to make sure it wasn’t falling apart sitting in the case.”
After Kessel passed in 2004, Forman continued to visit Phyllis and the ES-350. It was on one of these occasions that he had the notion to pay tribute to his mentor. “I had this idea that we should re-visit the Poll Winners with this guitar,” he explains.
“When you play with him, it’s like a knife fight. He’s there to compete in a very cutthroat manner.”
Then, There Were Three
In 1957, Kessel, bassist Ray Brown, and drummer Shelley Manne were at the top of their game and topping the jazz polls that appeared in the magazines DownBeat, Playboy, and Metronome. Confidently assuming the band name the Poll Winners, the trio recorded a series of five albums for Contemporary Records, the first four of which—The Poll Winners, Ride Again!, Poll Winners Three, and The Poll Winners Exploring the Scene—appeared between 1957 and ’60 and helped to usher in the popularization of guitar/bass/drums jazz-trio instrumentation.
“We have to realize those records were Earth shattering,” Forman enthuses. “Before that, there may have been some guitar/bass/drums bands, but not that I know of in the history of jazz. The guitar was in a band with multiple guitars, like Django or George Barnes, or it was in a vibes and bass kind of trio, like Red Norvo and Benny Goodman, or they were in with a piano, like Oscar Peterson or Nat Cole or Ahmad Jamal. The guitar/bass/drums … our instrument had not really grown to that level of responsibility and maturity in jazz.”
The heart of Forman’s concept for a tribute record was that the three Poll Winners’ instruments would be played by their protégés, all of whom were friends and collaborators. “John Clayton, who’s a Ray Brown protégé, has Ray’s bass. I knew that Monterey Jazz Festival had a set of Shelley’s drums, and I knew a guy in Portland who had a set of Shelley’s drums, and Jeff Hamilton, the reason he’s in L.A. is because Shelley brought him to take over [for him] in the L.A. Four. And I played in the trio with Ray and Jeff.”
Bruce Forman’s Gear
The trio that recorded Reunion!, from left to right: Bruce Forman and Kessel’s ES-350, drummer Jeff Hamilton, and bassist John Clayton.
Guitars
- 1946 Gibson ES-350 formerly belonging to and modified by Barney Kessel
Strings and Picks
- D’Addario Chromes flatwounds (.014–.018–.026w–.035–.045–.056)
- Dunlop Primetone 1.0 mm picks
Amps
- Gibson BR-3
- Henriksen Bud TEN
- Morgan JS12 Josh Smith Signature
But this tribute project would require a big favor from Phyllis Kessel, since Forman didn’t actually own his mentor’s guitar. “She said, ‘Boy, that’s great,’ but when she realized I had to take the guitar and play on it for a while, and probably get it set up, that was not cool. She wanted it totally in her possession.”
Eventually, Phyllis decided to sell the ES-350, and Forman suggested the auction house that handled the sale. “We both believed that it was extremely valuable. I didn’t want anything to do with it because I didn’t trust myself. Who knows how that could cloud my judgement in terms of getting the best thing for her,” he explains. But in 2018, the guitar sold for just a fraction of what either of them expected, purchased by “a guy from Oklahoma who loved Charlie Christian,” just like Kessel.
Forman and the buyer soon became email pals, sharing their affection for Kessel’s music. But between maintaining a regular gigging schedule and his teaching job at USC, Forman has a full plate, so he put the idea of the Poll Winners tribute to rest.
“We have to realize those records were Earth shattering.”
A Visit From a Ghost
Everything about this project changed in April 2021, when Forman swears he had a visitation from beyond:“I was playing at the Kuumbwa Jazz Center in Santa Cruz, and I’m driving up there and, I swear to God I’m not bullshitting, there was a moment when he [Kessel] was sitting there next to me. I couldn’t see him—this wasn’t a hallucination. I could just feel his presence. I could even smell his after-shave. He wore this kind of weird cologne shit. The whole drive up there, I’m thinking about Barney. I can’t shake it—didn’t even want to listen to music because I was too deep in all these memories. I get to the club, and I realize I played here with Barney about 35 years ago, but meanwhile I’ve played that club dozens and dozens of times, and I’d never once thought of Barney.
