“This is one is special to me,” admits Bones Owens. “It’s been my main touring guitar for the last few years because it’s a Swiss-Army knife.” Above you’ll see his 2002 Gibson ES-355. If you recognize it from a previous Rig Rundown, you’re not wrong because it belonged to Guster’s Luke Reynolds before Owens bought it off him. Reynolds upgraded the 355 with Lollar pickups—an Imperial humbucker in the bridge, and a Charlie Christian in the neck—replaced the nut, added a Tune-o-matic bridge, a Bigsby, and swapped in Grover Vintage Deluxe tuners. Since purchasing it, Owens hasn’t done anything to the instrument and even hesitates to re-string it. Speaking of strings, Owens used to beat himself up with .012s but now loosens up with Ernie Ball Slinky .010s for most of his instruments.
A close-up of Owens' 2002 Gibson ES-355.
Owens’ favorite over quarantine has become this 2018 Gibson ES-355 “Black Beauty” that he picked up at Nashville guitar store Rumble Seat Music. It was aged by Rock N Roll Relics and was enhanced with Monty’s PAF pickups.
A close-up of Owen's 2018 Gibson ES-355 “Black Beauty”.
Here is Bones’ cherry 2015 Gibson Custom Collector’s Choice 1959 Les Paul Standard R9. While he mostly sticks to the bridge pickup, Owens says this ’burst begs to be in the neck position thanks to its warm alnico-III Custom Buckers.
A close-up of Bones' 2015 Gibson Custom Collector’s Choice 1959 Les Paul Standard R9.
For the oddball lovers, Owens busted out his 1972 Gibson Les Paul Recording singlecut. Before he bought the weirdo from J Gravity Strings in St. Louis, someone gave it the Ace Frehley treatment and dropped in three DiMarzio Super Distortions and stripped out all the crazy original wiring.
A close-up of his 1972 Gibson Les Paul Recording singlecut.
Meet “Ashtray,” Owens’ beloved 2000s Gibson Firebird non-reverse reissue (similar to the original run from mid-’65 through 1969) that is loaded with three mini-humbuckers. The nickname stems from the cigarette stench caked into the guitar when he bought it off a fine southern gentleman at an Alabama truck stop.
A close-up of Bones' 2000s Gibson Firebird non-reverse reissue.
The only non-Gibson in Owens’ Rundown is actually a licensed Gibson copy. Banker Custom Guitars is one of select few luthier shops that have been handpicked and authorized by Gibson to faithfully recreate their iconic instruments. Above is Banker’s ’58 V that has a period-correct two-piece korina body and neck, Indian rosewood fretboard, vintage-specific brass string plate, brad nails, and ferrules, and it came loaded with a set of OX4 Hot Duane PAFs.
A close-up of his Banker ’58 V.
For most of today’s Rundown, we were hearing this Echopark Vibramatic 4T5A. Owens mentions it is loosely based on a brown-panel Fender, but it does have a voice switch that kicks it into an earlier JTM45-style tone. This is supposedly one of 10 4T5A heads ever built.
The Vibramatic head runs into a matching Echopark cab that has three ceramic Warehouse Speakers—two 10" up top and a 12" on the bottom.
For a “bass” tone during his gritty blues-rock duo gigs, Owens will run this ’90s (Audio Brothers) Hiwatt Custom 100 DR103 alongside the Vibramatic. The DR103 rocks through an early ’70s Marshall 2034 cabinet. In a previous life, the 2034 was an 8x10 but now it’s home to two 15s.
Just a fraction of Bones' immense amp collection.
Owens’ signal out of the guitar hits his first board that’s dedicated to his “bass” sound that colors the DR103. The Spaceman Effects Saturn V Harmonic Booster is an always-on, no-matter-what pedal. Then it hits the Pete Cornish A/B/C amp splitter box. Out of that it runs into the Electro-Harmonix Micro POG (just for octave down) and then goes through a “tall font” EHX Big Muff that was rehoused by Mike Hill. From there, he has the Tech 21 SansAmp Bass Driver/DI. If things are cooking onstage, Owens will leave the Saturn V, Micro POG, Big Muff, and SansAmp all on, all the time.
The B signal path is much shorter—it incorporates the Echopark Echodriver that awakens the Echopark Vibramatic 4T5A.
