Grace Bowers has quickly won a reputation for high-energy guitar heroics.
Grace Bowers began playing the guitar at age 9, after she stumbled across the music video for Guns N’ Roses’ “Welcome to the Jungle” on YouTube and was immediately inspired by the top-hat-sporting, Les Paul-wielding Slash. Then, at 13, she heard B.B. King on her mom’s car radio, and suddenly knew that playing guitar was what she wanted to do with the rest of her life. But within that discovery lurked a deep sense of isolation.
While she appreciates the sentiment, Bowers doesn’t love being called a guitar prodigy, saying it dismisses the eight years she’s put into studying the instrument.
Photo by Cedric Jones
“I was living in California at the time, in a small town outside of San Francisco,” she reflects. “And there’s absolutely no live music there, whatsoever. I didn’t even know any people my age who played an instrument. So, I pretty much had no hope. And I would always dream that I’d be playing on a stage, or just anywhere, honestly. It always felt super unrealistic and like, ‘Oh, that would never happen.’”
When the pandemic hit, the now 18-year-old Bowers was finishing the seventh grade, and the abrupt separation from her peers didn’t exactly help to improve her sense of belonging. Pretty soon, however, things took a major, positive turn: “I started posting videos online, and it got some momentum,” she shares. Gibson took notice, and offered her an endorsement when she was just 14. Then,“We moved to Nashville, and I was playing onstage almost every night.”
The sudden wealth of opportunity that came with the move changed everything. “It was the biggest motivation ever,” she continues. “Made me want to do it more than I ever have [laughs].”
Grace Bower's Gear
One of Bowers’ main guitars is this 1961 Gibson SG Special. She also plays a Murphy Lab version of the model.
Effects
- Analog Man King of Tone
- Wah
- Boost
- Gain
Strings & Picks
- Ernie Ball .010s
- Dunlop 2.0 mm
By now, Bowers’ résumé has gathered more than just moss. Earlier this year, she was recruited by Dolly Parton to perform on Dolly Parton’s Pet Gala; she’s played with Devon Allman, Tyler Childers, Christone “Kingfish” Ingram, and Susan Tedeschi; and in August, shared a bill with her first guitar hero, Slash. And, on the tails of all this success, she’s just released her debut album, Wine on Venus.
Produced by John Osborne of the Brothers Osborne, the album is a collection of eight original tracks, written by Bowers in collaboration with her band the Hodge Podge, and one cover—Sly & the Family Stone’s “Dance to the Music.” Although she has been playing for nine years, the grasp Bowers has on her instrument at 18 is rare. She knows just what notes to play and when to play them, saying very much with very little. She also wields a tone that’s just fuzzy enough, just singing enough, and just wailing enough—when she feels like it. Wine on Venus is the perfect showcase of her wisdom on guitar, antecedent to her being even a quarter century of age. It was recorded live in the studio over the span of one week, and Bowers knew going in just which shots she was going to call.
The eight original songs on Wine on Venus were written by Bowers in collaboration with Esther Okai-Tetteh and the rest of her band, the Hodge Podge.
She shares that she’s highly averse to recording in an isolated booth, unable to see the rest of the band—something she’s done a lot as a session guitarist. “Before we went into the studio, I told John, if I’m wearing headphones, it’s over,” she says. “And when we’re playing live, eye contact is one of the most important things. So, the band was live in the room, and then I was outside looking through a window in the control room with John. We put my amp upstairs on this balcony—it’s like a house, the studio—and turned it to 10, and for the entire record, my guitar was recorded in the control room. It was very loud; I’ll tell you that.”
Carving out your own voice as an individual artist in improv-based genres can be a significant challenge, and Bowers kept that in mind. “I’d say [that difficulty comes from] oversaturation. There’s a lot of jam bands out there right now. And don’t get me wrong; I love that kind of music, but what a lot of them lack is songs. When we went into the studio, I wanted to make sure that we wrote songs and didn’t just jam. I was very intentional in the writing process with Esther [Okai-Tetteh, vocalist]—to write catchy hooks and make sure that the lyrics meant something.”
Okai-Tetteh, whose first name is pronounced “Acey,” was Bowers’ primary writing partner in the development of the album’s material. “A lot of it [came together] sitting on my bedroom floor, writing songs every night. She wrote a lot of the [vocal] melody, which is where I struggle. Whereas I wrote all of the music, and then we both collaborated on the lyrics.” The other members of the Hodge Podge, who include keyboardist Joshua Blaylock, drummer Brandon Combs, bassist Eric Fortaleza, and co-guitarist Prince Parker, each fleshed out the arrangements with their own contributions.
