Since joining alt-rock duo Cairo Knife Fight in 2015, George Pajon Jr. has applied his meticulous gear-tinkering toward creating layered, complex guitar and bass parts for the duo.
George Pajon Jr. is pedal-obsessed. For him, time off means hiding out in his studio, working his way through every setting on every pedal he owns—and he owns a lot of pedals—logging each tone he thinks he may be able to use, and making careful notes in order to recall the sound later when needed. When he’s working in the studio or in a rehearsal, he scrolls through his files, pulls up options to share with his many A-list collaborators, and looks for the tone that often makes the difference between a good-sounding track and a hit. He does know the difference, by the way, since he has a regular gig as the touring guitarist with the Black Eyed Peas, and also plays on their albums.
That obsession is also a big part of his writing process with Cairo Knife Fight, his duo with New Zealand-based drummer, vocalist, keyboardist, and kindred-tonal-spirit Nick Gaffaney. “When Nick and I decided we were going to start writing, I started stockpiling sounds,” Pajon says. “I am lucky enough to own my own studio, so I hired an engineer to mic my whole rig and then literally nailed down those mics into the floor so they wouldn’t be touched.” As he experiments with pedals, he runs Pro Tools. “If I stumble on something I like, I scream in the mics, ‘This sounds like a chorus,’ or ‘This sounds like a bridge.’ I mark the session, put it into a notepad on my phone, write the number, and then describe what the sound says to me. There are 72 hours of that.”
Once he has ideas and the skeleton of a Cairo Knife Fight song, he goes back to the cave and starts programming, which takes about one week per tune. He also does everything—each nuance, layer, or quirk—with the understanding that he has to be able to duplicate it onstage, and that also informs the design of his ever-evolving and ever-growing rig.
Cairo Knife Fight has been around since 2004, with two full-length albums and a handful of singles to their name. Since Pajon joined in 2015, they’ve released “Churn,” a single which came out earlier this year. “The first songs we wrote, we will release in the coming years,” he says. “We have 22 finished songs.” On “Churn,” Pajon’s guitar burns with intermittent bursts of djent, thrashing rhythm parts, and incisive melodic lines, while decorated with impressively exact, pop-infused vocals by Gaffaney. His playing, at its most torqued, sounds like sonic flashcards quickly overturned in series—disparate tones tail one another, and yet each somehow seems to fit the tune at hand with surprising logic.
Pajon joined the Black Eyed Peas in 1998. It’s his Dick Dale-style riffing and tone sculpting you hear on the pop outfit’s hit, “Pump It.”
Photo by Sterling Hampton
With Cairo Knife Fight, Pajon approaches arranging like a classical composer. His songs do often have verses and choruses that repeat themselves, but he always makes some kind of variation—be that a tonal shift, an additional riff, a harmony, or taking something out—in order to challenge the listener and keep the song moving. “When you listen to ‘Churn’ from beginning to end, the parts never repeat themselves,” he says. “If you really listen to what the guitars are doing, there’s no cut-and-paste on that song. When I record the guitar parts, it’s a full take. When I double the parts, it’s a full take. I believe that when you listen to a song it should be a ride. The beginning should take you to a different place by the time you get to the end. There’s constant movement in the way I approach writing. That’s why I have all those tools.”
Given Pajon’s passion and dedication to those tools, it’s fortunate that he’s also close with amp legend and tonal wizard Dave Friedman. “I sit with Dave and brainstorm,” Pajon says. “I am really a tech nerd, so I create a PowerPoint spreadsheet with the pedals laid out and how I want the signal flow to be. Dave then tells me, ‘There’s no way we can do this, so we’re going to have to invent something to create what you’re trying to do.’”
Pajon’s rig—the one he uses with Cairo Knife Fight—is already in its 17th iteration, and that doesn’t include the refrigerator-sized unit he has that’s loaded with more than 60 pedals (Friedman wired that up, too). For his work with the Black Eyed Peas, he uses a Fractal Axe-Fx amp modeler and effects processor, which he never stops tinkering with. Pajon is the son of Cuban immigrants and came of age as a guitarist in late-’80s Los Angeles. He hung out on the Sunset Strip when hair metal was the rage, and made the shift in the early ’90s when hair abruptly became grunge. His first loves were Black Sabbath and Iron Maiden, but he discovered a broad range of artists and styles thanks to an open-minded uncle who turned him onto the great guitar-centric acts from the ’60s and ’70s, as well as artists like Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, and many others.
