Jason Isbell on Why His Gear Collection Makes Other Gearheads “Lose Their Minds”
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The post Jason Isbell on Why His Gear Collection Makes Other Gearheads “Lose Their Minds” appeared first on Consequence.
Jason Isbell has plenty to say about his new album, Weathervanes, his band The 400 Unitt, his wife Amanda Shires, and the state of the world. But nothing makes him quite as bubbly as his musical gear.
Speaking with me for the June Consequence cover story, Isbell tells me how his collection has impressed other gearheads, such as Blackbird Studio manager Rolff Zwiep. Isbell and The 400 Unit recorded Weathervanes at the Nashville institution, which in the past has hosted Taylor Swift, Neil Young, The White Stripes, Tim McGraw, and many other icons.
“I don’t know if there’s any other studio on Earth that has the kind of gear that they have, because they’ve been collecting for a long, long time,” Isbell explains. “But when I brought in all [my] amps, the studio manager came in and looked at my amps and said, ‘Well, I guess you guys won’t need to borrow any amps for this project.’ I was really, really flattered by that.”
Isbell shows off his “disgusting” amplifiers over Zoom. He starts with “probably the most prominent amp on the record,” one of the original Marshall Bluesbreaker Combos which had been hand-crafted in 1964 by the legendary Jim Marshall.
“The Fender Bassman was the industry standard,” Isbell tells me. “And in England, because of trade restrictions, it was extremely expensive to get a Fender Bassman. So, Jim Marshall decided that he could replicate the Fender Bassman circuit and build an amplifier for his friends. His friends were Eric Clapton and Peter Green and Pete Townsend, people like that.
“The first thing he built,” he continues, “was the JTM45, and it was apparently too big for those guys to fit in the trunk — what they called the boot of their car. So he started making the Combos and this was the first of those.”
The Bluesbreaker Combo has a hallowed place in rock history. Another of those first 10 pre-factory models was owned by Thin Lizzy’s Gary Moore. John Mayall utilized a Bluesbreaker on his album Blues Breakers, originally called John Mayall with Eric Clapton and now sometimes referred to as The Beano Album. “He used one of those amps with the 1959 Les Paul, and turned it up really loud,” Isbell remembers. “And they had ribbon mics. So the engineers said, ‘This is going to blow the microphone to pieces.’ So he said, ‘Just move it across the room.’ So they move the mic across the room and turned the amp all the way up, and you can hear the room. And that was really what changed the rock guitar tone forever.”
In practice, “The Marshall is a loud, aggressive amp. It has a lot of treble and a lot of bass, and sitting on top of the Marshall is a very special device called the Dallas Rangemaster. This one is a treble booster made in the ’60s. So it would make the treble louder and also overdrive the amp.”
The 44-year-old songwriter turns to another amplifier used on Weathervanes, a 1961 Vox AC-15. Isbell picked it up from an accordion player who rarely used it, and so it remains in pristine condition. “It took a while to figure out how to mic this Vox,” Isbell says. “Because it’s so small, it sounds like a cardboard box if you don’t mic it just right. You’ll notice it says, ‘Don’t Lift Handle’ because that is the original leather handle and it will break.”
Jason Isbell and The 400 Unit, photo by Josh Weichman
Finally, Isbell shows off his latest toy, acquired too late to appear on Weathervanes but still “possibly the greatest amplifier ever made… a Dumble Overdrive Special, No. 22, made in the ’70s for Dennis Herring, who was a producer and played with Bonnie Raitt back in those days.”
Looking over his collection, Isbell almost whispers, “If people saw this, they would lose their mind.”
He also recorded with vintage Fuzz Face pedals, and then there are the guitars, perhaps even more beloved than the amps. Isbell heavily featured several different instruments on the album: a 1953 Blackguard Telecaster, a 1959 Les Paul, his own signature Telecaster, and a pair of Stratocasters built in 1958 and 1960 that serve very different purposes. The ’58, Isbell explains, features “a maple neck with no fingerboard. It’s all one piece of maple. And then the ’60 has what’s called a slab board. So it’s a thick piece of rosewood on the fingerboard. It softens the tone up a little bit, takes a little of the treble off. And the ’58 would sound more like Buddy Holly or David Gilmore, and the ’60 would sound more like Stevie Ray Vaughan or Jimi Hendrix.”
From Isbell’s perspective, picking the right guitar for a song is as obvious as deciding between “a hammer or a screwdriver.” For example, the Weathervanes single “Middle of the Morning,” has guitars that sound like sunshine, even as the lyrics plunge the narrator into darkness. “That calls for a clean strat neck pickup,” Isbell says. “When you hear that part in your head, you think that is how it should sound.”
But perhaps his favorite combination on the record is the one that has the most history: that 1959 Les Paul through the Marshall Bluesbreaker Combo. Because of Gary Moore and Thin Lizzy, John Mayall and the way he “changed the rock guitar tone forever,” Isbell returned to that sound again and again.
“There’s a twin guitar on ‘Save the World’ that had to be the Les Paul to the Marshall. Had to be, because it’s a twin guitar sound like Thin Lizzy,” he says. “You have to go with historical significance. You go with what the nerd in you wants to hear.”
The combination of Bluesbreaker and 1959 Les Paul turned the Weathervanes sessions into a musical Mecca, according to Isbell, as “other musicians in town would just drop by to see the stuff. Just like, ‘Man, can I come over and hear that Marshall with that Les Paul tomorrow?’ Yeah, sure!”
And that might be one of the reasons that for all the darkness on Weathervanes, a real joy of music shines through. As Isbell says, “We were playing with toys the whole time.”
Jason Isbell on Why His Gear Collection Makes Other Gearheads “Lose Their Minds”
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