DAVE “SNAKE” SABO: SNAKIN’ ALL OVER
“YOU HIT THE GAS ON THAT THING AND IT’S FULL-ON”
DAVE “SNAKE” SABO’S history with Kramer stretches back decades, to when the company was based in Neptune, New Jersey, in the 1980s, and Sabo’s band, Skid Row, was still a few years away from achieving multi-platinum success with their selftitled debut and hard-rock anthems like “Youth Gone Wild” and “18 and Life.”
At the time, Sabo was holding down a day job at Garden State Music, a guitar shop roughly a half hour south of Neptune in Toms River, New Jersey, and playing with an early version of the Skids. “We started working with Kramer and they were so receptive of us,” Sabo recalls. “Skid Row didn’t have a record deal or anything. We were just a band from the neighborhood.”
Sabo’s first Kramer was actually a parts guitar that the company fitted with a Kramer neck. It featured, per Sabo’s preferences, a Floyd Rose trem and a single humbucker, as well as original artwork by Kramer artist Dennis Kline. “I said to Dennis, ‘How about something like a snake coming out of a grave, with my birth date on there?’ ” Sabo recalls. “And what he came up with was so amazing. Kramer really fine-tuned that guitar and did their handiwork, and I played all the early Skid Row gigs with it.”
As Skid Row shot to stardom, that Kramer was used to record the band’s smash 1989 debut and the follow-up, 1991’s chart-topping as well as to rock arena and stadium stages alongside the likes of Aerosmith and Bon Jovi.
Fast forward to a few years ago, and Sabo and Skid Row co-guitarist Scotti Hill, who are also big Gibson players — “it’s part of our DNA,” Sabo says — paid a visit to the Gibson factory to meet CMO Cesar Gueikian. They immediately
hit it off. Recalls Sabo, “After a couple of conversations, Cesar said to me, ‘We’re relaunching Kramer and we want to do the Snake guitar.’ I was like, ‘Are you serious?’ It was so humbling.”
The guitar they came up with, the Snake Sabo Baretta, pays tribute to Sabo’s original model with a single humbucker, a Floyd Rose (in this case a 1000 Series tremolo fitted with an EVH D-Tuna), a reverse headstock and the original Dennis Kline Snake artwork. “The green finish, it just stands out so well — it’s almost fluorescent,” Sabo says. Other features include an alder body, a fastplaying three-piece maple neck and a 22-fret Indian laurel fingerboard.
As far as the new guitar’s tone, Sabo points to the addition of a Kramer 85-T Double Black Open Coil Humbucker as a particular sonic upgrade; his original model was loaded, at various times, with a Seymour Duncan and an EMG. But after hearing the Kramer 85-T, designed by Gibson Master Luthier Jim DeCola, Sabo fell in love. “You hit the gas on that thing and it’s full-on,” he says, noting that his signature model is also the first production Kramer to feature DeCola’s creation.
The result is “a guitar that, you plug it in, and it’s ridiculously fierce,” Sabo says. “The original guitar played great, and this plays just as great. But I’ve gotta be honest — I think this Kramer sounds even better.”
woods like curly maple, walnut and koa.
Early on, Kramer and Berardi joined up with Peter LaPlaca — a vice president at Norlin, then Gibson’s parent company — and investor Henry Vaccaro to open a plant in Neptune, New Jersey; soon after, Kramer moved to Los Angeles, essentially ending his day-to-day connection with the company that bore his name, years before the brand caught fire with the guitar-playing public.
The first step toward that fiery future came in 1981, when Kramer transitioned to making wooden-necked instruments — a move that served to lower production costs (some offshore production in East Asia and parts from Japan helped as well) while making the brand more appealing to traditionally minded players. The company also hooked up with a German inventor named Helmut Rockinger and began installing his Rockinger tremolo systems, a precursor to the Floyd Rose, on its instruments. This tremolo system eventually caught the eye of Eddie Van Halen, who signed on as a Kramer endorsee and famously vowed that he would help make Kramer the “number one guitar company in the world.”
Within a few years, Kramer was. By 1983, the Rockinger system (or as it came to be known, the “EVH trem”) was out, and Kramer was offering its guitars stock with Floyd Rose tremolos. They also introduced what would become their flagship model, the single-hum Baretta, based on Van Halen’s Frankenstrat (despite Eddie’s close association with the company, Kramer never actually produced an EVH signature model). That sleek, streamlined guitar, built for speed and massive amounts of gain, helped to kick off the superstrat era. By 1985, Kramer swapped out Schaller pickups for hotter and more modern Seymour Duncans, and soon after added in eye-catching appointments like custom graphics options and pointy headstocks (following forays with “strathead,” “beak” and “banana” headstock designs).
At this point, Kramer’s status as the shredder’s instrument of choice was indisputable. And indeed, for several years in the mid Eighties Kramer was the overall best-selling guitar brand, with a list of players and endorsers that included Vivian Campbell, Sambora, Joe Satriani and others. Those glory days, Gueikian recalls, “were when I started playing guitar, and Kramer was what everybody was playing. It’s the authentic brand of that Eighties shred revolution.”
Kramer’s reign, however, eventually came to an end, and through mismanagement and financial problems the company effectively ceased to exist in 1991. Six years later, however, it was sold out of bank
ARTIST | Tracii Guns AXE | Kramer Tracii Guns Gunstar Voyager
Body | Mahogany Neck | 3 piece maple Fingerboard | Maple Frets | 22 Controls | Neck Volume with coil split, Bridge Volume with coil split Bridge | Floyd Rose 1000 series Tremolo Pickups | Epiphone ProBucker 2 (neck), Epiphone ProBucker 3 (bridge) Finish | Black Metallic