Bowers picked up guitar at age 9 after discovering Slash, and fully fell in love with it at 13, after hearing B.B. King for the first time.
Photo by David McClister
Blues guitarists are typically working with the starkest templates (three or four chords) and the most concise vocabulary (the minor pentatonic scale), which, in many albeit honest, dedicated hands, often sound commonplace. But in the best hands, the blues can be some of the most powerful music out there. As Bowers puts it, “The blues comes from your heart, and you’re not just playing it, if that makes sense. I’m not the best at expressing emotions.... It comes out better for me on guitar.”
“As long as I have a very clean-toned amp and my pedalboard, I’m pretty much good to go.”
Bowers owns three different SGs, and her two main choices are her ’61 model with P-90s—“That’s like my baby”—and a newer model with humbuckers. Her pedalboard is a “basic setup,” and she doesn’t know all the names of her pedals off the top of her head. But in classic funk fashion, she does like to employ her wah while playing rhythm parts. As for amps for live shows, she doesn’t yet have her own tour bus, so she’s been relying on backlines. “As long as I have a very clean-toned amp and my pedalboard, I’m pretty much good to go,” she says. Her greatest inspirations on guitar, aside from Slash, are Leslie West, Eddie Hazel, Carlos Santana, and Marc Bolan. “I have a huge Electric Warrior poster above my bed right now,” she tells me.
As for the future, Bowers says she doesn’t really have long-term goals, exactly. “I don’t like to set expectations for myself, because I just want to see where things are going to bring me naturally. I love doing what feels right in the moment.
“Before, I was super shy and didn’t have a lot of confidence,” she continues. “Guitar really helped me build that up, and now I’m doing things that I would have been horrified to do three years ago. It’s definitely helped me come out of my shell.”
YouTube It
In this brief live clip, Grace Bowers breaks down the blues and builds it back up with incredible tone, feel, and taste.
Duane Denison of the Jesus Lizard, EGC Chessie in hands, coaxing some nasty tones from his Hiwatt.
The Jesus Lizard’s sixth album, Blue, served as the band’s final statement from the frontlines of noisy rock for the next 26 years. By the time of their dissolution in 1999, they’d earned a reputation for extreme performances chock full of hard-hitting, machine-like grooves delivered by bassist David Wm. Sims and, at their conclusion, drummer Mac McNeilly, at times aided and at other times punctured by the frontline of guitarist Duane Denison’s incisive, dissonant riffing, and presided over by the cantankerous howl of vocalist David Yow. In the years since, performative, thrilling bands such as Pissed Jeans, METZ, and Idles have built upon the Lizard’s musical foundation.
Denison has kept himself plenty busy over the last couple decades, forming the avant-rock supergroup Tomahawk—with vocalist Mike Patton, bassist Trevor Dunn (both from Mr. Bungle), and drummer John Stanier of Helmet—and alongside various other projects including Th’ Legendary Shack Shakers and Hank Williams III. The Jesus Lizard eventually reunited, but until now have only celebrated their catalog, never releasing new jams.
The Jesus Lizard, from left: bassist David Wm. Sims, singer David Yow, drummer Mac McNeilly, and guitarist Duane Denison.
Photo by Joshua Black Wilkins
Back in 2018, Denison, hanging in a hotel room with Yow, played a riff on his unplugged electric guitar that caught the singer’s ear. That song, called “West Side,” will remain unreleased for now, but Denison explains: “He said, ‘Wow, that’s really good. What is that?’ And I said, ‘It’s just some new thing. Why don’t we do an album?’” From those unassuming beginnings, the Jesus Lizard’s creative juices started flowing.
So, how does a band—especially one who so indelibly captured the ineffable energy of live rock performance—prepare to get a new record together 26 years after their last? Back in their earlier days, the members all lived together in a band house, collectively tending to the creative fire when inspiration struck. All these years later, they reside in different cities, so their process requires sending files back and forth and only meeting up for occasional demo sessions over the course of “three or four years.”
“When the time comes to get more in performance mode, I have a practice space. I go there by myself and crank it up. I turn that amp up and turn the metronome up and play loud.” —Duane Denison
the Jesus Lizard "Alexis Feels Sick"
Distance creates an obstacle to striking while the proverbial iron is hot, but Denison has a method to keep things energized: “Practice loud.” The guitarist professes the importance of practice, in general, and especially with a metronome. “We keep very detailed records of what the beats per minute of these songs are,” he explains. “To me, the way to do it is to run it to a Bluetooth speaker and crank it, and then crank your amp. I play a little at home, but when the time comes to get more in performance mode, I have a practice space. I go there by myself and crank it up. I turn that amp up and turn the metronome up and play loud.”
