Gear shopping with Jake Kiszka is not for the fainthearted. It’s not that he’s a high-roller but by his own admission his tastes skew towards the pricier end of the market.
Hand the Greta Hand the Van Fleet guitarist a bunch of electric guitars and nine times out of 10 he will pick the most expensive one – and he doesn’t even mean to.
“I’ve done lots of these sort of shootouts, in many music stores,” he says, joining MusicRadar over Zoom ahead of launch of his new signature Gibson SG Standard. “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.”
Article continues belowWhat Kiszka is unsure of is whether or not the vintage ’61 Les Paul SG he calls his number one, aka The Beloved, is to blame for all of this, for giving him a taste. “I guess I don’t know,” he sighs. Because that was a pretty expensive guitar – eye-wateringly so for a young kid coming fresh out of Michigan.
At $25,000, he couldn’t afford it. But as the story goes, Chicago Music Exchange CEO Andrew Yonke was friends with Greta Van Fleet’s manager, loved the band, yadda yadda yadda he lent Kiszka the $25,000 '61 SG for a tour and said pay him back when he could. And the rest is history (and Kiszka did pay him back).
But what about guitar amps? Having established his tastes for vintage electrics, what about the holiest of holy grail tube amps, the Dumble, has he crossed the Rubicon and tried one?
“Yeah, you know, yes, I have,” he says with a wry chuckle.
Kiszka, however, admits that he is in no position to be bidding on them, and he remembers the moment he learned that when he went amp shopping in Osaka.
“There’s a few scenarios where we were travelling and doing some shows in Tokyo and Osaka,” he says. “And this is an interesting one, because, yes, I’ve run into Dumbles, in Nashville, and in New York – and Chicago Music Exchange has them – and they’re rare, few and far in between. But this particular time in Japan was interesting. We were in Osaka, and I saw that there was a little music shop up the way, and I heard from some friends that there’s some really valuable stuff up there.”
If you know, you know. Osaka is a repository of vintage US culture. In Amerikamura you might find pristine vintage Levi’s shrink-wrapped and retailing at Murphy Lab Les Paul prices. You might also find the kind of sight that would empty Joe Bonamassa’s checking account. Something brought Kiszka out in a cold sweat – and it wasn’t the humidity.
“I walked up the hill and and this guy had everything that you could think of,” says Kiszka. “American amplifiers and pedals – and British as well – like some of the most rarefied ‘60s Plexi Marshalls, Klon pedals, and all kinds of stuff.”
But that wasn’t the good stuff. The really fancy stuff was kept out of sight. As Kiszka explains…
“He’s like, ‘Would you come with me? I’ve got the reserves in the basement. I guess he might have recognised me – he might have just trusted me. I don’t know. But he let me into the basement with all his sort of secret stuff and he had, like, 10 Dumbles down there. It was the biggest collection I’ve ever seen in person!”
If the store owner was thinking that Kiszka was going to be tempted to buy one, he’d be right. But he might have over-estimated what kind of budget the GVF guitarist was working with. That cold sweat returned to Kiszka’s brow once they started talking dollars and yen.
“He was like, ‘Would you like to buy one?’ And this was probably before me really knowing the value that’s associated with those amps [laughs]. Because I was like, ‘Well, yeah! How much? How much which is one of these?’ He’s like, ‘Well, you know, this guy over here,’ whatever model it was, he’s like, ‘It's not as expensive as the rest of them, so I probably could go 60, 70K on that, 60, 70,000 USD?. I was like, ‘Jesus, man! Yeah, no.’ I’ve run across them, but I am not in that area yet?”
Maybe when Greta Van Fleet’s fourth studio album hits record store shelves, Kiszka might be in a position to say yes when in Osaka. If not, well, at least we know his credit is good at Chicago Music Exchange.
“Yeah, that’s it! They’ll hold me up there! [laughs]”
The limited edition Jake Kiszka SG Standard is available now – see Gibson for more details.
