WHEN GUITAR GODS WALKED THE EARTH
The slow, secret death of the electric guitar — and why you should care
George Gruhn has sold guitars to Eric Clapton, Neil Young, Paul McCartney and Taylor Swift. The 71-year-old Nashville dealer has great love for the product and great skepticism about its future.
“There are more makers now than ever before in the history of the instrument, but the market is not growing,” Gruhn says. “I’m not all doomsday, but this — this is not sustainable.”
In the past decade, electric guitar sales have plummeted, from about 1.5 million sold annually to just over 1 million. The two biggest companies, Gibson and Fender, are in debt, and a third, PRS Guitars, had to cut staff and expand production of cheaper guitars.
In April, Moody’s downgraded Guitar Center, the largest chain retailer, as it faces $1.6 billion in debt.
When Gruhn opened his store 46 years ago, everyone wanted to be a guitar god, inspired by the men who roamed the concert stage, including Clapton, Jeff Beck, Jimi Hendrix, Carlos Santana and Jimmy Page. Now those boomers are retiring, downsizing and adjusting to fixed incomes. They’re looking to shed their collections, and the younger generation isn’t stepping in to replace them.
“What we need is guitar heroes,” Gruhn says.
Guitar heroes. They arrived with the first wave of rock ’n’ roll. Chuck Berry duckwalking across the big screen. Scotty Moore’s reverbsoaked Gibson on Elvis’s Sun records. Link Wray, with his biker cool, blasting through Rumble in 1958.
The ’60s brought a wave of white blues — Clapton, Jeff Beck, Keith Richards — as well as the theatrics of the guitar-smashing Pete Townshend and the sonic revolutionary Hendrix.
Paul McCartney saw Hendrix play at the Bag O’Nails club in London in 1967.
“The electric guitar was new and fascinatingly exciting in a period before Jimi and immediately after,” the former Beatle says wistfully in a recent interview. “So you got loads of great players emulating guys like B.B. King and Buddy Guy, and you had a few generations there.
“Now, it’s more electronic music and kids listen differently,” McCartney says. “They don’t have guitar heroes like you and I did.”
Living Colour’s Vernon Reid remembers being inspired when he heard Santana on the radio. “There was a culture of guitar playing, and music was central,” adds Reid, 58. “A record would come out and you would hear about that record, and you would make the journey. There was a certain investment in time and resources.”
“It was just a different world,” Lita Ford, 58, says.
“There was Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert, Ed Sullivan, Dick Clark, and they would have one band on and you would wait all week to see who that band was going to be. And you could talk about it all week long with your friends — ‘Saturday night, Deep Purple’s going to be on, what are they going to play?’ - and then everybody’s around the TV like you’re watching a football game.”
But there were already hints of the evolutions in music technology that would eventually compete with the guitar.
In 1979, Tascam’s Portastudio 144 arrived on the market, allowing anybody with a microphone and a patch chord to record with multiple tracks.
So instead of Hendrix or Santana, Linkin Park’s Brad Delson drew his inspiration from RunDMC’s Raising Hell, the crossover smash released in 1986. Delson, whose band recently landed atop the charts with an album notably light on guitar, doesn’t look at the leap from axe men to DJs as a bad thing. “Music is music,” he says. “These guys are all musical heroes, whatever cool instrument they play. And today, they’re gravitating toward programming beats on an Ableton. I don’t think that’s any less creative as playing bass. I’m open to the evolution as it unfolds. Musical genius is musical genius. It just takes different forms.”
Tell that to Richard Ash. The chief executive of Sam Ash, the largest chain of family-owned music stores in the country, isn’t afraid to state the obvious.
“Our customers are getting older, and they’re going to be gone soon,” he says.
Still, the leaders of Gibson, Fender and PRS say they have not given up.
“The death of the guitar, to paraphrase Mark Twain, is greatly exaggerated,” says Fender’s chief executive, Andy Mooney.
Paul Reed Smith, the Marylandbased guitar designer, says the industry is just now recovering from the recession that struck in 2009. Then there’s Henry Juszkiewicz — when he and a partner bought Gibson in 1986, for just $5 million, the one-time giant was dying.
“It was a failed company that had an iconic name, but it really was on its last legs,” Ash says. “(Juszkiewicz) completely revived the Gibson line.”
In recent years, Juszkiewicz has made two major pushes. In 2014, he acquired Philips’ audio division to add headphones, speakers and digital recorders to Gibson’s brand. There’s also the line of selftuning “robot” guitars that Gibson spent more than a decade and millions of dollars developing and which have not caught on.
Journey’s Neal Schon says he battled with Juszkiewicz when he served as a consultant to Gibson.
“I was trying to help Henry and shoo him away from areas that he was spending a whole lot of money in,” Schon says. “All this electronical, robot crap. I told him, point blank, ‘What you’re doing, Roland and other companies are light-years in front of you, you’ve got this whole building you’ve designated to be working on this synth guitar. I’ve played it. And it just doesn’t work.’ And he refused to believe that.”
Juszkiewicz says that one day, the self-tuning guitars will be recognized as a great innovation.
“Everything we do is about music,” Juszkiewicz says. “It doesn’t matter whether it’s the making of music with instruments or the listening of music with a player. To me, we’re a music company. That’s what I want to be. And I want to be No. 1. And, you know, nobody else seems to be applying for the job right now.”
The electric guitar was new and fascinatingly exciting in a period before Jimi and immediately after.