“I get inside of the club, and I still can’t shake Barney. He’s just there. So, I email the guy who had the guitar and said, ‘I’m having this heavy Barney Kessel flashback. I’m in this club we played years ago. Hope you’re getting along with the guitar. If you ever want to let it go, please let me get first crack.’ That’s all I said.
While Kessel’s ES-350 and Gibson BR-3 amplifier show plenty of signs of wear, they sound alive as ever on Reunion!
Photo by Patrick Tregenza
“Went up and played my set, came back, looked at my emails and I had gotten an email from him, and he said, ‘Bruce, it’s amazing you contacted me now. I just decided it’s probably best for me to sell the guitar. I don’t want to leave it for my wife or my kids. It’s too weird a thing to leave it to somebody else to have to deal with. The reason I bought it in the first place was to keep it from going into the hands of a collector who would take it out of circulation. So, I’d really love for someone like you who had a connection to Barney to have it. If you just give me what I paid for it, if you come and get it, and if you give me a guitar lesson, you could have it.’”
Two weeks later, Forman was headed to Colorado to pick up the guitar. When he returned home, Forman shot his own video with Barney’s guitar (which can be found in the Kickstarter page for the Reunion! project). As he goes over the details of the guitar, we get an up-close look at the finer details and see how it has changed over time. Kessel made extensive alterations to the instrument through the years, from replacing the fretboard and tuners, to painting the headstock black when he “went to war with Gibson.” The trapeze piece is rusty, as is the over-sized replacement jack plate that may be supporting the guitar’s significantly cracked sides. Hearing Forman play it, the ES-350 is alive as ever. It’s a bright and responsive instrument, and the always-smiling guitarist seems to approach every note and chord with pure joy. (There’s plenty of evidence on Forman’s Instagram, too, where he documents his “first chorus of the day.”)
“There was a moment when he [Kessel] was sitting there next to me. I couldn’t see him—this wasn’t a hallucination. I could just feel his presence.”]
The Reunion! Sessions
By the summer, Forman, John Clayton, and Jeff Hamilton headed into guitarist Josh Smith’s Flat V Studio with their respective mentor’s instruments. Forman even brought Kessel’s Gibson BR-3 amp, which a friend gave him as a gift (though he also used a Henriksen Bud TENand a Morgan JS12). They wanted to pay tribute to, but not re-hash, the Poll Winners albums. “It’s a tribute but it’s not a tribute in the way most people do tributes. It’s really more like kids getting together playing their parents’ instruments,” says Forman.
Rather than taking the most obvious route and covering tunes on the original albums, the trio looked for a more personal way to evoke their mentors. Throughout his arrangement of Kurt Weill’s “This Is New,” Forman uses the intro figure that Kessel played on “Cry Me a River,” which he recorded with vocalist Julie London, as a recurring motif. Forman says that’s “probably the most famous thing he did.” His “Barney’s Tune” is an original based upon the jazz standard “Bernie’s Tune,” where he uses sliding harmonized thirds to recall Kessel’s style. The sole entry on Reunion! that also appeared on The Poll Winners is the jazz standard “On Green Dolphin Street.” But even on that track, Forman takes a different approach, injecting it with the feel of the once-omnipresent guitar showpiece “Malagueña.”
Kessel’s guitar’s case still wears this hand-written luggage tag from its former owner.
Photo by Patrick Tregenza
“Barney was really funny. He had a great sense of humor, and so did Ray and Shelley,” Forman says, and laughs. “They could have been stand-up comedians. And a lot of times in the music, they do silly, funny-ass shit [like that] that was just really cool.”
While the loose and playful feeling of the Poll Winners is always part of the music on Reunion!, Forman’s personality and musical voice plays the biggest role. He’s a fiery player whose deft, energetic chording propels the songs with swinging style, while his zesty melodic lines fly off the fretboard. Much like Kessel, he plays from the gut with a palpable sense of enthusiastic glee. And while Kessel is, obviously, a huge influence, Forman’s playing also reveals a love for his favorites, Charlie Parker and Count Basie. At this point in his long career, though, he mostly just sounds like himself. Hearing him play on Kessel’s gear, the tone of the ES-350 incorporates so well with his style and it just seems to make sense.
