Jimmy Johnson: Guitar Tech for Styx

Jimmy Johnson has been plying his main trade as a guitar tech since 1974, when he scored a job on the backline of fellow Canadians and soon-to-be rising high rockers, Rush — a role he would continue off and on for almost a quarter of a century. As well as working solidly as personal guitar tech to Tommy Shaw of Styx since 1997, Jimmy’s career has also seen him support a slew of other on-the-road stars with his tech-ing expertise, including Todd Rundgren, Peter Frampton, Metallica, Tom Cochrane, the Cars, Glass Tiger, Tesla, Collective Soul and Damn Yankees — while a few unique one-off jobs have also fallen into his lap, such as tech-ing at Eric Clapton’s 2004 Crossroads Festival and on the Blues Brothers 2000 movie.

The last few years have seen Jimmy balancing his heavy Styx touring load with running his own company, Gorgomyte, which manufactures and markets a unique guitar fret and fingerboard cleaning product (see box on page 64). 2008 once again offered no slow down on the Styx front. “We did a co-headlining show with Boston throughout the US and it was terrific,” enthuses Jimmy. “There’s a bit of growing pains when you do a tour like that, but once we all got into the groove of it, it was terrific, and a nicer bunch of people we couldn’t have met. We did huge business all over the country, and chances are if you like Styx then you’re probably a fan of Boston and vice versa, so for the audience it was really great. But like all good things, it ended too soon!”

“I was in high school and a friend was a drummer in a band,” explains Jimmy. “He asked me if I wanted to help them set up their stuff on a weekend gig. I’m a technician, not a musician, and I like getting my hands dirty building things and modifying stuff. One thing led to another and as the years passed I was still doing it, even after I’d finished college. I was working for them on weekends all the time, and then my friend had an audition with Rush and he became the drummer! Of course, it was Neil Peart, and I was part of the package! He told them, ‘I’d love to join the band, but also my friend Jimmy is a good tech!’ Rush were another local band and everybody knows everybody in this business, and they were like, ‘Sure, we know Jimmy!’ And the next thing you know, we were on tour!”

When Jimmy was offered the backline job with Rush, he didn’t actually have any specific knowledge about guitars, but his reputation as a great technician went before him. He credits Rush’s axe hero, Alex Lifeson, with passing on a lot of his insightful knowledge about the instrument. “I knew nothing about guitars, but I was asked to come along, and I guess they figured I could probably handle it!” Jimmy says. “And thanks to Alex Lifeson and his patience, I learned a lot. He is an amazing man and a terrific player, but he’s also an inventor, a very hands-on fella. He would give me tasks and would be right in there with me, and the next thing you know we were doing just about anything there was to do! I learned a lot and was then calling myself a guitar technician.”

“Alex is the funniest man I’ve ever met and he’s also a mad professor!” says Jimmy. “When it was time to go on tour, he would start talking and he had very specific ideas on what he wanted. And it would be nothing like the last time we went out. He’d say, ‘This is what I’d like to make happen. What do you think?’ When I had something that was close, I’d give him a call and he would come by and play through it, and we’d polish it a little bit. And he’d say, ‘That’s close, but maybe if we can do this’ So over the course of anything from a week to a month, we’d get a guitar rig together that was suitable for him.

One of the things that Jimmy feels has really helped his corner as far as guitar tech-ing goes is the fact he hasn’t and never has had any aspirations to be any kind of a rock star in his own right. He just wants to be a top tech! “From my experience, a lot of musicians that are at that level in their career like having a guy over on the side of the stage that isn’t a frustrated musician.” Jimmy explains. “But I didn’t settle for this; this is what I aspired to! And I have found that whether it’s Alex Lifeson or Peter Frampton or whoever, they’re really comfortable with that! I’m extremely happy when the soldering iron’s out and there’s hot cable everywhere and I’m gonna come up with something really cool, rather than, ‘This is something I’ve gotta do instead of bringing a guitar and playing it myself!’”

