Jack Higginbotham’s life changed the night he met Paul Reed Smith eating a slice of pizza down on Main Street in 1983. He went home and told his girlfriend – now his wife – that the guy was going places.
When Smith set up PRS Guitars in 1985, Higginbotham got in at the ground floor, working minimum wage as an entry-level guitar builder.
“There was something driving that guy that I was fascinated by,” says Higginbotham from PRS’s HQ on Kent Island, Maryland. “I was going to go back to get my mechanical engineering degree, but I found myself absolutely falling in love with the art and the science of guitar building.”
41 years later, Higginbotham is now PRS’s first-ever CEO. He explains why the time is right for that position, and how the company’s guiding principles on quality are driving it forward – albeit at the expense of his playing.
“Oh, it’s made me a worse guitar player!” he laughs. “Hopefully I’ll get my chops back, but I’m an infinitely better guitar builder than I ever thought I would be, and that’s more important.”
Why has PRS Guitars appointed its first CEO?
It’s actually about where our company is headed right now. We have been doing business internationally since the year we opened. But I believe this is our time to become a global business, and I think [it’s important] having one consistent leadership point, one consistent path to follow, drawing all of our company objectives into one spot…
The last year and a half, I would say maybe 50 per cent of my time has been outside of the United States, traveling and understanding these markets a little bit better.
The birds inlay and the quilted maple catches the eye, but arguably the defining detail of PRS is the guitar’s critical infrastructure – nuts, tremolo units, tuners...
I do a series of trainings, and it’s dealer training for the most part. One chapter is called “The Devil in the Details”, and it’s exactly what you’re talking about. The bridge, the pickups, the nut, the tuners, drying wood, our thoughts on resonance and sustain as it applies to moisture content inside of wood, proper ways of drying wood so that you bring out the most in a guitar... The devil is in the details. It’s what we’re interested in.
A lot of this comes from Paul.
He’s a very singular human who can listen to a guitar and tell you what’s emanating from it – whether it’s the pickup, the soldering, if it’s the amount of potting in the pickup, or if it’s a truss rod that’s too tight or the action is too high. He’ll just listen and go, “Do this, this and this,” and then you do it and that guitar is better. He’s amazing in that regard.
Players can go into a store with $1,149 and take home an SE Special Semi-hollow. Is that what you mean by quality and value?
Whether it’s Private Stock and it’s $20,000, or it’s $649 for a CE Standard, it’s about value. We want the person to get twice their money’s worth, and we feel really good about the job we’ve done. If we’ve made a $600 guitar and you’re like, ‘Man, I would have paid $1,200 for this guitar,’ that’s a home run in my book.
In 2022 you talked about a five-year plan to turn the SE line into a $75 million business. How close are you?
We’re not too far. I don’t remember saying that, actually, so good on you! That portion of our business is about three times what it was then, which I would say is a great success – because the quality of the instruments has risen, not just stayed flat.
Do you have ambitions of seeing PRS guitars on the vintage market?
I guess it doesn’t really matter to me so much, not in the traditional sense of it as an investment. That doesn’t really interest me. What I do love is the fact that people care enough about us to care enough about our roots, that they value those things.
I saw a 1986 Custom Custom 24 on Reverb going for $23,000. That is technically a vintage guitar.
My 1986 Custom 24 has an interesting story. Two years ago, I’m writing a will. I’ve got a lot of musical instruments, and so my kids are like, “What do I get?” So we had a death party. My lawyer was like, “This is a very bad idea.” [Laughs]
So everybody came over, and I had everything around the house and different colour sticky pads. I was like, “I’m gonna count to 10, and everybody go claim your stuff!” My daughter put her sticky on my ’86 Custom.
I realised I hadn’t opened that case in a while, and it bummed me out, because it was the first guitar that I can say I completely built by myself. I didn’t use it anymore. As time went on and we learned more, the guitars just got better.
Then last year I said, “I am never gonna sell this guitar, so why don’t I just go back, rip it apart, and turn it into a guitar that I would love today?”
I put new pickups in it. I put new electronics on it; new tuning pegs, new bridge, new everything. I even went back and redid the fingerboard… The guitar is absolutely unbelievable.
My point being, people look back at guitars – vintage guitars, or early PRS guitars – and it’s like, “Oh, the magic of this.” And there’s magic because it’s history. But the real magic is in the performance, and what I loved was, I was able to take a guitar that I probably never would plug in and use, and I turned it into my other favorite guitar – along with my Silver Sky.”
Silly question to finish – but if you could put a PRS into the hands of any player, living or dead…
A Silver Sky in Stevie Ray Vaughan’s hands would be quite interesting. That would be nice.
