Chris Forsyth: The Anti-Shredder on Guitars Made from Fuckin’ Old Wood, Shitty Pedals, and Loud as Fuck Amps

Like ex-Harry Pussy Americana skronk maverick Bill Orcutt and finger-picking purveyor Jim O'Rourke, Philly's weave-tastic six-string painter Chris Forsyth is an anti-guitar hero for the ages. Aesthetically on par with the likes of fellow Killadelphia strings violator Nick Millevoi (of punk jazzmongers Many Arms) and Ohio guitarist colossus Edward Ricart (of Hyrrokkin) via bold experimental histrionics, Forsyth distinguishes his shape-shifting vision—not all by loud-as-fuckness all the time (yes, he aces it there, too) but by epic solo dreaminess dueling à la Television (dude can effortlessly emulate both Verlaine and Lloyd within the same tune), Sonic Youth's Thurston/Lee noise-scape intertwineage with marathon psych trippiness.

On Solar Motel, Forsyth's most recent voyage into the guitar anti-hero worship unknown, he gives a stunning clinic on its four outer space lengthy pieces, running the gamut from free improv's phraseology, punkazoid Robert Quine-esque punk rockness, blues 'n' pysch stoner-isms and Marquee Moon jammage.

Here, we caught up with Forsyth to get the skinny on his studies with Television legend Lloyd, where he shops for guitars in New York City, shitty pedals, fuckin’ loud-assed amps and the new Solar Motel Band record coming out later this year via the Paradise of Bachelors label.

Noisey: Well, we’re here to talk guitars and amps and shit. No shredding, though. You are anti-shredding plus that’s a totally exhausted term.
Chris Forsyth: [Laughs] Yeah, I kind of weave…

Just weaving, no shredding? Slaying, maybe?
You can call it whatever you want. I guess.

You made up your own style, weaving.
I just thought that up off the top of my head. But actually, especially with the (Solar Motel) band stuff, it is very much about that because I’m playing with Paul Sukeena, who’s the second guitarist in the band, and there’s a lot of interplay, interlocking kind of stuff. We’re just finishing up another record, which will probably come out sometime in 2014 on Paradise of Bachelors. I’ve been listening to it and I can imagine, because I played all the guitar on Solar Motel, because that was recorded before the band existed. But on this (new) record, Paul takes leads and it’s very much in that Television/Sonic Youth model, or the Stones even, where you’re like, “You can’t even tell who’s playing what.”

So on the Solar Motel record released last year, you did it all yourself?
Yeah, I recorded it about two years ago. I started it in December 2011, actually, tracked it, then and did overdubs and mixing over the course of the next few months. I was the only guitarist on it. Peter Kerlin, who also plays bass in the Solar Motel band, played on it and Mike Pride played drums on it. He’s a drummer in New York. Mike and I had played together for years and Peter and Mike and I were playing shows out semi-regularly towards the end of my tenure in New York, around 2008, 2009. They just came down, and with the keyboardist Shawn Hansen, who used to live in New York and now lives in Kansas City, we just recorded the basics for that record in two days and then I added and layered the guitars on and various other stuff.

How did you meet Paul, your new guitarist counterpart in Solar Motel?
He plays in a band here in Philly called Spacin,’ who are really great and kind of Velvet’sy and are a trance-and-garage-kind-of thing. So we were just kind of friendly. I was gonna do gigs when my record, Kenzo Deluxe, came out two summers ago and that record was totally solo. It was recorded at the same time as Solar Motel but that came out first. There was one song on Kenzo Deluxe that needs two guitar parts, so I was talking to Paul and I said, “Oh, you wanna do some gigs with me just on that one song?” And we hit of off and something was there. When I finally set up plans for the Solar Motel to come out, I was like, “I need a band to play this stuff because Mike is too busy and lives in New York, Shawn lives in Kansas City.” The second voice on the record is the keyboard a lot so I was thinking of a keyboardist but I didn’t know any in Philly, really. But Paul could cover a lot of those parts and that was the original thinking like, “Paul plays droney and he can play these leads and he’ll cover the organ parts” and it just snowballed from there. It turned out Paul’s roommate is now the (Solar Motel) drummer—they live two blocks from me—and Steven Urgo, who used to play in The War on Drugs, and Peter stayed on with bass so that’s how the band formed. Initially, and this was in March, I was like, “Maybe by the fall, we’ll be doing some gigs or whatever” and it really snowballed fast. It was just one of those things where the chemistry between the players was really good. When we played out here (in Philly), people were super into it and we did this residency at a club in Philly called Ortlieb’s, where we played every Thursday in June and that really kind of solidified things. I think between the players and the eyes in audience, it gave the band an identity. So, yeah, we have a whole record in the can.

