Friendship Series (I)

The Jesus H

Greetings earthlings!

They say if you want to get smarter you should surround yourself with people that are smarter than you. As luck would have it, I found someone in high school that was way smarter than me, and we became friends. That was Robbie, who I ended up being in a few bands with over the years. Then he moved away, ultimately to become a professor at Princeton. PRINCETON. Definitely smarter than me.

So Robbie was gone, and I started getting dumber without the adjacent intelligence. 

Enter Chris Hannah. 

I first encountered Chris as a fan of his band Propagandhi and, in particular, his guitar playing. By 1996 I had a few years’ experience playing guitar, and when Less Talk More Rock came out I studied that record like I was supposed to be studying my high school textbooks. The voicings Chris used created such lush textures—something I wasn’t hearing from the other punk bands I was listening to. He was a huge influence. 

Fast-forward a few years. Chris and I both frequented the same watering-hole and started getting to know each other, bonding over our mutual love of music and fun. By this time I was playing shows in my own bands and Chris started showing up to some of them. 

Then one night, over beers, he pitched to me the idea of starting an AC/DC cover band in which we would both be “Angus.” 

“Let’s do it!” I screamed.

That band never happened. 

But later, over more beers, Chris suggested we start another band—a new band with new original songs that we, together, would write with our pal Derek (who I am now in Agassiz with). Chris even had a name for us: EPCOT. 

“LET’S DO IT!!!” I shrieked. 

That band did not happen either.

I carried on, despairing and floundering in my aimless life. Then, out of the blue, I got an email from Chris. I did not save this email because, as has been established, I am dumb. But I do remember the gist of it.

First Chris wanted to know if I’d be interested in rereleasing my former band’s albums as a digital anthology on G7 Welcoming Committee Records.

Then he asked if I might be interested in possibly joining Propagandhi as a second guitar player.

“LET’S DO IT GODAMMIT!!!” I wailed in all caps. 

Well, that email was a game changer, to say the least. It was a life-defining moment. For real. It altered the course of my life in profoundly positive ways. I have often described my nine years with Propagandhi as the best education I’ve ever received. And Chris was the best teacher I’ve ever had. He would scoff at this, and you might too, but this is no joke. If you want to get smarter, surround yourself with smarter people, right? 

Chris always seemed to see something in me that I never saw myself. I’ll give you an example. A few years after joining the band I was tinkering around with lyrics for a song I had written. Chris really wanted me to have a go at singing and was very open to me writing my own lyrics. So one day he had me over to demo my song with me singing. He knew I was nervous, so he turned the lights down low in his basement studio and let me record the demo by myself while he pretended to tidy his house upstairs.  

After a time I slithered upstairs and informed him I was ready to share the demo. 

We listened to it.

(Dear gawd, am I actually choosing to relive this? OK, here goes…)

It was objectively horrid. Verifiably putrid. Unequivocally awful and offensive to all that is decent on this strange earth. I instructed Chris to delete all traces of it immediately. Chris did so (I hope), and said to me, “There’s a voice in you somewhere, Barvin.” 

In the literal sense, he was very wrong. I just cannot sing. Or write lyrics. But in a deeper sense, he was not wrong. There was a voice hiding in me, one I was too insecure and too guarded to recognize, let alone set loose. But he helped me believe that it was there, and over time I have come to own it.

This is the context in which I say Chris was a great teacher. He created this safe and supportive environment for me to just go for it, without fear of failure or embarrassment. That is precisely what great teachers do. 

Finding my voice. Pic by Alex Kwong.

The guitar, I have come to learn, is my voice. Playing guitar, and now building guitars. So, when Chris approached me to build him a guitar, it felt like a full-circle moment. 

“I will do it,” I sobbed. “Goddammit buddy, I will do it.”

For Chris’ guitar, “The Jesus H”, I bounced several ideas off of him during the designing stage. He gave me helpful feedback, such as “make it more pointy,” that I used to refine the design of the body towards something we both liked. 

Early design of The Jesus H body. Some things were tweaked before the final design was finalized, such as the location of the pot and switch.

I also chose woods based on what I know about Chris’ sonic tastes: warm yet balanced. Now, I’m not convinced that wood choice is the crucial element in how an electric guitar sounds—at least not as crucial as other factors such as pickups or the amp used. But Chris, more than anyone I’ve ever known, has dog ears. He hears EVERYTHING. Knowing this, I chose carefully: black walnut for the body and neck for its balanced, warm tone qualities and black locust for the fretboard, which is one of the hardest domestic woods yet not as bright and snappy sounding as maple. 

The pickups were some Chris had lying around his house. The neck is a Seymour Duncan JB and we started with a Seymour Duncan Distortion in the bridge, seen above. The Distortion ended up being way too hot for Chris’ liking; I wonder if not having a tone pot with a capacitor in the circuit resulted in it being just too raw. So we switched it out for a Bare Knuckle Alnico Nailbomb, which seemed to work better for him.

Chris also wanted an Evertune bridge. The process of installing these things is way trickier than installing your average bridge: there was some very precise routing involved. But these bridges do what they say they will do. Once you set them up properly, your guitar will stay in tune forever.

As a player myself, I’m not a huge fan of Evertune bridges. They can erase all of the exciting human imperfections that come when playing live, like bending chords slightly sharp when you are so stoked on the tunes you just cannot handle it. I mean, can you imagine AC/DC’s album Let There Be Rock with the guitars installed with Evertunes? That record is full of all kinds of tuning problems, and it sounds perfect. But I understand the appeal of not having to worry about tuning problems while performing, so I was happy to oblige Chris in his request.

Don’t get me wrong: tuning stability and intonation are very important to me. That’s why I constructed the neck using three quartersawn walnut boards laminated together. Quartersawn basically means the grain runs perpendicular to the face of the fretboard. This, coupled with the glue joints, results in a stiffer neck, which results in better tuning stability.

So there we have it: The Jesus H in a nutshell.

I could conclude my little dispatch by sharing entertaining stories from my shared adventures with Chris. Like the time we had to claw our way out of a bar fight where every single goon in the bar wanted to kill us. Or the time a cop in Japan wanted to arrest me for looking sketchy and Chris appeared out of nowhere to vouch for my decency. Or the time I got utterly lost, as a child would, in a crowd of people on the busy streets of downtown Dublin (before the days of cellphones) and the whole band and crew were waiting impatiently at the van to leave for the next gig and Chris had to retrace his steps for more than an hour in order to save me from myself. Or the time we climbed onto the roof of our local watering hole and…

I said I could conclude this way.

Listening

Red Rider, “White Hot”

When I first joined Propagandhi, Chris made me a mixed CD with a bunch of his favourite songs. There were a lot of great songs on there from bands I was not too familiar with at the time: Bad Brains, Cro-Mags, Venom, Zoetrope, Voivod...

But there was one song I knew very well. It was “White Hot” by Red Rider. I had long loved Red Rider despite the derision I received from my music-nerd friends (love you guys). So when Chris included this song on his favourites mix for me, I knew we were kindred musical spirits.

And come on, have you ever seen a better record cover in your entire life?