”As Forman tells it, that’s what Barney knew all those years ago: “On one of the first days of one of the first tours [with Kessel], he said, ‘Do you ever wonder why I picked you?’ And I said ‘yeah.’ I could name four or five guys I would have expected him to pick. He said, ‘I picked you because you play the way I play, but you don’t sound like me.’ Which is kind of cryptic, you know?” he laughs. “But I got it—he’s right.”
YouTube It!
Hear Barney Kessel’s guitar in Bruce Forman’s hands, live in the studio during the making of Reunion! The trio expertly navigates the tune “Feel the Barn” with dynamic, swinging interplay, led by Forman’s bright, clear tone and melody-first approach to improvisation and harmony.
Stevie Van Zandt with “Number One,” the ’80s reissue Stratocaster—with custom paisley pickguard from luthier Dave Petillo—that he’s been playing for the last quarter century or so.
There’s a life-size cameo of a go-go dancer in banana yellow; she’s frozen in mid hip shimmy. One wall displays rock posters and B-movie key art, anchored by a 3D rendering of Cream’s Disraeli Gearsalbum cover that swishes and undulates as you walk past it. Van Zandt’s shelves are stuffed with countless DVDs, from Louis Prima to the J. Geils Band performing on the German TV concert seriesRockpalast. There are three copies ofIggy and the Stooges: Live in Detroit. Videos of the great ’60s-music TV showcases, from Hullabaloo to Dean Martin’s The Hollywood Palace, sit here. Hundreds of books about rock ’n’ roll, from Greil Marcus’s entire output to Nicholas Schaffner’s seminal tome, The Beatles Forever, form a library in the next room.
But I haven’t seen this yet because the elevator is dead, and I am in it. Our trap is tiny, about 5' by 5'. A dolly filled with television production equipment is beside me. There’s a production assistant whom I’ve never met until this morning and another person who’s brand new to me, too, Geoff Sanoff. It turns out that he’s Van Zandt’s engineer—the guy who runs this studio. And as I’ll discover shortly, he’s also one of the several sentinels who watch over Stevie Van Zandt’s guitars.
There’s nothing to do now but wait for the NYFD, so Sanoff and I get acquainted. We discover we’re both from D.C. and know some of the same people in Washington’s music scene. We talk about gear. We talk about this television project. I’m here today assisting an old pal, director Erik Nelson, best known for producing Werner Herzog’s most popular documentaries, like Grizzly Man and Cave of Forgotten Dreams. Van Zandt has agreed to participate in a television pilot about the British Invasion. After about half an hour, the elevator doors suddenly slide open, and we’re rescued, standing face-to-face with three New York City firefighters.
As our camera team sets up the gear, Sanoff beckons me to a closet off the studio’s control room. I get the sense I am about to get a consolation prize for standing trapped in an elevator for the last 30 minutes. He pulls a guitar case off the shelf—it’s stenciled in paint with the words “Little Steven” on its top—snaps open the latches, and instantly I am face to face with Van Zandt’s well-worn 1957 Stratocaster. Sanoff hands it to me, and I’m suddenly holding what may as well be the thunderbolt of Zeus for an E Street Band fan. My jaw drops when he lets me plug it in so he can get some levels on his board, and the clean, snappy quack of the nearly 70-year-old pickups fills the studio. For decades, Springsteen nuts have enjoyed a legendary 1978 filmed performance of “Rosalita” from Phoenix, Arizona, that now lives on YouTube. This is the Stratocaster Van Zandt had slung over his shoulder that night. It’s the same guitar he wields in the famous No Nukes concert film shot at Madison Square Garden a year later, in 1979. My mind races. The British Invasion is all well and essential. But now I’m thinking about Van Zandt’s relationship with his guitars.
Stevie Van Zandt's Gear
Van Zandt’s guitar concierge Andy Babiuk helped him plunge deeper down the Rickenbacker rabbit hole. Currently, Van Zandt has six Rickenbackers backstage: two 6-strings and four 12-strings.
