Mac DeMarco has frequently been cited as the last indie rock star. Now onto his 10th record – and his first since 2023's One Wayne G – the aptly-titled Guitar is, as per the artist's own description, “a true representation” of where the king of lo-fi, spacey sounds is at today – and that includes a reflection on DeMarco's unwavering DIY-through-and-through ethos.
“I used to play this old piece-of-shit guitar,” he tells The New Yorker. “That was my style of fixing back in the day: ‘Oh, I found a piece of siding in an alley, and I’ll use it as the pick guard.’ I needed that guitar or I couldn’t do my show.”
As DeMarco himself reflected in a 2015 piece he wrote for The Rumpus, his image is inextricably linked to the Teisco signature/custom electric guitar, dubbed “Cardboard Queen”, he brandished in his earlier days.
Teisco was a Japanese musical instrument manufacturing company that operated between 1948 and 1967. In its early years, Teisco sought to emulate American and Western European guitar designs of the time, such as those by Hagström and EKO. However, in the early 1960s, Teisco developed its own distinct designs, and its guitars became notable – and sought after – for their unusual body shapes and features.
“I went to this place called Lillo’s. It’s a music store, but also half like a pawn shop. It’s weird, and old, and disorganized,” he wrote.
“It’s the kind of place where if you bug them enough, they’ll go through the basement and find what you’re looking for. They brought me something perfectly crappy. As soon as I played this guitar, I was like ‘Wow, this thing is actually a piece of shit!’ They were like, ‘Thirty bucks?’ And I was like, ‘Sure.’”
DeMarco reflected that, by the time he got that guitar at Lillo's, he already had a “better sense” of what he actually wanted out of a guitar. But the Teisco he chose did come with some quirks...
“Man, the neck was huge. It was like playing a baseball bat! And the frets were dead and buzzing, and it sounded God awful unless I played it really, really hard.”
He continued, “I took a nail file and tried to fix all the frets to get it a playable level, but I never really knew what to do with the action. It took a long time to get it to where I wanted it to be.
“But after a few years, the neck finally did wear in, and the pickup was great. I’ve never really found another guitar that sounds the same way. If you play it clean and soft, it has a very specific tone, and if you hit it really hard, it sounds completely different.”
And while he eventually moved on to other models, just as Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix had their inimitable Strats, the off-kilter guitar remains, undisputedly, part and parcel of his image and legacy.
