The Players
News and happenings from the world of your favourite guitarists
Guitarist was saddened by the loss of two rock icons last month with the passing of the Allman Brothers’ Gregg Allman and Soundgarden’s Chris Cornell. Allman died on 27 May, aged 69, at home in Savannah, Georgia from complications due to liver cancer. His final solo album, titled Southern Blood, recorded with producer Don Was at FAME studios in Muscle Shoals, is due to be released in September. Chris Cornell’s death (on 18 May, while on tour with Soundgarden) has been ruled a suicide. The 52-yearold singer/guitarist had recently been working on a new album with his bandmates and also tracking for a possible solo covers album with producer Brendan O’Brien.
Grateful Dead icon Jerry Garcia’s Wolf guitar raised more than $3 million at auction in aid of a civil rights group late last month.
Guitarist reported on the auction in issue 418 ahead of the sale at the Brooklyn Bowl in New York, and the guitar itself ended up selling for $1.9 million to Brian Halligan, the CEO and co-founder of marketing firm HubSpot. An anonymous charity then matched the guitar’s pre-premium price of $1.6 million, raising a total of $3.2 million for the Southern Poverty Law Center. “I don’t plan on selling it or trading it, and so it’s somewhat priceless,” Halligan told AFP. The price for the Wolf still hasn’t topped the 2015 record set by John Lennon’s Gibson J-160E from his early Beatles days. That was sold for an amazing $2.4 million…
Paradise Lost guitarist Gregor Mackintosh started playing V-shape guitars early in his career and has told us how much he’s been enjoying using them again since he became a Framus endorsee. “I’ve got a Pantera model – not the band – and it’s a custom version of that. Then I got two custom Vs, one I use with Paradise Lost and one I use with Vallenfyre [Gregor’s other band] that has a Phoenix emblem. They’re a lot easier to play, because I was using superstrats and various other things for a long time. I forgot how easy it was with Vs – you just rest it on your leg and you’re away!”