“I’ll probably be buried with it!”: Greta Van Fleet’s Jake Kiszka on his most beloved and battered guitars
Few guitarists have a bond with their instrument quite like Jake Kiszka and his 1961 Gibson Les Paul SG. And that bond was strong from the moment he laid his hands on it.
As the story goes, Kiszka and his now-beloved SG first met during the early days of Greta Van Fleet, when he paid a visit to Chicago Music Exchange, of which the band’s manager knew the owner. As he tells Guitar.com in the latest episode of My Guitars & Me, the owner suggested he try the guitar out, “based on everything I was into at the time”.
READ MORE: “We knew there was going to be quite a bit of scrutiny”: Jake Kiszka felt “pressure” at what Greta Van Fleet fans would think of his Mirador side project
And the moment he plugged it in, it was a moment of “divine intervention”, he recalls. “It was like lightning split from the sky – it was really unbelievable. It was everything that I had been looking for sonically in a guitar my whole life was right here.”
While it commanded a hefty $25,000 price tag, the owner generously let Kiszka walk away with the guitar and take it on tour with GVF, on the condition that he pay him back when he was able. “It was incredible on him for letting me do that,” Kiszka says.
The ‘61 Les Paul SG has been Kiszka’s go-to guitar ever since, and you don’t need a magnifying glass to tell it’s taken some wear and tear over the years.
“This is what happens when you start wearing rhinestones on suits with no jacket over them. And this is what my nipples have done,” he jokes. “It looks like a cutting board, doesn’t it? It’s a lot lighter than when I got it – I’ve sanded it away!”
The wear and tear is so extreme, Kiszka says, that Gibson would have to invent an “entirely new specification of aging level” to recreate the guitar as a true-to-life signature model.
Through their thousands of hours together, Jake Kiszka has developed a bond with his SG that few guitarists will ever enjoy with their instruments.
“I’ll probably be buried with it!” he jokes. “There’s a piece of me in this guitar, but there’s also a piece of this guitar in me. In reality, a lot of my playing, and the way that I’ve developed playing have actually come from this very specific instrument.”
Elsewhere in the episode, Kiszka shows off the custom Martin 00-28 he had designed specifically for his side project, Mirador.
“I wanted to find something that could be the guitar that would be the Mirador acoustic. I went to Gibson. I went to tonnes of people to do something specifically, with certain types of inlays, obviously. I went to Martin and asked if they could do this and they said, ‘Yes.’”
Kiszka says he was after an aged-looking “renaissance”-style guitar, and one with a slotted headstock. “I’m like, ‘Could you guys build me a pirate guitar.’ This is what they came up with, which is quite brilliant,” he says.
Watch the full episode of My Guitars & Me with Jake Kiszka below.
The post “I’ll probably be buried with it!”: Greta Van Fleet’s Jake Kiszka on his most beloved and battered guitars appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.
Source: www.guitar-bass.net