Solar Motel had four suites. Is the new record similar to that vision?
Actually, it’s quite different. The thing is Solar Motel is like my little creation and the guys that played on that record totally add a huge amount because there’s a lot of improvisation in it but it wasn’t really the work of a band, you know? A couple of those songs, it was the first time we got to play them in a studio. I’m still writing all the material and running it a little bit as much as anybody is but the voices of the people in the band are pushing it different directions, too. The chemistry with Paul is a big thing and Steven is a really great drummer who plays very differently than Mike, for example. It sounds a lot different; it has a different identity, put it that way.

The new record is not two album-length sides of continuous music. There’s one song that is maybe twelve-minutes long that’s kind of an epic but it’s a little bit more concise. There are five songs over like forty minutes so most of them are like five to seven minutes long.

You mentioned Television before. How vital was the Tom Verlaine-Richard Lloyd combo to your aesthetic and now with Paul?
Oh, yeah. Totally. I studied with Richard Lloyd for about a year and a half in the late 90s. But even if I hadn’t studied with Richard, it would be huge. I’ve listened to that record (Marquee Moon) maybe more than any other single record, since I was fifteen or something. But studying with Richard makes it even more influential in that he kind of taught me the grammar of what I do. I’d be sorta trying to be inspired by that stuff when I was younger but he actually taught me how to think about music and how music works and also how to apply that to guitar.

Did you study with Richard in New York?
Yeah. He still gives lessons. I went every Wednesday. I would go and meet him at his studio near Port Authority Wednesdays at nine in the morning before I went to work at a café that I worked at on the Upper East Side, pretty much every week.

He’s out of Television now, right?
He quit them, he quit the band. It’s kind of a fucked up story, actually. Richard is a brilliant but kind of troubled guy. They played at Summerstage—it’s a while ago, probably about seven years ago—and they were supposed to play and he made this big announcement, like a month or two before that show that said, “This is going to be my final show with Television, I’m leaving the band, Tom won’t make a record, I’m not gonna sit around playing these reunion shows just for money, we need to be making new music…” Then he got pneumonia and couldn’t make the gig and was in the hospital when it happened! Hmmmmm. His big going away show turned out be them playing at Summerstage and people probably going, “Who’s that other guitarist?” That was Jimmy Rip, who’s playing with Television now.

Do you still keep in touch with Richard?
Yeah, a little bit. I saw him in Philly maybe two summers ago. I exchange messages with him now and then.

What else did you take from the lessons you had with him?
He’s a pretty intense guy who’s not the kind of teacher where you sit down and he teaches you licks or tricks; in a lot of ways he’s kind of a fundamentalist. He’s very much about how music works and then giving you the tools to apply that to your own ideas and combined also with these patterns and maps of getting around the guitar neck that he used. So it’s a combination of practical stuff and theoretical stuff. It’s funny, his playing in Television is considered the kind of more earthy one, right? But he’s like a total spaceman. He’s really into Gurdjieff and cosmic philosophies. For him, music is very much this theology or something and that kind of mystical approach to it is something he puts across, which is meaningful to me, too. I’m probably a little more earthy about it than that but I really appreciate where he’s coming from with that.

Do you think with Paul you’ve found your foil, akin to what Verlaine had with Lloyd?
Yeah, I’ve never had that kind of chemistry with another guitarist—in my life, ya know, and I’m 40. So, I’ve been playing for a long time. Not since I was in my very early twenties or just kicking around have I been in a band with another guitarist. But it’s great. Paul and I can just sort of close our eyes and play stuff and we don’t really have to discuss it too, too much. At the same time, if I have a part for him he’s like “OK” and he can just pick it up really fast.

When did you start playing guitar?
Probably 1986, or so. I was like, 13.

What made you want to pick up a guitar?
When I think back to it, the reason why I got a guitar was because a friend of mine got a guitar and there was this idea we should both get guitars and maybe start a band even though neither of us knew how to play. I just got one, one went to one guitar lesson, which was totally lame and I told my parents I was going to the second one (lesson) but I just played hooky on it. Then I told them, “Hey. Jimmy Page didn’t take guitar lessons. I don’t need to take guitar lessons.”

What kind of guitar was that first one you bought?
Oh, jeez. The first guitar I had was a Kramer pointy headstock, Floyd Rose tremolo—total piece of shit, 80s metal guitar.

