BOY COULD HE PLAY GUITAR

WE EXAMINE THE TECHNIQUE AND TONE OF THE LATE, GREAT MICK RONSON

MICK RONSON IS arguably the best-loved and most iconic of Bowie’s guitar slingers. His playing techniques were eccentric, but they worked. One unusual attribute was that, unlike most other guitarists, he kept his left-hand fingernails fairly long. He claimed that this enabled him to get his nails under the strings to create the kind of extreme vibrato (shown off to devastating effect on Bowie’s “The Width of A Circle”) that led some listeners to believe he was using a trem, or play extraordinary bends that sounded like he was deploying a slide. To this end, he kept his guitars subtly detuned, preferring to bend a slightly flattened string into pitch. His idol Jeff Beck used to do something similar during his Yardbirds years.

Few major guitarists have ever seemed fundamentally less interested in gear than Ronson. Though he did indeed carry backup instruments on tour (and did occasionally use them), Ronno concentrated primarily on one main guitar at a time. His most famous guitar throughout the Bowie years and beyond was his stripped 1968 Les Paul Custom [see page 50], which he had bought new in 1968 and played until it was literally worn-out — the neck had been broken and repaired one time too many — and Ronson eventually donated it to the Hard Rock Cafe in Australia. Thereafter, he switched to a blue rosewood-’board Telecaster, which sustained him through the remainder of his career (though studio pics shot during the Heaven and Hull sessions show him with a white, Floyd Rose–loaded, maple-fretboard, single-humbucker Superstrat of unknown provenance). He reverted back to Les Pauls, or other humbucker-loaded guitars, for his slide work.

From the Spiders era through his ill-fated solo career, his even more ill-fated tenure with Mott the Hoople, and during his first collaboration with Ian Hunter, Ronson’s amp of choice was a 200-watt Marshall Major head (the same model favored by Ritchie Blackmore) through a single Marshall 4x12.

When he relocated to the U.S., he discovered Mesa/Boogies and used them for most of the rest of his life (apart from a brief flirtation with Music Man amps during the sessions for Hunter’s You’re Never Alone With a Schizophrenic album and the subsequent tour immortalized on the Welcome to the Club live album), preferring a combo for studio work and a Mesa head with Marshall cab for live work. Despite using a Marshall Supa Fuzz and a Tonebender, owned previously — allegedly — by Pete Townshend to generate added grit during his tenure with the Spiders, Ronno’s main tonal “secret weapon” was his Vox wah pedal, generally left stationary somewhere near the midpoint of its sweep.