Guitars
- 1957 Fender Stratocaster (studio only)
- ’80s Fender ’57 Stratocaster reissue “Number One”
- Gretsch Tennessean
- 1955 Gibson Les Paul Custom “Black Beauty” (studio only)
- Rickenbacker Fab Gear 2024 Limited Edition ’60s Style 360 Model (candy apple green)
- Rickenbacker Fab Gear 2023 Limited Edition ’60s Style 360 Model (snowglo)
- Rickenbacker 2018 Limited Edition ’60s Style 360 Fab Gear (jetglo)
- Two Rickenbacker 1993Plus 12-strings (candy apple purple and SVZ blue)
- Rickenbacker 360/12C63 12-string (fireglo)
- Vox Teardrop (owned by Andy Babiuk)
Amps
- Two Vox AC30s
- Two Vox 2x12 cabinets
Effects
- Boss Space Echo
- Boss Tremolo
- Boss Rotary Ensemble
- Durham Electronics Sex Drive
- Durham Electronics Mucho Busto
- Durham Electronics Zia Drive
- Electro-Harmonix Satisfaction
- Ibanez Tube Screamer
- Voodoo Labs Ground Control Pro switcher
Strings and Picks
- D’Addario (.095–.44)
- D’Andrea Heavy
Van Zandt has reached a stage of reflection in his career. Besides the Grammy-nominated HBO film, Stevie Van Zandt: Disciple, which came out in 2024, he recently wrote and published his autobiography, Unrequited Infatuations (2021), a rollicking read in which he pulls no punches and makes clear he still strives to do meaningful things in music and life.
His laurels would weigh him down if they were actually wrapped around his neck. In the E Street Band, Van Zandt has participated in arguably the most incredible live group in rock ’n’ roll history. And don’t forget Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes or Little Steven and the Disciples of Soul. He created both the Underground Garage and Outlaw Country radio channels on Sirius/XM. He started a music curriculum program called TeachRock that provides no-cost resources and other programs to schools across the country. Then there’s the politics. Via his 1985 record, Sun City, Van Zandt is credited with blasting many of the load-bearing bricks that brought the walls of South African apartheid tumbling into dust. He also acted in arguably the greatest television drama in American history, with his turn as Silvio Dante in The Sopranos.
Puzzlingly, Van Zandt’s autobiography lacks any detail on his relationship with the electric guitar. And Sanoff warns me that Van Zandt is “not a gearhead.” Instead he has an organization in place to keep his guitar life spinning like plates on the end of pointed sticks. Besides Sanoff, there are three others: Ben Newberry has been Van Zandt’s guitar tech since the beginning of 1982. Andy Babiuk, owner of Rochester, New York, guitar shop Fab Gear and author of essential collector reference books Beatles Gear and Rolling Stones Gear (the latter co-authored by Greg Prevost) functions as Van Zandt’s guitar concierge. Lastly, luthier Dave Petillo, based in Asbury Park, New Jersey, oversees all the maintenance and customization on Van Zandt’s axes.
“I took one lesson, and they start to teach you the notes. I don’t care about the notes.” —Stevie Van Zandt
I crawl onto Zoom with Van Zandt for a marathon session and come away from our 90 minutes with the sense that he is a man of dichotomies. Sure, he’s a guitar slinger, but he considers his biggest strengths to be as an arranger, producer, and songwriter. “I don’t feel that being a guitar player is my identity,” he tells me. “For 40 years, ever since I made my first solo record, I just have not felt that I express myself as a guitar player. I still enjoy it when I do it; I’m not ambivalent. When I play a solo, I am in all the way, and I play a solo like I would like to hear if I were in the audience. But the guitar part is really part of the song’s arrangement. And a great solo is a composed solo. Great solos are ones you can sing, like Jimi Hendrix’s solo in ‘All Along the Watchtower.’”
In his autobiography, Van Zandt mentions that his first guitar was an acoustic belonging to his grandfather. “I took one lesson, and they start to teach you the notes. I don’t care about the notes,” Van Zandt tells me. “The teacher said I had natural ability. I’m thinking, if I got natural ability, then what the fuck do I need you for? So I never went back. After that, I got my first electric, an Epiphone. It was about slowing down the records to figure out with my ear what they were doing. It was seeing live bands and standing in front of that guitar player and watching what they were doing. It was praying when a band went on TV that the cameraman would occasionally go to the right place and show what the guitar player was doing instead of putting the camera on the lead singer all the time. And I’m sure it was the same for everybody. There was no concept of rock ’n’ roll lessons. School of Rock wouldn’t exist for another 30 years. So, you had to go to school yourself.”