Were you a metal dude?
No, never. Actually, I don’t like metal. It’s not my thing at all. That’s just the kind of guitar that, if you didn’t know anything at all about guitar and it was 1986 and you went to a guitar store and you said, “I want to pay $200 for a guitar,” this is the one they would give you. That’s just what was on the market then [laughing]. A few years later, I got my first good guitar, which was a Rickenbacker, which I really liked.

Do you have a lot of guitars in your stable?
I got a few. I have three electrics and three acoustics but two of the acoustics are kind of beaters. I still have that Kramer down in my basement, actually.

Cool. Which guitar do you play live these days?
The main guitar I use now is a Rick Kelly Stratocaster. Rick is a guitar maker in New York and he’s got a shop on Carmine Street. He makes better Fenders than Fender has for a long time. He makes them out of really, really old wood. It used to be, he would get wood from barns that were torn down; he would just stockpile this old wood. So, this guitar I have is the body is made out of a piece of wood that was cut down like 110 years ago or something like that and the neck is like 100 years old. That was how old they were when I got them so it’s a little more than that now. Now, he makes them out of old buildings. You know that bar Chumley’s in the West Village that collapsed a few years ago? He got a lot of wood from there and he makes guitars out of Chumley’s now [laughing] and Jim Jarmusch’s loft—the building on the Bowery next to CB’s—when they tore that down, he got a bunch of wood. So, he makes these beautiful, old Tele and Strat copies. The key is, he’s a one man shop, he does everything by hand and he uses this really old wood so they really sing. The wood is old and settles and is resonant, it doesn’t change and it doesn’t warp.

How did you find that shop?
I used to just bring my guitars to him to get fixed because he does good, cheap repairs. I worked in that neighborhood so I would just go in there. But then when I went in there, I noticed that Robert Quine from the Voidoids was Rick’s buddy and he just would hang out in the corner and smoke cigarettes and play guitar and be a general misanthrope. Quine is one of my favorites, so I was like “OK, I’m just gonna keep on coming back to this shop.” If Robert Quine hangs out there…As it turned out, the guy also makes phenomenal guitars. He’s kind of under the radar. He’s got a really danky website and he doesn’t really push himself. There are a lot of small guitar makers now that are really competing. He’s made guitars for Lou Reed, Robert Quine, Richard Thompson, Bill Frisell, Bob Dylan…a lot of heavy duty Fender people have played his guitars. I got one from him about three years ago. When I went in there and played one of his guitars, I had been playing a Strat that I bought maybe in ’90 or ’91, a perfectly fine guitar, it’s Fender, made in Japan and I’d been playing that for a long time. I then went into his shop and picked up one of his and the second I played it I was like, “Ohhh, this is what a Strat is supposed to feel like!” because one can never afford these 50s or 60s Fenders because they are, literally, the cost of a house. But his guitars are made like that but you can get them for a lot cheaper. That’s kind of my main guitar. I also have a Les Paul Deluxe from ’78 or the late 70’s that has a Firebird pickup in the bridge and I use that live sometimes. I use that in the studio a lot. “Part I” of Solar Motel is all the Les Paul—it has that thick, kind of screechy sound. I also have a Rickenbacker twelve-string solid body. I used to play it live, sometimes still do but, again, it’s something I use in the studio and mess around with.

Is there a lot of thought put into which guitars you are going to use for certain songs or you just wing it?
Oh, yeah. Stuff in the studio, I love that. I’m totally into that kind of orchestration of guitar sounds. People like Jimmy Page and Johnny Marr, the way they pile on guitars in a really kind of elegant way where each guitar is doing something super-important and also sounds really…a lot of it has to do with the guitar, the amp, the EQ, what’s actually being played and where it sits in the mix. I’m really into improvising and being rough around the edges playing live but in the studio, you got the opportunity, I like to pile on. George Harrison, you know, he was great that that stuff, too, creating these guitar orchestrations. On the other end of the spectrum, people like Rhys Chatham or Glenn Branca have definitely influenced me in the way you can do that, or Sonic Youth, on their classic records there’s way more going on than meets the eye.