With Kiwi drummer Nick Gaffaney, Pajon writes guitar and bass parts that he can perform live, loop, and trigger. The duo doesn’t play to backing tracks—everything is done in the moment.
Photo by Michell Shiers
That deep listening exploration came in handy when he first met the Black Eyed Peas. He was with them in the studio for a one-off session, but that quickly morphed into what’s now a 25-years-and-counting relationship.
“I first joined the Black Eyed Peas in October 1998,” Pajon says. “Will [William James Adams, Jr., better known as will.i.am] asked me to come in and play guitar on a song. He was sampling a rock record, and I said ‘Why are you sampling that?’ He said, ‘It’s cool, why not?’ I said, ‘But you’re going to give away all the publishing to that other band. Let me come up with a part that’s similar to that.’ He said, ‘You can play stuff like this?’ I essentially mimicked that style, and he threw away the sample. Then he was like, ‘Do that again,’ and he would give me directions, ‘Change it here, change that chord there.’ That was our relationship.”
That versatility, as not just a player but a master of feels and tones, played a big part in creating “Pump It,” one of the band’s biggest hits. “We were in Japan on tour,” Pajon says. “Will bought a bunch of CDs and he was listening to Dick Dale’s ‘Misirlou.’ I was one of the first guys in the band who had a mobile recording studio—I had the first [Avid] MBOX. At the time I was signed to EMI as a writer, and I would write with different people all over the world. Will knew I had the studio with me, and we were on the bullet train, and he said, ‘George! I need to use the Pro Tools.’ I gave it to him. He samples that Dick Dale song and creates the song ‘Pump It.’
“Fast forward, and we’re finishing that record, Monkey Business, and during that time, it was common for the label to sync one of the songs with a movie or a TV show or a commercial as promotion for the new album. One of the songs they picked was ‘Pump It.’ They had to get clearance from Dick Dale, and he said ‘no.’ Will calls me and says, ‘We have to rerecord Dick Dale’s part.’ I was like, ‘You want me to recreate that?’ I told him, ‘Call Lon Cohen [of Lon Cohen Backline in L.A.], get the same guitar Dick played and the same amp from that time. I’ll do the research.’ We rented those amps and that guitar and I replayed the whole thing. It’s not a sample. It came out so good. Will’s ears are really fine-tuned and he got the EQ just right. But when you listen to that, it’s me. It’s not Dick Dale. We redid those parts for that commercial. In the end, what got released has all the parts that I created for the commercial.”
Cairo Knife Fight sounds nothing like the Black Eyed Peas. It’s heavy and layered, and sits somewhere between progressive metal and grunge. For Pajon, who tells tales of watching the Mars Volta every night with Fergie and members of Metallica while touring with them in Australia in the early 2000s, it’s the perfect sound.
George Pajon Jr's Gear
Pajon has developed a sophisticated system for testing and cataloging new tones and sounds. He spends his days off playing his pedals on every setting possible, then makes a note of how each setting could be used in the future.
Photo by Michell Shiers
Guitars
- Grosh Retro Classic with Evertune Bridge
- Grosh Retro Classic Vintage TKnaggs Severn X with Floyd Rose
- Fender Custom Shop Lush Closet Classic Telecaster with Evertune Bridge
- PRS SC245 with Evertune Bridge
Amps
- Friedman Dirty Shirley Mini
- Friedman BE-100 Deluxe
- Two Rock Custom Reverb Signature V3
- 3 Monkeys Orangutan
- Custom Morgan GP 70R
- Ronin Audio Research K7 GT4-P88
- Form Factor Audio Bi 1000Di
- Form Factor Audio 1B15L-8 cabinet
Pedalboard 1
- Pigtronix Infinity 3
- Devi Ever FX Ruiner
- HexeFX reVOLVER DX
- RJM Mastermind PBC/10 loop switcher
- HexeFX VarioFree The Tone PA-1QB
- Strymon TimeLine
- G-Lab PB-1 power supply
- Midiman Thru 1x4
Pedalboard 2
- Strymon BigSky
- Strymon Mobius
- Pigtronix Infinity 3
- Friedman Buxom Boost
- Friedman Buffer Bay
- Dirty Boy Pedals Fuzzy Boy
- Red Panda Tensor
- HexeFX reVOLVER IV
- EarthQuaker Devices Arpanoid
- ZVEX Fuzz Factory Vexter
- Beetronics Swarm
- Friedman Fuzz Fiend
- CostaLab Booster Plus
- Malekko Downer
- Fortin Mini Zuul
- EarthQuaker Devices Bit Commander
- RJM Music Mini Effect Gizmo X
- Strymon Zuma
- Strymon Ojai
Bass Amps Pedalboard
- JHS Little Black Amp Box
- Voodoo Lab Control Switcher
- Boss BB-1X Bass Driver
- Electro-Harmonix B9
- Disaster Area Designs DMC.micro
- Chase Bliss Blooper
- Darkglass Alpha Omega Ultra
- Source Audio C4 Synth
- RJM Music Mini Effect Gizmo X
- Strymon Zuma
Strings & Picks
- D’Addario, various gauges
- V-Picks Nexus
Since the band is just a duo, loopers are essential when playing live. “On my current pedalboard, I have 10 loopers, if you count all the pedals that actually have a looping function. But I am only looping with three of them,” he says.