By the end of the 1960s, Van Zandt tells me he had made a conscious decision about what kind of player he wanted to be. “I realized that I really wasn’t that interested in becoming a virtuoso guitar player, per se. I was more interested in making sure I could play the guitar solo that would complement the song. I got more into the songs than the nature of musicianship.”
After the Beatles and the Stones broke the British Invasion wide open, bands like Cream and the Yardbirds most influenced him. “George Harrison would have that perfect 22-second guitar solo,” Van Zandt remembers. “Keith Richards. Dave Davies. Then, the harder stuff started coming. Jeff Beck in the Yardbirds. Eric Clapton with things like ‘White Room.’ But the songs stayed in a pop configuration, three minutes each or so. You’d have this cool guitar-based song with a 15-second, really amazing Jeff Beck solo in it. That’s what I liked. Later, the jam bands came, but I was not into that. My attention deficit disorder was not working for the longer solos,” he jokes. Watch a YouTube video of any recent E Street Band performance where Van Zandt solos, and the punch and impact of his approach and attack are apparent. At Nationals Park in Washington, D.C., last year, his solo on “Rosalita” was 13 powerful seconds.
Van Zandt and Bruce Springsteen’s relationship goes back to their earliest days on the Jersey shore. “Everybody had a different guitar; your guitar was your identity,” recalls Van Zandt. “At some point, a couple of years later, I remember Bruce calling me and asking me for my permission to switch to Telecaster. At that point, I was ready to switch to Stratocaster.”
Photo by Pamela Springsteen
Van Zandt left his Epiphone behind for his first Fender. “I started to notice that the guitar superstars at the time were playing Telecasters. Mike Bloomfield. Jeff Beck. Even Eric Clapton played one for a while,” he tells me. “I went down to Jack’s Music Shop in Red Bank, New Jersey, because he had the first Telecaster in our area and couldn’t sell it; it was just sitting there. I bought it for 90 bucks.”
In those days, and around those parts, players only had one guitar. Van Zandt recalls, “Everybody had a different guitar; your guitar was your identity. At some point, a couple of years later, I remember Bruce calling me and asking me for my permission to switch to Telecaster. At that point, I was ready to switch to Stratocaster, because Jimi Hendrix had come in and Jeff Beck had switched to a Strat. They all kind of went from Telecaster to Les Pauls. And then some of them went on to the Stratocaster. For me, the Les Paul was just too out of reach. It was too expensive, and it was just too heavy. So I said, I’m going to switch to a Stratocaster. It felt a little bit more versatile.”
Van Zandt still employs Stratocasters, and besides the 1957 I strummed, he was seen with several throughout the ’80s and ’90s. But for the last 20 or 25 years, Van Zandt has mainly wielded a black Fender ’57 Strat reissue from the ’80s with a maple fretboard and a gray pearloid pickguard. He still uses that Strat—dubbed “Number One”—but the pickguard has been switched to one sporting a purple paisley pattern that was custom-made by Dave Petillo.
Petillo comes from New Jersey luthier royalty and followed in the footsteps of his late father, Phil Petillo. At a young age, the elder Petillo became an apprentice to legendary New York builder John D’Angelico. Later, he sold Bruce Springsteen the iconic Fender Esquire that’s seen on the Born to Run album cover and maintained and modified that guitar and all of Bruce’s other axes until he passed away in 2010. Phil worked out of a studio in the basement of their home, not far from Asbury Park. Artists dropped in, and Petillo has childhood memories of playing pick-up basketball games in his backyard with members of the E Street Band. (He also recalls showing his Lincoln Logs to Johnny Cash and once mistaking Jerry Garcia for Santa Claus.)
