We all have that one (or several) story of accidentally breaking gear (and, well, if you don't have one, congratulations – you're an exception to the rule), but Ty Segall’s snafu can best be described as every guitarist or bassist's worst nightmare.
The garage rocker has recounted the time he accidentally smashed his prized ’65 Gibson Melody Maker, which he had received after graduating college.
“I’d toured with it for about a year,” he tells Guitar World, “but one show I had it leaned up against my amp, and [when] I went to go say hi to somebody, I stepped on the stage really hard and the guitar fell over and exploded. The headstock shattered into five pieces; it was not just a crack. That was sad.”
Shattered six-strigns aside, in keeping with the theme of his 17th solo album, Possession, Segall also revealed what he considered to be his “prized possessions” nowadays.
“A Les Paul has been my main studio guitar for close to 10 years now, but it only makes an appearance on one song," he reflects as he dials in from his current home/studio in South Pasadena.
“But I’ve got this SG that I customized… it’s blasphemy, I think; it’s a ’62, and it has P90s, but I took those out and put some late-Sixties humbuckers in there. Everybody I know that’s a guitar head is like, ‘Why would you do that?’ It’s just what I wanted! And it rules. So that’s the main guitar on this album.”
The multi-instrumentalist-slash-record-producer was also involved in converting La Luz’s Shana Cleveland to fuzz pedals – which feature happily in the band’s latest album, News of the Universe.
For more from Segall, alongside new interviews with Jake Kiszka and Maya Delilah, check out issue 594 of Guitar World at Magazines Direct.
