Jenny

In 2003 I bought a maroon / wine red Telecaster somewhere in New York (Queens? I can’t remember). Mexican-made, poplar body, all-maple neck, ceramic pickups. The guitar is named after Waylon Jennings, because I had gotten pretty deep into Jennings during that time. This was the first guitar that I named with my oddball naming scheme, where the guitar is named after a person, but with an indirect and gender ambiguous name. The first time I played it in a show was in 2003 with Aileen Morgan at a Bob Dylan birthday festival in Warwick, New York. The sticker is a monkey with angel wings, from the Beck album The Information.

Jenny was my primary electric from 2003 into 2009, which means all of Ninth Street Mission and the first year of Ghost Ghost. The last time Jenny was my main stage guitar was on Valentine’s Day, 2009, at Lit Lounge:

This guitar has seen a bunch of modifications. In the early days of Ghost Ghost, I had a problem with frequent string breakage. I was pounding the guitar back then, even with heavy strings. So I filed down the string holes in the bridge plate so the strings would bend on a rounded corner rather than a hard one. I also replaced the saddles with String Saver saddles, which have Teflon inserts that the strings rest on. The original incarnation of this guitar sounded particularly great plugged straight into my Sovtek MIG-50. With few exceptions, this is the electric that I played on the Ninth Street Mission record, and Time is Gravity. Time is Gravity is saturated with the personality of this guitar: the lovely neck pickup, the whistly feedback of the bridge pickup that I never quite loved but worked with because we were old friends.

Some time before I recorded Condo Fucks City Rockers, I replaced the stock three position switch with a Oak Grigsby four position switch so there’s a position where both pickups are in series. Since I had to rewire basically everything to replace the switch, I replaced the potentiometers, and the stock capacitors with Orange Drops; for noise shielding, I painted the entire cavity with conductive paint and glued shielding foil to the pickguard. The stock tuners got replaced with locking tuners. This is the Tele setup I used for rhythm guitar on “Rock the Grotto” and ”(Where’s the) Remote Control?”

The stock all-maple neck had seen better days, so it got replaced with a Warmoth unfinished Gonçalo Alves neck, which is smooth as hell. The bridge plate is now a Callaham Vintage Model T with brass saddles. Mojotone Broadcaster Quiet Coil pickups replaced the stock ceramics. In many ways–most ways, actually–it’s a new guitar. I think of it now as my 1950s guitar. I guess I should play some country rock with it, again.