BONUS TRACK: THE ART OF SHREDDING

The “Dean from Hell”

“Pick me out a winner.”

ROY HOBBS,

The Natural

Every guitar hero has a signature guitar. Darrell Abbott’s was a blue Dean ML illustrated with a stylized lightning storm. It was his prize for finishing first in an Arnold & Morgan music store guitar contest when he was fifteen. Darrell, nearing driving age, had his eye on a different prize: a bright yellow Firebird. He needed six hundred dollars for the car, and as it happened, he had something to sell. His dad had ordered him another Dean model, an ML Standard with a sunburst finish. It arrived just before he won the ML in the contest. One of the guitars was now superfluous, and it wasn’t going to be the one his father had scrimped and saved to buy for him.

“Right when he turned sixteen, he was, like, ‘Dude, dude, buy my ML. I’ll give you a great deal. Man, it’s really cool,’” Buddy Blaze says. “Blah blah blah. He thought it was ugly. And it was pretty damn ugly. He wanted that car. I said, ‘Darrell, man, that’s your trophy. You don’t sell your trophies.’ I said, ‘especially to buy a car. It’s a trophy.’”

Blaze refused to buy it, but Darrell found someone who would.

“The singer in my band was also a friend of Darrell’s, and Darrell talked him into buying the ML,” Blaze continues. “At that time, I had three or four really nice guitars. The kid came walking into rehearsal with this case, and I knew it was a Dean case, and I knew exactly what was inside of it. He said, ‘Wait ‘til you see what I got.’ And I’m, like, ‘Fuck you.’ I said, ‘You did not buy Darrell’s guitar.’ And he opened it up, and I go, ‘You fucker.’ I said, ‘Any one of my guitars—it’s yours. But that guitar doesn’t leave this house. That guitar goes to me.’”

Blaze painted over the guitar’s original maroon color (“I had a rule that my guitars had to be blue,” he says), found someone to finish it out with the realistic-looking electrical storm, and replaced all of the ML’s hardware. The result was a guitar that retained its original shape and little else. When Blaze was finished with his work, Darrell wanted his trophy back, or at least a copy of it.

“When I went to Kramer [in 1987], I shut down my shop in Arlington and drove over to Darrell’s house,” Blaze says.

Because Darrell was begging me for a couple of years to make him a copy of that guitar. I went over to his house and said, “Why don’t you borrow this while I work on the copy?” I didn’t need it to duplicate it; I made it, so I knew exactly what it felt like. He was, like, “Dude, dude, I’ll scratch it, man. I can’t do that.” He was, like, shaking. He was all excited and stuff.

I had no intention of ever taking the guitar back. He called me at my office in Jersey a couple of weeks later. He said, “Dude, whatever it takes, man, I gotta have this guitar. I can’t give it up.” On and on, how he had to have that guitar. I said, “Dude, it was always yours. I don’t care. You take it.”