Frank Zappa on why he eventually landed with a Gibson SG
It’s one of the most iconic pairings in the history of music: Frank Zappa and his Gibson SG. While he experimented with a number of guitars over the years, the image of Zappa playing the iconic cherry red double-horned SG is probably the first one that most fans conjure up when they think of him. Along with prominent rock figures like Angus Young and Tony Iommi, Zappa very well may be the most identifiable and consistent SG player in music history.
The truth was that, in reality, Zappa’s SGs had little to do with the models that you can still find on guitar store shelves. A relentless tinkerer, Zappa heavily modified almost every piece of equipment that came into his possession, with his arsenal of SGs becoming science experiments in his hands. One of his most famous guitars, the “Roxy” SG, had a number of modifications that allowed Zappa to explore a wider sonic scope than the traditional SG was capable of.
Even his “Baby Snakes” SG was different – mostly because it wasn’t even a Gibson, but was rather a custom-made guitar that Zappa bought backstage at a concert. The custom-inlaid neck and extensive use of non-Gibson parts was probably a giveaway, but Zappa dutifully used the guitar on albums like Over-Nite Sensation and Apostrophe (‘). It all fit into a guitar lineage that was more than a decade long by that point.
“I started off with a [Fender] Telecaster, which I rented from a music store,” Zappa explained to Down Beat Magazine in 1983. “After that I bought a [Fender] Jazzmaster, which I used for about a year-and-a-half while playing lounge gigs at places like Tommy Sandy’s Club Sahara in San Bernadino. That guitar got repossessed, but then I made some money by writing music for a film, so I went out and bought a Gibson ES-5 Switchmaster, one of those big fat hollow-body jobs with three pickups on it.”
The Gibson Es-5 Switchmaster became Zappa’s main guitar when he first rose to the attention of music fans with The Mothers of Invention. Zappa would use the Switchmaster on his debut album, Freak Out!, and continued to use the guitar on a less frequent basis throughout the 1960s. Like a lot of prominent guitarists in the rock world, Zappa soon found himself in possession of a Gibson Les Paul.
“I used to really like that guitar; it had a nice neck on it, but there was a real problem with uncontrollable feedback whenever I needed more amplification for larger halls,” Zappa explained about the Switchmaster. “That’s common for hollow-bodies. A lot of people said, ‘Well, just stuff it with styrofoam and it won’t feedback so much,’ but I didn’t feel like doing that. So I switched to a solid body, a Les Paul gold-top, which I used for a couple of albums. And eventually I got Gibson SG.”
The SG had the feeling that Zappa gravitated toward it, but he was experiencing issues with the basic mechanics of the instrument. “The hollow-body had a nice feel and I liked the tone of it, but you could never use a fuzztone with it, and there was no way to tweeze it up and make it work,” Zappa recalled. “Remember, in those days there were no graphic equalizers or any other scientific equipment.”
Zappa’s solution was to modify the instrument, and soon enough, he could rarely be seen without his trusty SG during concerts. Shut Up ‘n Play Yer Guitar saw Zappa wield another Les Paul, this time a Gibson Les Paul Custom, but Zappa was always quick to return to the SG as his main axe.
