ARTICLES AND REVIEWS
Victor Sotelo's TV yellow guitar
You always hurt the ones you love. Spats happen during all relationships, whether they're between lovers, parents and children or musicians and their instruments.
Victor Sotelo, the singer in Fresno rock band SparkleJet, remembers plugging in his TV yellow Gibson guitar before a high-pressure gig in Seattle last year.
He instantly got a nasty howl
"Here we were, in Seattle, kind of this mecca where we wanted the show to go really well," Sotelo says, "and I couldn't figure out where the sound was coming from."
Sotelo assumed the guitar, a 1992 reissue of a 1955 classic, had gone haywire. He lost his temper and tossed the instrument off the stage.
"I saw it tumble down and figured that was it -- the guitar was finished," Sotelo says. "But it was fine."
A chagrined Sotelo rolls his eyes to the ceiling.
"It wasn't even the guitar that made the howling," he says. "It was the stupid cord."
Sotelo says the guitar has been a versatile workhorse, as strong on stage as it is tender in the studio. He used it during recording on both SparkleJet compact discs, "Soap" and "This Years Model."
"It has a really bright tone, which helps it stand out in the mix," Sotelo says. "It's not hard for it to have its own place in the song. It's easy to hear without having to turn it up real loud. And it has a nice growl to it. You don't have to add a lot of effects or processing."
What makes the guitar most unusual is its color: a sickly mustard.
Original models were made so that they would show up on the black and white televisions of the day. Sunburst guitars of the mid-'50s were yellow in the middle but dark around the edges.
"On black and white TV's, the guitars were getting lost in the picture," Sotelo says. "Yellow made a better contrast."
Once color television came along, it became a moot point. But Gibson reissued the guitar in '92 anyway.
Sotelo, the guitar's forth owner, bought it in 1995.
"Once I got it, I started asking about the color," he says. "Because when you stop and look at it, it really is kind of an ugly color."
But it's beautiful to play.
"You do form this weird attachment to the instrument -- like you know it, and you don't want to let go of it," Sotelo says. "You feel like you're adding to the legacy of it."
- Don Mayhew, (excerpt)
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