“Fast, Aggressive Caveman”

In this podcast I have an amazing conversation with Frank Meyers about his fascination with vintage Japanese guitars and the resulting journey.

Frank’s accolades include:

Author,“The History of Japanese Electric Guitars”

Monthly columnist for Premier Guitar magazine, “Wizard of Odd”

Creator of the wonderful website, drowninginguitars.com with help from his friend Mike Dugan, and the @drowninginguitars YouTube channel

Part of his origin story is seeing Kurt Cobain in concert in 1989 playing a Mastumoku made Mosrite copy. Inspiration also includes Teengenerate and The Mummies among other bands.

Twenty-five years of curiosity eventually led to Frank getting on a plane for the first time in his life and traveling to Japan.

His noble mission, to honor the Japanese craftsmen and manufacturers and tell their story. And that’s exactly what he did.

Out of Frank’s passion, love and loyalty, he’s created a world-class treasure trove of information about an era of guitars that changed the trajectory of music.

It was an absolute pleasure and gift to have Frank on the show and this episode is sure to deepen your appreciation of some of the best guitar makers in the world.

I can’t say it enough, thank you so much Frank! (audio available on all major podcast platforms)

In the early to mid 80s Guild produced some of the most radical pointy guitars like the Blade Runner and X-88.

They also had their fair share of super strats.  

Generally speaking, since they had so many different models production output was limited. That and a lot of these radical guitars may not have fit the public’s perception of the “Guild mold”.

Either way a very good argument can be made that Guild was the most adventurous of their industry counterparts in the 70s and 80s whether their ideas were successful or not. 

In 1983 Guild launched their super strat assault with the company’s first bolt neck guitar, the S-280 Flyer, part of their “Modern Aviation” series.  

One of those guitars was the S-270 Runaway.  Very little is known about this model except that it was cataloged for approximately one year 1984-85.  

By 1986 the model was called the S-271 Sprint and both models disappeared from the face of the earth.

The Runaway sported a Kahler, while the Sprint had a stop-tailpiece. EMG’s were the humbucker of choice. 

S-270 Runaway specs: Maple neck with locking nut, Rosewood fretboard, EMG bucker, Master volume, Kahler tremolo

In the spirit of 80s metal, here is your “Lick Of The Week” with Christos Fragias

In this lick Christos provides a breakdown of LEGATO. A free-flowing sequence of notes without using machine gun picking.

His insightful tutorial provides a best practice for maximizing pick oscillation and getting the most emotion from each note. Do not attempt with cold fingers :-).