In other words, you’re pretty meticulous in the studio?
Yes and no. All that said, I like to work fast. I talk to people that are in rock bands, especially in New York, and they are like, “Oh, yeah. We did that record so fast. We only spent seventeen days in the studio” and I’m like, “What!?” I did Solar Motel in seven days and this (new) record, it’ll be six days. The thing is, basic tracks I like to record fast. I like to allow for improvisation and I like to allow for accidents and get good, basic takes and then take them home and listen to them and figure it out. Sometimes, I have other guitars parts already laid out that I’m going to put on it but other times it’s like, “I’m gonna take this recording home and sit and listen to it a bunch of times and figure out what else can be done with it.” That kind of becomes the template. It’s kind of the way Dylan makes records or it’s kind of a jazz approach: go in there and just be ready and commit to the moment in the studio. But then since you have the opportunity, why not polish it up and bring out these other kind of elements because listening to a recording is way different than experiencing it live.

Are you pedal-happy?
I’m into pedals but I try to keep it as simple as possible but sometimes that doesn’t work out.

So you don’t have rows upon rows of pedals like some guitarists do?
It varies; I change it up all the time, actually. Basically, what I use pedals is for gain stages and delay—that’s really kind of it. But for some of the Solar Motel material, I’ll need two overdrives, two distortion pedals and three delay pedals or something and they get all lined up and used differently. I’m trying to strip it back, actually. I got a 90s Turbo RAT that I bought new and those are really great. There’s a specific chip that’s up in those up until ’94 or ’95 or so that’s way different than the ones that came after. That’s kind of my workhorse. It’s not a very sexy pedal but you see them all over the place and I think that’s an ultra classic pedal. They made so many of them that they are not that hard to find so they are not that expensive but those things are fucking great. That’s my go-to distortion pedal. I’ve also got a 90s Sovek Big Muff and that’s another funny thing about the pedal markets. I bought that thing new for like 40 bucks and it was considered a shit pedal at the time and really one-dimensional. Now, they are like $300 on eBay. It’s insane. I had no idea how expensive they’ve gotten up until about a year or two ago. I was like, “Are you kidding?” As with everything, I want less knobs, I want the designer of the pedal or the guitar or the amplifier to make decisions for me. I don’t want a million options. I want like two good options, three good options. That’s what I want so I don’t have to think about it too much. That’s just my style. There’s all these pedal that come out now with all these chips in them and if I see more than three knobs, my eyes just glaze over. I’m like, "Forget it.”

What about building your own shit?
I’m not really that interested in building stuff. I'd rather have someone else build it for me. Paul’s a tinkerer. He makes pedals and I had Jesse Trbovich, who plays in Kurt Vile’s band, rehouse that Big Muff for me because those Big Muff enclosures are the size of toasters, you know? I had him pick out the guts and put in something that is more the size of an MXR pedal or something. I probably utterly destroyed the value of the thing but it’s way more useful to me because it’s not as heavy and clunky.

What about amps?
Now amps, that’s what I’m really into. I think amps are where it’s at. That’s probably more than 50% of the sound. People geek out over guitars or pedals but if you’re plugging in a great guitar and great pedals into a shit amp, you’re fucked, whereas you can plug anything into an old Silvertone and it’s gonna sound good, ya know? I have a ’73 Fender Deluxe that I’ve had for twenty years and it’s always been kind of a standby. Somewhere along the way, I think before I bought, it, somebody had black-faced it—they changed the circuitry from the silver faced circuit to the “more desirable black-faced circuit”—which is like the 60s Fenders. I didn’t find that out until I had the amp for like fifteen years or maybe more like twenty years. I love that thing but it’s also not quite that loud enough to play on its own, on stage with a drummer. If I’m playing solo gigs, I’ll bring that (amp) and I use it in the studio a ton.

I’ve been playing out of an old Bassman—oh, not that old, like a 70s Bassman for a lot of stuff. I actually just traded that to a friend of mine in exchange for use of his van to go on tour for two weeks. I’m replacing it with—and I’m actually really psyched about it and haven’t even done a rehearsal with it because I just got it a week ago—with an old Traynor YBA-1 ead, which is a Traynor with a Canadian company which, at the time, was looked down upon for being cheap Fender or Marshall clones. But, I’ve gotten really into them lately and I think they are the best bargain on the vintage tube amp market, because I got this ’68 Traynor head, it’s loud as fuck, it’s basically like an early Marshall Plexi clone so it’s really loud, it’s really dynamic and they are cheap. They are one third of maybe the price of what it would cost to get a Fender or Marshall from that era. They’re point-to-point wired, they are made by humans and not made by machines or in China or something. I’ve been playing that through a Marshall 4x10 that I have. I also have a Silverface Champ that I’ve been using a lot in the studio and that’s really great. Again, three knobs, man. And I put them all on 10.