It’s a proven solution. On Rack—recorded at Patrick Carney’s Audio Eagle studio with producer Paul Allen—the band sound as vigorous as ever, proving they’ve not only remained in step with their younger selves, but they may have surpassed it with faders cranked. “Duane’s approach, both as a guitarist and writer, has an angular and menacing fingerprint that is his own unique style,” explains Allen. “The conviction in his playing that he is known for from his recordings in the ’80s and ’90s is still 100-percent intact and still driving full throttle today.”
“I try to be really, really precise,” he says. “I think we all do when it comes to the basic tracks, especially the rhythm parts. The band has always been this machine-like thing.” Together, they build a tension with Yow’s careening voice. “The vocals tend to be all over the place—in and out of tune, in and out of time,” he points out. “You’ve got this very free thing moving around in the foreground, and then you’ve got this very precise, detailed band playing behind it. That’s why it works.”
Before Rack, the Jesus Lizard hadn’t released a new record since 1998’s Blue.
Denison’s guitar also serves as the foreground foil to Yow’s unhinged raving, as on “Alexis Feels Sick,” where they form a demented harmony, or on the midnight creep of “What If,” where his vibrato-laden melodies bolster the singer’s unsettled, maniacal display. As precise as his riffs might be, his playing doesn’t stay strictly on the grid. On the slow, skulking “Armistice Day,” his percussive chording goes off the rails, giving way to a solo that slices that groove like a chef’s knife through warm butter as he reorganizes rock ’n’ roll histrionics into his own cut-up vocabulary.
“During recording sessions, his first solo takes are usually what we decide to keep,” explains Allen. “Listen to Duane’s guitar solos on Jack White’s ‘Morning, Noon, and Night,’ Tomahawk’s ‘Fatback,’ and ‘Grind’ off Rack. There’s a common ‘contained chaos’ thread among them that sounds like a harmonic Rubik’s cube that could only be solved by Duane.”
“Duane’s approach, both as a guitarist and writer, has an angular and menacing fingerprint that is his own unique style.” —Rack producer Paul Allen
To encapsulate just the right amount of intensity, “I don’t over practice everything,” the guitarist says. Instead, once he’s created a part, “I set it aside and don’t wear it out.” On Rack, it’s obvious not a single kilowatt of musical energy was lost in the rehearsal process.
Denison issues his noisy masterclass with assertive, overdriven tones supporting his dissonant voicings like barbed wire on top of an electric fence. The occasional application of slapback delay adds a threatening aura to his exacting riffage. His tones were just as carefully crafted as the parts he plays, and he relied mostly on his signature Electrical Guitar Company Chessie for the sessions, though a Fender Uptown Strat also appears, as well as a Taylor T5Z, which he chose for its “cleaner, hyper-articulated sound” on “Swan the Dog.” Though he’s been spotted at recent Jesus Lizard shows with a brand-new Powers Electric—he points out he played a demo model and says, “I just couldn’t let go of it,” so he ordered his own—that wasn’t until tracking was complete.
Duane Denison's Gear
Denison wields his Powers Electric at the Blue Room in Nashville last June.
Photo by Doug Coombe
Guitars
- Electrical Guitar Company Chessie
- Fender Uptown Strat
- Taylor T5Z
- Gibson ES-135
- Powers Electric
Amps
- Hiwatt Little J
- Hiwatt 2x12 cab with Fane F75 speakers
- Fender Super-Sonic combo
- Early ’60s Fender Bassman
- Marshall 1987X Plexi Reissue
- Victory Super Sheriff head
- Blackstar HT Stage 60—2 combos in stereo with Celestion Neo Creamback speakers and Mullard tubes
Effects
- Line 6 Helix
- Mantic Flex Pro
- TC Electronic G-Force
- Menatone Red Snapper
Strings and Picks
- Stringjoy Orbiters .0105 and .011 sets
- Dunlop celluloid white medium
- Sun Studios yellow picks
He ran through various amps—Marshalls, a Fender Bassman, two Fender Super-Sonic combos, and a Hiwatt Little J—at Audio Eagle. Live, if he’s not on backline gear, you’ll catch him mostly using 60-watt Blackstar HT Stage 60s loaded with Celestion Neo Creambacks. And while some boxes were stomped, he got most of his effects from a Line 6 Helix. “All of those sounds [in the Helix] are modeled on analog sounds, and you can tweak them endlessly,” he explains. “It’s just so practical and easy.”
The tools have only changed slightly since the band’s earlier days, when he favored Travis Beans and Hiwatts. Though he’s started to prefer higher gain sounds, Allen points out that “his guitar sound has always had teeth with a slightly bright sheen, and still does.”
