Thunderface
Senior Member
I bid on and won this Guitar World poster of Kim Thayil's white S-100, and just picked up a cheap frame and framed it. The poster was actually a Guitar World article by Alan Paul.
Here's what the article says:
An 18-year-old Kim Thayil bought his first Guild S-100 at a Chicago music store in 1978, choosing it because it was fairly light and cheap ($250) and clearly a step up from his main axe at the time, an Encore Strat copy. The young guitarist didn't know it, of course, but his relatively casual decision led indirectly to the birth of grunge.
"I pretty much developed my style around how that guitar played," Thayil recalls. "It turned out to lend itself really well to detuning, and to play well below the bridge, which became an important part of my sound -- I get a ghostly effect by striking the low E down there.
"I used that S-100 through the early years of Soundgarden. It survived a lot of thrashings, but I finally broke it in 1990 in Denver. I threw it on the ground and the wood around the nut got crushed. Our next stop was Lawrence, Kansas, where we found a luthier and took in my guitar, along with one of Chris [Cornell]'s and Jason Everman's bass -- they had also gotten smashed in the same week. The guy looked at my nut and said with disgust, 'I can't fix this! What is it with you people from Seattle? Last week, I had a band called Nirvana in here with their broken guitars. Don't you people have any respect for your instruments?' We were like, "F*** you.' We weren't trying to break guitars, but we play with a lot of passion and energy and anger and joy, and we didn't really worry about it.
"But I was seriously bummed out -- it was my favorite guitar and I didn't know how to replace it. Then a friend said that he had a guitar just like it in his closet and I could have it. It was disassembled -- a bond and a neck and a bag full of hardware -- so I took it to Steven's Strings in Seattle where they put it together and painted it white. This is it, and it's been my main guitar ever since.
"It was pretty much the only guitar on Badmotorfinger [A&M, 1991] and I used it a lot on the next two, as well [Superunknown (A&M, 1994) and Down on the Upside (A&M, 1996)]. I don't take it on tour anymore because I want to preserve it, so I use new Guilds. Actually, the S-100 was out of production for a long time. Believe it or not, they put it back in production after a cover story of me in Guitar World [June '93], because they got so many calls asking for it. They told me that I single-handedly resurrected that guitar, with an assist from Guitar World. Now, that's a weird thought."
The cover in question was actually from June 1992.
And he was again on the cover of Guitar World, with one of his reissue S-100s in December 2010.
Plus an inside shot...
Here's what the article says:
An 18-year-old Kim Thayil bought his first Guild S-100 at a Chicago music store in 1978, choosing it because it was fairly light and cheap ($250) and clearly a step up from his main axe at the time, an Encore Strat copy. The young guitarist didn't know it, of course, but his relatively casual decision led indirectly to the birth of grunge.
"I pretty much developed my style around how that guitar played," Thayil recalls. "It turned out to lend itself really well to detuning, and to play well below the bridge, which became an important part of my sound -- I get a ghostly effect by striking the low E down there.
"I used that S-100 through the early years of Soundgarden. It survived a lot of thrashings, but I finally broke it in 1990 in Denver. I threw it on the ground and the wood around the nut got crushed. Our next stop was Lawrence, Kansas, where we found a luthier and took in my guitar, along with one of Chris [Cornell]'s and Jason Everman's bass -- they had also gotten smashed in the same week. The guy looked at my nut and said with disgust, 'I can't fix this! What is it with you people from Seattle? Last week, I had a band called Nirvana in here with their broken guitars. Don't you people have any respect for your instruments?' We were like, "F*** you.' We weren't trying to break guitars, but we play with a lot of passion and energy and anger and joy, and we didn't really worry about it.
"But I was seriously bummed out -- it was my favorite guitar and I didn't know how to replace it. Then a friend said that he had a guitar just like it in his closet and I could have it. It was disassembled -- a bond and a neck and a bag full of hardware -- so I took it to Steven's Strings in Seattle where they put it together and painted it white. This is it, and it's been my main guitar ever since.
"It was pretty much the only guitar on Badmotorfinger [A&M, 1991] and I used it a lot on the next two, as well [Superunknown (A&M, 1994) and Down on the Upside (A&M, 1996)]. I don't take it on tour anymore because I want to preserve it, so I use new Guilds. Actually, the S-100 was out of production for a long time. Believe it or not, they put it back in production after a cover story of me in Guitar World [June '93], because they got so many calls asking for it. They told me that I single-handedly resurrected that guitar, with an assist from Guitar World. Now, that's a weird thought."
The cover in question was actually from June 1992.
And he was again on the cover of Guitar World, with one of his reissue S-100s in December 2010.
Plus an inside shot...
