Five Minutes Alone: Dave Knudson
The Minus The Bear guitar wizard talks jetlagged gigs, dashed baseball dreams and bitter Boogie baggage…
I got my first real six string… “The first guitar I got was a used Hohner acoustic something or another that was like 50 bucks. I saw the video for One by Metallica and I was like, ‘Okay, I suck at baseball, I have to do something else… Mom, can I get guitar lessons?’ [laughs]. The first electric guitar I got was a Cherry Red Kramer that was almost like a little Strat knock-off. So it had a white pickguard and all that, but it was Kramer – because back then that was the stuff!” Hot for teacher… “I went through various stages of taking guitar lessons. At first I took them for a year just to get used to it and then I had different teacher, who was one of the ones where you bring in a tape and he’d figure out the song and show you how to play the riffs. So I’d bring in a tape with like, Slayer and Soundgarden, and then he’d be like ‘What is this?!’ because he was this old dude! But he’d figure it out for me and write it down in tab, and I’d kind of go from there.” We are the Romans… “The first real band I was in was Botch! But the first four or five years we were just dorks in high school who didn’t have anything better to do. We were absolutely atrocious! We’d have one song in the set that was a weird ska song, and then there was one that was us trying to be a metal band, and then we’d do a Helmet cover… It was horrible music!” Boogie nights are always the best in town… “As soon as Botch broke up I sold my original [Mesa/Boogie] Dual Rectifier. I just wanted to get rid of all that stuff – it kinda felt like it was a lot of baggage. So, I sold it to Brian [Cook], our bass player [now of Russian Circles], and he ended up selling it to some Botch superfan on eBay, who lives in some Eastern European country… don’t even know which one! [laughs] So that’s one I regret – at the time I was just bitter about that band so I wanted to exorcise the demons by getting rid of all the stuff that reminded me of it. Not that I would use it much these days, it’s just a piece of my history that I wish I still had around so I could plug in and play through it if I wanted to reminisce and
get all nostalgic!” But I’m lost without you… “Aside from a guitar and an amp, the Line 6 DL-4 is essential to do the looping and sampling side of things, because that’s a very unique part of my sound, and I almost try to use it as a different instrument.” They make beer commercials like this… “My worst gig wasprobably one of the very early Botch European tours. We had just flown in that day from Seattle and the first show was in Mannheim, Germany. We probably hadn’t slept, the crowd didn’t understand what was happening… we would just play songs back to back to back without any breaks, so I think people thought that we were playing a 25-minute song… and they were naturally kinda dumbfounded! So, I’d brought over two guitars, right? And I was probably jet-lagged and angry about something, but then during the set one of my guitars stopped working… and so I threw it around my back and picked up the other guitar… but then that didn’t work either. So I ended up just smashing them together… and then the show ended! [laughs]” Minus The Bear’s new album, VOIDS, is out 3 March on Suicide Squeeze
“I suck at baseball, I have to do something else… Mom, can I get guitar lessons?”