(Typically, the C patch would hit a third amp and handle the bulk of effects, but for at-home-recording purposes, Owens routed all the stomps through the Echopark head.) Before jumping over to the second board on the left, the C path routes through the Cornish TB-83 Extra Treble Booster. Then we have plethora of Pete Cornish pedals—NG-3 (“imminent amp death” fuzz), a SS-3 (overdrive/distortion) & P-2 (distortion) housed together, CC-1 (boost/overdrive) that uses two fixed, low-gain, soft-clipping stages, and a NB-3 (linear boost). The other noisemakers and rebel rousers at Owens’ feet include a silver Klon Centaur, Endangered Audio Research AD4096 Analog Delay, a Skreddy Pedals Skreddy Echo, a JHS-modded Boss TR-2 Tremolo (rehoused by PG columnist Barry O’Neal over at XTS—XACT Tone Solutions), and in the top left is a Toneczar Effects Halophaze.
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“I'm thinking about fire as this emblematic action," he says, “but this record is not a big angry protest record. It's actually going the other way. I wanted it to be a good energy, as a political move against all the bad energy in the air. I always say putting records out is a political move. There's a responsibility to it, especially if you're past the age of 19 or 20. I'm 62, so I think there's a dignity in that exchange. That's probably not something I was so articulate about or aware of as a younger person, but it's interesting to me now because I see that as something very real. When you put records out, or if you're working in a discipline of creative impulse, and you're creating something to be in the marketplace, that's a bit of a responsibility. So I always see it as very political."
Tracked almost entirely at Total Refreshment Centre, a multi-use art space, and Paul Epworth's the Church Studios, both in London, the sessions for By the Fire concluded just before the pandemic hit, but they capture a band that, after three albums together, is clicking and communicating on a deep and visceral level. “The music I'm bringing into this group is not wholly dissimilar to the music I brought into Sonic Youth through the years," Moore says. “It's just more contemporary, more now. It all comes from the same lineage and the same vocabulary. It's always progressing in a certain way, but it'll always have that similarity, that recognizable factor."
Back in 1981, when Moore co-founded Sonic Youth with Kim Gordon and Lee Ranaldo (with drummer Steve Shelley coming on board in '85), the band was so aggressively underground and anti-establishment that none of them even considered the possibility they'd have a legacy to look back on, let alone the accolades for sparking a transformative New York art-punk movement that still reverberates loudly to this day. That experimental ethos informs the music that Moore brings to his current band, with a couple of key differences: where Sonic Youth was more of a democracy, Moore is now calling the shots. And, on top of that, he has stunt guitar-savant James Sedwards riding shotgun.
The ex-Sonic Youth co-leader hits the limits of his well-traveled 1959 Jazzmaster's fretboard while playing Riot Fest in 2015. Photo by Chris Kies
“James is such a high-technique guitar player," Moore raves. “I mean, he wakes up and he has guitar for breakfast—he is the guitar, you know?" Brit aficionados of experimental music would concur. Sedwards' own adventures with his mathy noise-rock unit Nøught, which emerged from the same artsy Oxford scene that spawned Radiohead, are the stuff of local legend. The band often draws comparisons to American post-rock acts like Shellac or Slint for their freeform sonic ferocity, while Sedwards' approach to the guitar—always inquisitive and seemingly insatiable—prompted none other than John Peel, during a filming of his 1999 series Sounds of the Suburbs, to praise Sedwards as “the first person who's not been a footballer that I've been jealous of."
Sedwards didn't make the Rough Trade set, but he makes his presence felt on By the Fire. Not surprisingly, Moore recognized their potential as a team—Sedwards also favors a Jazzmaster, and is an avowed Sonic Youth fan—early in their collaboration. “If you listen to the first record we did," The Best Day, released in 2014, “for the title song, I thought it would be cool if James stepped forward and possibly played a lead or something. And what he did was so incredible, I was just like, 'Oh, this guy is a secret weapon, and I'm really under-using him here.' So I've slowly been asking him to shred some leads here and there. I don't want to do it on every piece, but he does come up with something new every time."