“Honestly, I don’t think my tone has changed much over the past 30-something years,” Denison says. “I tend to favor a brighter, sharper sound with articulation. Someone sent me a video I had never seen of myself playing in the ’80s. I had a band called Cargo Cult in Austin, Texas. What struck me about it is it didn’t sound terribly different than what I sound like right now as far as the guitar sound and the approach. I don’t know what that tells you—I’m consistent?”
YouTube It
The Jesus Lizard take off at Nashville’s Blue Room this past June with “Hide & Seek” from Rack.
LR Baggs HiFi Duet High-fidelity Pickup and Microphone Mixing System
"When a guitar is “the one,” you know it. It feels right in your hands and delivers the sounds you hear in your head. It becomes your faithful companion, musical soulmate, and muse. It helps you express your artistic vision. We designed the Les Paul Studio to be precisely the type of guitar: the perfect musical companion, the guitar you won’t be able to put down. The one guitar you’ll be able to rely on every time and will find yourself reaching for again and again. For years, the Les Paul Studio has been the choice of countless guitarists who appreciate the combination of the essential Les Paul features–humbucking pickups, a glued-in, set neck, and a mahogany body with a maple cap–at an accessible price and without some of the flashier and more costly cosmetic features of higher-end Les Paul models."
Now, the Les Paul Studio has been reimagined. It features an Ultra-Modern weight-relieved mahogany body, making it lighter and more comfortable to play, no matter how long the gig or jam session runs. The carved, plain maple cap adds brightness and definition to the overall tone and combines perfectly with the warmth and midrange punch from the mahogany body for that legendary Les Paul sound that has been featured on countless hit recordings and on concert stages worldwide. The glued-in mahogany neck provides rock-solid coupling between the neck and body for increased resonance and sustain. The neck features a traditional heel and a fast-playing SlimTaper profile, and it is capped with an abound rosewood fretboard that is equipped with acrylic trapezoid inlays and 22 medium jumbo frets. The 12” fretboard radius makes both rhythm chording and lead string bending equally effortless, andyou’re going to love how this instrument feels in your hands. The Vintage Deluxe tuners with Keystone buttons add to the guitar’s classic visual appeal, and together with the fully adjustable aluminum Nashville Tune-O-Matic bridge, lightweight aluminum Stop Bar tailpiece, andGraph Tech® nut, help to keep the tuning stability nice and solid so you can spend more time playing and less time tuning. The Gibson Les Paul Studio is offered in an Ebony, BlueberryBurst, Wine Red, and CherrySunburst gloss nitrocellulose lacquer finishes and arrives with an included soft-shell guitar case.
It packs a pair of Gibson’s Burstbucker Pro pickups and a three-way pickup selector switch that allows you to use either pickup individually or run them together. Each of the two pickups is wired to its own volume control, so you can blend the sound from the pickups together in any amount you choose. Each volume control is equipped with a push/pull switch for coil tapping, giving you two different sounds from each pickup, and each pickup also has its own individual tone control for even more sonic options. The endless tonal possibilities, exceptional sustain, resonance, and comfortable playability make the Les Paul Studio the one guitar you can rely on for any musical genre or scenario.
For more information, please visit gibson.com.
Introducing the Reimagined Gibson Les Paul Studio - YouTube
Phat Machine
The Phat Machine
The Phat Machine is designed to deliver the tone and responsiveness of a vintage germanium fuzz with improved temperature stability with no weird powering issues. Loaded with both a germanium and a silicon transistor, the Phat Machine offers the warmth and cleanup of a germanium fuzz but with the bite of a silicon pedal. It utilizes classic Volume and Fuzz control knobs, as well as a four-position Thickness control to dial-in any guitar and amp combo. Also included is a Bias trim pot and a Kill switch that allows battery lovers to shut off the battery without pulling the input cord.
Silk Worm Deluxe Overdrive
The Silk Worm Deluxe -- along with its standard Volume/Gain/Tone controls -- has a Bottom trim pot to dial in "just the right amount of thud with no mud at all: it’s felt more than heard." It also offers a Studio/Stage diode switch that allows you to select three levels of compression.
Both pedals offer the following features:
- 9-volt operation via standard DC external supply or internal battery compartment
- True bypass switching with LED indicator
- Pedalboard-friendly top mount jacks
- Rugged, tour-ready construction and super durable powder coated finish
- Made in the USA
Static Effectors’ Street Series pedals carry a street price of $149 each. They are available at select retailers and can also be purchased directly from the Static Effectors online store at www.staticeffectors.com.