Pajon also has a wall of amps, and a guitar tuned to A–D–G–C–E–A to cover the bass parts, which are run through a separate bass amp and pedalboard. “When I am writing a part, it has to be a layer that I can trigger later,” explains Pajon. “It can’t be a 10-bar layer or a long layer that plays through the whole song. It has to be something that only happens for a bar because I need to be able to trigger it live. We don’t do anything to playback. Everything is done live. When we record, I do minimal overdubs to create more of a sonic landscape, but when I do those overdubs I am very conscious that I have to recreate that sound live, whether it’s putting it in a looper or me actually playing it.”
Pajon’s attention to detail, dedication to finding the correct sound, and innate compositional sense—regardless of the genre or project he’s working on—help explain his longevity in the industry and his ongoing working relationships with a variety of artists. His Grammy wins and other awards testify to those qualities.
“I am not a side guy with the band,” he says about his longtime association with the Black Eyed Peas. “Those are my parts. The reason I’ve been in the band so long is I’ve been playing my parts this whole time, that I wrote, that I played on those records. I was in the studio with them creating this music. And that all started from my knowledge, from my uncle turning me on to a whole new flavor of styles.”The Violence of Action Live at Kingsize Soundlabs
At this live studio session with Cairo Knife Fight, watch Pajon’s right foot as he almost constantly loops and triggers parts.
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.
Across Frank Zappa’s monumental body of work, he injected rock-based music with compositional techniques straight out of the modern classical handbook, as well as groundbreaking studio trickery and a teenager’s wit. To match his untamable creativity, he famously demanded an unmatched level of musical dedication from his players, and his own guitar playing balanced that discipline with off-the-rails experimentation.
When considering Zappa’s legacy as a guitarist, we can’t separate it from his work as a composer, songwriter, producer, and all-around big personality. As a listener, you can love Zappa’s chamber music and simultaneously not be able to handle his lyrics; you can adore his guitar playing but prefer he keep his opinions to himself. Our list of favorite Zappa guitar-centric recordings covers a lot of musical ground but keeps it all about his playing.
Is Frank Zappa to blame for the sound of jam bands? When was Zappa’s best decade? And we’re looking at the connection between Zappa and Phish (who one of us calls “Zappa lite”). In a bonus segment, we’re playing “Did They Get It Right?” and examining the Grammys’ former category for Best Rock Instrumental Performance.
This episode is sponsored by Dunlop.
Learn more: https://www.jimdunlop.com/products/electronics/cry-baby/.
The FullerTone SC '52 and DC '62 represent the fusion of Eastman’s old-world craftsmanship and modular versatility, featuring their FullerTone two-bolt, long-tenon neck design first pioneered in the highly acclaimed D'Ambrosio Series. This innovative neck-to-body construction delivers more tone, sustain, and stability.
Through collaboration with renowned pickup builders ToneRider, both models deliver pure, pristine tone while maintaining exceptional warmth and projection. The SC '52 single-cutaway and DC '62 double-cutaway models draw inspiration from California's natural beauty, coming in three distinctive colors—Moss Black, Desert Sand, and Ice Blue Metallic—each complemented by industrial anodized aluminum pickguards and Eatman’s signature Truetone Satin Gloss finish, delivering a gust of modern refinement and graceful mojo.
Key features of the Eastman FullerTone Series:
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