On the whole, By the Fire signals something new for Moore and the entire band. The album feels rooted in a spiritual mood of bliss—a good deal of that stemming from the vivid lyrics of poet Radieux Radio in such songs as the opening “Hashish"—but Moore is also painting with a much wider brush than he did on 2017's Rock n Roll Consciousness. Where that album tapped into an accessible thread of avant-garde rock with echoes of the classic canon (Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd, Velvet Underground), this one runs with that notion and raises the stakes, from the heavy-booted rawk of Black Sabbath (“Cantaloupe," which pivots on a searingly Iommi-like solo from Sedwards) to the extended noise explorations, reminiscent of Moore's mentor Glenn Branca, that propel the nearly 17-minute “Locomotives." Add the electronic soundscapes of Jon Leidecker (aka Wobbly, also of Negativland) and the further contributions of Steve Shelley (who lends a hard-driving backbeat to the trance epic “Breath"), and By the Fire delivers on multiple promises Moore made to himself when he was mixing the album.
“We do have this intrinsic nature of wanting to communicate," he explains, “and to keep each other safe, and to find harmony amongst all the distortion that's in the air. By the Fire is a very simple title as such, but it's definitely about communication. That's just the nature of the record. It was all done before the pandemic, but the thing is, it was put together during the pandemic, so to be in quarantine defined a lot of the narrative, too, as far as how I sequenced it, and just the vibe of it. It's informed by this time of contemplation and anxiety—this new world we're living in together."
TIDBIT: Although Moore's new release was recorded pre-COVID, he explains that “it was put together during the pandemic, so to be in quarantine defined a lot of the narrative, as far as how I sequenced it, and just the vibe of it. It's informed by this time of contemplation and anxiety—this new world we're living in together."
At its core, how does this band function differently from the way Sonic Youth did?
Well, Sonic Youth was a thing unto its own. It was a sum of its parts. Even though I might have been the instigator, we grew up together, and there was no hierarchy in the band. That's something that I don't think can be repeated, and I'm not really willing to repeat it. I didn't really want to start a band again and have that kind of relationship.
I spent 30 years playing with Lee Ranaldo, and Lee is such an amazing guitar player, and he was always looked upon as possibly the lead guitar player in Sonic Youth. And if there was one, it was him, but that was never the relationship we had between all of us. Lee had his own voice, so we called him the Lee guitar player. With James, there's nothing he really plays like Lee—and I never really wanted to have that replicated anyway, because I thought that would be rather a clunky thing to do. It just didn't feel right.
When I started talking to James, I knew he was quite a different guitar player than Lee is, so that sets the music apart. Deb does that with her bass playing, too. I never tell her at all what to play. She just somehow finds that magical root that drives the song. So I've been really loving playing with this group. It's been like eight years, almost. We've been together longer than most groups, historically, you know? With Steve and Jem, the drummers have changed around a little bit, but James and Deb and myself have been a nucleus for quite some time now.
For one thing, you've talked about turning James loose on guitar solos, and he takes a pretty massive one on “Cantaloupe."
That was just a simple song—something that I wrote really quickly and thought, “Oh this is cool; let's do this as a band." So I showed it to the band and we put down the basic track, and I said to James, “You know, this section would really smoke with a lead." And he did it in one take. He went in there, in the alternate tuning [C–G–D–G–C–D], laid it down, and I was just like, that's ridiculous. So he has that ear and that ability. He can shred in that really traditional way, but he always has this edge, this sense of jumping off the experimental cliff, you know?
Russian Big Muff Pi Bubble Font circa 1995
1969/1970 Original Big Muff Pi
Photo by Kit Rae
Late-'70s Echo Flanger
Photo by Tom Hughes
1973 Big Muff Pi Version 2, Ram's Head
Photo by Kit Rae
Photos by Tom Hughes
An early-90s Mike Matthews-branded Soul Kiss wah-type effect. It features a plastic case with a strap clip and is controlled with the mouthpiece coiled next to it.
Late '70s Muff Fuzz
Photo by Tom Hughes
NYC Big Muff Pi
Photo by Tom Hughes
Late '70s Polyphase
Photo by Tom Hughes
Late '70s Deluxe Electric Mistress
Photo by Tom Hughes
Small Stone Family
Photo courtesy pedalarea.com
The top row of this Small Stone collection shows left to right) a mid-'70s model with minimalist graphics, a late-'70s version with large orange lettering, early-'80s and mid-'90s models with blocky black-and-orange graphics, and a recent Small Stone Nano, while the bottom row features three Electro-Harmonix/Sovtek co-branded units built in Russia and a US-made late-'70s Bad Stone.