“I was more interested in making sure I could play the guitar solo that would complement the song. I got more into the songs than the nature of musicianship.” —Stevie Van Zandt
“I’ve known Stevie Van Zandt my whole life,” says Petillo. “My dad used to work on his 1957 Strat. That guitar today has updated tuners, a bone nut, new string trees, and a refret that was done by Dad long ago. I think one volume pot may have been changed. But it still has the original pickups.” Petillo is responsible for a lot of the aesthetic flair seen on Van Zandt’s instruments. He continues, “Stevie is so much fun to work with. I love incorporating colors into things, and Stevie gets that. When you talk to a traditional Telecaster or Strat player, and you say, ‘I want to do a tulip paisley pickguard in neon blue-green,’ they’re like, ‘Holy cow, that’s too much!’ But for Stevie, it’s just natural. So I always text him with pickguard designs, asking him, ‘Which one do you like?’ And he calls me a wild man; he says, ‘I don’t have that many Strats to put them on!’ But I’ll go to Ben Newberry and say, ‘Ben, I made these pickguards; let’s get them on the guitar. And I’ll go backstage, and we’ll put them on. I just love that relationship; Stevie is down for it.”
Petillo takes care of the electronics on Van Zandt’s guitars. Almost all of the Strats are modified with an internal Alembic Stratoblaster preamp circuit, which Van Zandt can physically toggle on and off using a switch housed just above the input jack. Van Zandt tells me, “That came because I got annoyed with the whole pedal thing. I’m a performer onstage, and I’m integrated with the audience and I like the freedom to move. And if I’m across the stage and all of a sudden Bruce nods to me to take a solo, or there’s a bit in the song that requires a little bit of distortion, it’s just easier to have that; sometimes, I’ll need that extra little boost for a part I’m throwing in, and it’s convenient.”
In recent times, Van Zandt has branched out from the Stratocaster, which has a lot to do with Andy Babiuk's influence. The two met 20 years ago, and Babiuk’s band, the Chesterfield Kings, is on Van Zandt’s Wicked Cool Records. “He’d call me up and ask me things like, ‘What’s Brian Jones using on this song?’” explains Babiuk. “When I’d ask him why, he’d tell me, ‘Because I want to have that guitar.’ It’s a common thing for me to get calls and texts from him like that. And there’s something many people overlook that Stevie doesn’t advertise: He’s a ripping guitar player. People think of him as playing chords and singing backup for Bruce, but the guy rips. And not just on guitar, on multiple instruments.”
Van Zandt tells me he wanted to bring more 12-string to the E Street Band this tour, “just to kind of differentiate the tone.” He explains, “Nils is doing his thing, and Bruce is doing his thing, and I wanted to do more 12-string.” He laughs, “I went full Paul Kantner!” Babiuk helped Van Zandt plunge deeper down the Rickenbacker rabbit hole. Currently, Van Zandt has six Rickenbackers backstage: two 6-strings and four 12-strings. Each 12-string has a modified nut made by Petillo from ancient woolly mammoth tusk, and the D, A, and low E strings are inverted with their octave.
Van Zandt explains this to me: “I find that the strings ring better when the high ones are on top. I’m not sure if that’s how Roger McGuinn did it, but it works for me. I’m also playing a wider neck.”
Babiuk tells me about a unique Rick in Van Zandt’s rack of axes: “I know the guys at Rickenbacker well, and they did a run of 30 basses in candy apple purple for my shop. I showed one to Stevie, and purple is his color; he loves it. He asked me to get him a 12-string in the same color, and I told him, ‘They don’t do one-offs; they don’t have a custom shop,’ but it’s hard to say no to the guy! So I called Rickenbacker and talked them into it. I explained, ‘He’ll play it a lot on this upcoming tour.’ They made him a beautiful one with his OM logo.”
The purple one-off is a 1993Plus model and sports a 1 3/4" wide neck—1/8" wider than a normal Rickenbacker. Van Zandt loved it so much that he had Babiuk wrestle with Rickenbacker again to build another one in baby blue. Petillo has since outfitted them with paisley-festooned custom pickguards. When guitar tech Newberry shows me these unique axes backstage, I can see the input jack on the purple guitar is labeled with serial number 01001.
“Some of my drive is based on gratitude,” says Van Zandt, “feeling like we are the luckiest guys in the luckiest generation ever.”
