Not everyone has a life-changing moment. We can't all be Spider-Man. But sometimes these things happen. There are occasions when something cosmic occurs, kismet strikes, and it happened for Jake Kiszka in Chicago.
Picture the scene: Greta Van Fleet were not the band they are now. They were just getting started.
“It was maybe a decade ago now, about 10 years ago, Greta Van Fleet was leaving Michigan for the first time, where we’d really played shows and gigged and done all sorts of work there,” explains Kiszka, speaking to MusicRadar over Zoom. “It was really the first time out in North America, nationally… Setting out into the infinite horizon, trying to find manifest destiny or something. [Laughs]”
Article continues belowThey did not have much gear. They had emptied the garage and took what they could. Chicago was an easy schlep, just across Lake Michigan. They stopped by Chicago Music Exchange (CME).
Greta Van Fleet’s manager was good friends the CEO, Andrew Yonke, and arranged for Kiszka to visit ‘The Vault,’ where CME keeps all of the good stuff. And while it sells new electric guitars by the boat load, it has also got quite the archive, vintage unicorns, old gnarly tube amps, and Yonke brought them all out for Kiszka to try.
“I was looking through all these guitars, and we were trying to pick up some gear if we could, some serious, good gear. I wasn’t really that familiar with the early ‘60s SGs. I didn’t know much about them. I stumbled upon this one.”
If you play the guitar, you will know the feeling. When you find a guitar you love, it is as though the molecules in the air change. “I was just immediately mesmerised,” says Kiszka.
There were a lot of instruments there. But the SG, with its double-horned silhouette, had something about it.
“The visual element of it, the weight of it, the slimness of the neck,” explains Kiszka. “And it was like, ‘I’d really like to play this and maybe see if I could take it with me.’
“And so the owner said, ‘Let’s walk back to my apartment. We’ll plug it in. I’ve got a Plexi JTM, early Marshall.’ So we did, we went back, and I plugged it in.”
Fast forward to now and Kiszka sees this guitar a little differently. It sure doesn’t look like it did when it left Chicago. It’s known as Beloved, and it is the inspiration behind the Jake Kiszka SG Standard that Gibson just released in limited quantities (this signature guitar comes with a spare backplate signed and stamped by Kiszka, and it might be collectible but as a Gibson USA model it is priced sensibly).
The Beloved has acquired its own legend. It has acquired a lot of wear and tear. “It’s seen a lot of battle,” says Kiszka. But back then it was just another vintage doozy in wait for a well-heeled collector to come swinging through the Windy City, and whatever the young Jake Kiszka was, he was not that. That didn’t stop him falling for it hard.
“It was, like, immediately, from the first strum, it was like a lightning bolt just hit me from above,” he says. “I really did feel like this was sort of a divine intervention for me. It was everything that I was looking for in terms of the sound of something. I’d been searching for that my whole life up to this point.”
If this was a shopping trip, there was no question, no doubts in his mind. Take it to the cashier and ring it up. Add to cart. Shut up and take my money. Except, he didn’t have any money.
“There was no question I yearned to take it on the road with me,” he says with a laugh. “The caveat was it was a $25,000 guitar. So of course I wasn’t gonna be able to afford that being a poor kid coming out of Michigan, you know?”
Yonke had an idea. From the point of view of the CME business model, it could have been seen at the time as a very bad idea, or at least cavalier. But he liked Greta Van Fleet, he liked Kiszka, and maybe he knew something that they didn’t at the time. He let him take it on the road and it has been with Kiszka ever since.
“Thankfully and gratefully I’m humbled that the owner perhaps saw something in me, and, and us as a band, and allowed me to take it on the road,” he says. “He said, ‘Do you know what? Just pay me back for it later, when you can afford it.’ And I did.”
This story is not quite the same as Nile Rodgers and the Hitmaker Strat. For a start, the Chic guitarist reluctantly traded his Gibson Barney Kessel at the pawnshop for what was the cheapest Stratocaster on the wall, receiving 300 bucks in cash, too.
This deal worked out well in the end, with Rodgers writing hits that crossed an estimated $2bn in record sales. And yet, Kiszka’s purchase was money well spent.
He has played the ’61 Les Paul SG into the ground and it’s only looking better with age. It has been immortalised in a Gibson replica and who is to say that there won’t be an Epiphone guitar version some time soon, or maybe even a 1:1 Murphy Lab replica assuming they approve all the overtime in the Custom Shop (the Beloved is one weather-beaten electric)?
Whether I like this or not, I think I’m drawn to expensive guitars, not knowing they’re expensive
The only trouble is that it has given him a taste for the finer things in life.
“It's interesting, the question for me is, ‘Was I drawn to expensive guitars, sort of organically prior to my ’61 SG or was it something that maybe would have been a byproduct and came later?’ And, I guess I don’t know,” he says. “Because whether I like this or not, I think I’m drawn to expensive guitars, not knowing they’re expensive.
“I’ve done lots of these sort of shootouts, in many music stores, and back to Chicago Music Exchange many times, and someone will put me in a room full of guitars, and say, ‘Tell me which one you like the most… give me some feedback.’ I’ll play through whatever, 15, 20 guitars, and I’ll always, almost every single time, pick the most expensive guitar.”
Maybe CME's Andrew Yonke did know what he was doing after all. He was playing the long game.
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