REEVES GABRELS
HELPED THE PARKER FLY GET ITS BUZZ
The Parker Fly had its share of devotees, including Adrian Belew, Vernon Reid, Joe Satriani and Joni Mitchell. But few exploited the tonal possibilities of Ken Parker’s groundbreaking axe as Reeves Gabrels did during his tenure with David Bowie. He also had the benefit of playing it well before its 1993 debut. “I knew Ken Parker from when I worked for Fishman in Boston, back when it was a two-man operation,” Gabrels told Guitar Moderne.
“Ken would give me a prototype and say, ‘See if you can break this. Tell me what’s wrong with it.’”
There was certainly much to like about Parker’s eclectic take on the electric. Sporting a carbon/ epoxy exoskeleton over a wood core, it weighed about four pounds and had magnetic and piezo pickups, whose signals could be mixed for a wealth of tones. Gabrels posed with Bowie and his Nitefly prototype (decorated with “objects that were thrown at me while I was playing onstage”) for our June 1997 cover (inset).
HEAR IT: “Voyeur of Utter Destruction,” Outside — David Bowie