Photo by Rob DeMartin
Van Zandt also currently plays a white Vox Teardrop. That guitar is a prototype owned by Babiuk. “Stevie wanted a Teardrop,” Babiuk tells me, “but I explained that the vintage ones are hit and miss—the ones made in the U.K. were often better than the ones manufactured in Italy. Korg now owns Vox, and I have a new Teardrop prototype from them in my personal collection. When I showed it to him, he loved it and asked me to get him one. I had to tell him, ‘I can’t; it’s a prototype, there’s only one,’ and he asked me to sell him mine,” he chuckles. “I told him, ‘It’s my fucking personal guitar, it’s not for sale!’ So I ended up lending it to him for this tour, and I told him, ‘Remember, this is my guitar; don’t get too happy with it, okay?’
“He asked me why that particular guitar sounds and feels so good. Besides being a prototype built by only one guy, the single-coil pickups’ output is abnormally hot, and the neck feels like a nice ’60s Fender neck. Stevie’s obviously a dear friend of mine, and he can hold onto it for as long as he wants. I’m glad it’s getting played. It was just hanging in my office.”
Van Zandt tells me how Babiuk’s Vox Teardrop sums up everything he wants from his tone, and says, “It’s got a wonderfully clean, powerful sound. Like Brian Jones got on ‘The Last Time.’ That’s my whole thing; that’s the trick—trying to get the power without too much distortion. Bruce and Nils get plenty of distortion; I am trying to be the clean rhythm guitar all the time.”
If Van Zandt has a consigliere like Tony Soprano had Silvio Dante, that’s Newberry. Newberry has tech’d nearly every gig with Van Zandt since 1982. “Bruce shows move fast,” he tells me. “So when there’s a guitar change for Stevie, and there are many of them, I’m at the top of the stairs, and we switch quickly. There’s maybe one or two seconds, and if he needs to tell me something, I hear it. He’s Bruce’s musical director, so he may say something like, ‘Remind me tomorrow to go over the background vocals on “Ghosts,”’ or something like that. And I take notes during the show.”
“Everybody had a different guitar; your guitar was your identity. At some point, a couple of years later, I remember Bruce calling me and asking me for my permission to switch to a Telecaster.” —Stevie Van Zandt
When I ask Newberry how he defines Van Zandt’s relationship to the guitar, he doesn’t hesitate, snapping back, “It’s all in his head. His playing is encyclopedic, whether it’s Bruce or anything else. He may show up at soundcheck and start playing the Byrds, but it’s not ‘Tambourine Man,’ it’s something obscure like ‘Bells of Rhymney.’ People may not get it, but I’ve known him long enough to know what’s happening. He’s got everything already under his fingers. Everything.”
As such, Van Zandt says he never practices. “The only time I touch a guitar between tours is if I’m writing something or maybe arranging backing vocal harmonies on a production,” he tells me.
Before we say goodbye, I tell Van Zandt about my time stuck in his elevator, and his broad grin signals that I may not be the only one to have suffered that particular purgatory. When I ask him about the 1957 Stratocaster I got to play upon my release, he recalls: “Bruce Springsteen gave me that guitar. I’ve only ever had one guitar stolen in my life, and it was in the very early days of my joining the E Street Band. I only joined temporarily for what I thought would be about seven gigs, and in those two weeks or so, my Stratocaster was stolen. It was a 1957 or 1958. Bruce felt bad about that and replaced that lost guitar with this one. So I’ve had it a long, long time. Once that first one was stolen, I decided I would resist having a personal relationship with any one guitar. But that one being a gift from Bruce makes it special. I will never take it back on the road.”
After 50 years of rock ’n’ roll, if there is one word to sum up Stevie Van Zandt, it may be “restless”—an adjective you sense from reading his autobiography. He gets serious and tells me, “I’m always trying to catch up. The beginning of accomplishing something came quite late to me. I feel like I haven’t done nearly enough. What are we on this planet trying to do?” he asks rhetorically. “We’re trying to realize our potential and maybe leave this place one percent better for the next guy. And some of my drive is based on gratitude, feeling like we are the luckiest guys in the luckiest generation ever. That’s what I’m doing: I want to give something back. I feel an obligation.”
