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Deciding on which of your guitars is your favorite can be really difficult. How can you choose – they’re all your babies.
When asked, you might umm, you will ahh, and after that you’ll call it a draw, picking one acoustic, one electric guitar. But there’s a real easy way to find out which one you love the most. Just imagine the house is on fire.
Should a fire break out, your instincts will tell you which is The One, and this almost actually happened to the great Billy Squier.
In a recent interview with Guitar World, he had that split-second decision to make. And what a decision. He has some great guitars in his collection.
There’s the 1956 Les Paul Special and ’57 Stratocaster that helped him find his signature sound in his early days with Piper. There’s the 1960 Fender Telecaster Custom you hear on tracks such as Calley Oh and all over his 1981’s Don’t Say No.
But then we can understand his thinking when he went for his 1959 Gibson Les Paul Standard, aka ‘Fanny.’ Those things are worth quite a bit of money, and there are not many of them around.
“It already happened to me a few years ago,” Squier responds to the burning building question. “It turned out it wasn't serious, but I live in a large building on Central Park West in Manhattan, and there was a fire in the basement.”
Squier says the blue lights were on. Sirens were tearing through the air. He kept his cool and focused on the two most important things anyone’s life: their dog and their guitar.
“There was a big commotion – alarms going off and fire engines circling – so I went straight to the closet, looked at my four Les Pauls, grabbed that one and my dog, and trotted down the back stairs and out onto the street.”
The good news is that Squier, his dog, and the Les Paul all made it out in one piece. So did the rest of his collection.
“Everything was fine in the end,” he says. “We didn’t lose anything.”
When he got back upstairs, checked things over, Squier might have sworn that there was a ’57 Strat throwing him some shade from the corner of the room. There he was rescuing ‘Fanny’ when this vintage Strat was responsible for the biggest song of his career, The Stroke.
“I’m playing my ’57 Strat through the Marshall,” Squier said of the track, speaking to Guitar Player in 2023. “I always liked the Volga Boatmen song, and including that as a countermelody in the song’s break was a bit of cinematography that I came up with. I actually recorded a guitar solo on the track, but I took it out when we mixed it, because I didn’t think it was necessary.”
That interview is required reading for anyone looking to get a bead on Squier’s sound. But really it is simple so long as you have the tools.
“Plug a great guitar into a great amp, and don’t let anything get in between,” he said. “ I’ve always taken a tremendous amount of inspiration from the guitars I’ve played.”
You can read our full interview with Billy Squier in the new issue of Guitar World – head to Magazines Direct to subscribe and you’ll save yourself some money.