YouTube It
“Rosalita” is a perennial E Street Band showstopper. Here’s a close-up video from Philadelphia’s Citizens Bank Park last summer. Van Zandt’s brief but commanding guitar spotlight shines just past the 4:30 mark.
Tinkering with theSDE-3 Dual Digital Delay suggested a similar, possibly enduring appeal. As an evolution of the Roland SDE-3000rack unit from the 1980s, it’s a texture machine, bubbling with subtle-to-odd triangle LFO modulations and enhanced dual-delay patterns that make tone mazes from dopey-simple melodies. And with the capacity to use it with two amps in stereo or in panning capacity, it can be much more dimensional. But while the SDE-3 will become indispensable to some for its most complex echo textures, its basic voice possesses warmth that lends personality in pedestrian applications too.
Tapping Into the Source
Some interest in the original SDE-3000 is in its association with Eddie Van Halen, who ran two of them in a wet-dry-wet configuration, using different delay rates and modulation to thicken and lend dimension to solos. But while EVH’s de facto endorsement prompted reissues of the effect as far back as the ’90s, part of the appeal was down to the 3000’s intrinsic elegance and simplicity.
In fact, the original rack unit’s features don’t differ much from what you would find on modern, inexpensive stompbox echoes. But the SDE-3000’s simplicity and reliable predictability made it conducive to fast workflow in the studio. Critically, it also avoided the lo-fi and sterility shortcomings that plagued some lesser rivals—an attribute designer Yoshi Ikegami chalks up to analog components elsewhere in the circuit and a fortuitous clock imprecision that lends organic essence to the repeats.
Evolved Echo Animal
Though the SDE-3 traces a line back to the SDE-3000 in sound and function, it is a very evolved riff on a theme. I don’t have an original SDE-3000 on hand for comparison, but it’s easy to hear how the SDE-3 bridges a gap between analog haze and more clinical, surgical digital sounds in the way that made the original famous. Thanks to the hi-cut control, the SDE-3’s voice can be shaped to enhance the angular aspect of the echoes, or blunt sharp edges. There’s also a lot of leeway to toy with varied EQ settings without sacrificing the ample definition in the repeats. That also means you can take advantage of the polyrhythmic effects that are arguably its greatest asset.
“There’s a lot of leeway to toy with varied EQ settings without sacrificing the ample definition in the repeats.”
The SDE-3’s offset control, which generates these polyrhythmic echoes, is its heart. The most practical and familiar echos, like quarter, eighth, and dotted-eighth patterns, are easy to access in the second half of the offset knobs range. In the first half of the knob’s throw, however, the offset delays often clang about at less-regular intervals, producing complex polyrhythms that are also cool multipliers of the modulation and EQ effects. For example, when emphasizing top end in repeats, using aggressive effects mixes and pitch-wobble modulation generates eerie ghost notes that swim through and around patterns, adding rhythmic interest and texture without derailing the drive behind a groove. Even at modest settings, these are great alternatives to more staid, regular subdivision patterns. Many of the coolest sounds tend toward the foggy reverb spectrum. Removing high end, piling on feedback, and adding the woozy, drunken drift from modulation creates fascinating backdrops for slow, sparse chord melodies. Faster modulations throb and swirl like old BBC Radiophonic Workshop sci-fi sound designs.
By themselves, the modulations have their own broad appeal. Chorus tones are rarely the archetypal Roland Jazz Chorus or CE type—tending to be a bit darker and mistier. But they do a nice job suggesting that texture without lapsing into caricature. There are also really cool rotary-speaker-like textures and vibrato sounds that offer alternatives to go-to industry standards.
The Verdict
The SDE-3’s many available sounds and textures would be appealing at $219—even without the stereo and panning connectivity options, a useful hold function, and expression pedal control that opens up additional options. The panning capabilities, in particular, sparked all kinds of thoughts about studio applications. Mastering the SDE-3 takes just a little study—certain polyrhythms can be dramatically reshaped by the interactivity of other controls and you need to take care to achieve identical results twice. But this is a pedal that, by virtue of its relative simplicity and richness and breadth of sounds, exceeds the utility of some similarly priced rivals, all while opening up possibilities well outside the simple echo realm