Jimmy Johnson finally left the Rush camp in ‘97, once the band entered an understandable sabbatical period following some personal tragedies suffered by his old friend, Neil Peart. By the time Rush decided to get on the road again in 2001, Jimmy was already working full-time for Tommy Shaw and Styx, but he’ll never forget the way Alex Lifeson handled the situation. “I finally got an email one day and Alex said, ‘Listen, I’ve written you a message rather than calling you, because I don’t want to put you on the spot. If you want to come and work again, we’re about to start up, but I know you’re in a place with Tommy, and whatever you decide we’re still what we were together. Do what’s right for you!’ I was almost in tears and that’s just what I needed to hear! We’re still very close. He’s a big part of my life, but life has to go on”

“The one thing that I really changed was taking care of his effects patches,” explains Jimmy. “He was doing that originally, but a player like Tommy only wants to be at his microphone position when he’s singing, otherwise he’s somewhere else. He would have to keep dashing back to switch his effects, so it wasn’t long before I said to him, ‘I can do that for you. You want to be Tommy Shaw!’ I do all his switching for him, and in my rack I have a drawer with all the pedals in there. He leaves them all up to me. I might decide we could use a little bit of delay on this solo, so I punch it in for him and he might look over his shoulder and give me a wink, and that’s always a good thing! He leaves all of that up to me and it’s nice to have that kind of trust from the master!”

“I started using them actually back in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s,” explains Jimmy, “What had happened was that the Groove Tubes corporation took Palmer to court, saying that they stole their speaker emulator circuit. As long as it was in litigation, they had to stop production, and the Palmer fellow could only stop production for so long before he went out of business. This made the Palmers very desirable, in that they were so hard to find. But the court case ran its course, nothing really happened and the Groove Tubes patent expired. When that happened, he started remaking these things. I actually gave [Palmer] a call in Nashville one night because we were considering getting these new models, but I was concerned they wouldn’t be as good as the old vintage pieces. And he said to me, ‘The only difference is they’re a little more heat-seeking. They do run warm, but other than that they’re exactly the same.’

“So I talked to Tommy and JY [James Young] about them. We’re always looking to pick up more space in the truck so we can get other things out here, and at the time I was using these isolation boxes. I had two for JY and two for Tommy, and they took up a good six feet of space — each of them had a Marshall 4 x 12 in them. I said to them, ‘We can pick up a lot of space and the consistency of your tone will remain day after day after day, and there’ll be no worries about blowing speakers!’ As soon as I plugged them in, they loved them, and they almost sound better than a Marshall 4 x 12, if that’s possible, so we loaded up on them. I’ve even got our bass player on them now!”

Two handy gadgets that form part of Tommy Shaw’s rig are two Lake Butler MIDI Mitigators, although they’re utilised purely to jog Tommy Shaw’s memory when it comes to Styx’s set list. “I first started using them in the early ‘90s with the Damn Yankees when Tommy was there,” says Jimmy. “And the reason I use them is that when the lights go down, he’s got to think about what the next song is. It’s the only pedal I’ve found with this many large characters so I can actually dial up the name of the song and not have to abbreviate it. I’ve got one on my end and he’s got one down at his microphone position, so when those lights go down, he can look down and I’ve already put the name of the song on the display for him!”

Styx currently take a crew of 12 on the road with them. In addition to Jimmy Johnson, there’s another guitar tech who looks after James Young’s guitars and Rick Phillips’ basses, a keyboard tech, a drum tech, a carpenter, a production manager, a lighting girl, a front-of-house engineer, two drivers and two people in merchandise. On the day of a gig, it doesn’t take Jimmy and the other crewmembers long to get the guitar world set up and ready to check. “Load in for us is usually around 11.00am, and our truck empties fairly quickly,” explains Jimmy. “After half an hour, everything is in the building, and from that point we pull the lids off and get our stuff up. I’ve got it down to a pretty quick art right now. I can have our world up and running in maybe another half an hour. From there, I go through all the guitars one at a time, make sure everything’s still working, listen to them, then decide who’s gonna get re-strung that day. It’s about half of them each day.”

Of the 11 axes Tommy Shaw takes on tour with him, it’s only his main guitar, the 1998 Gibson 1959 Historic Les Paul reissue — which he plays for five or so songs per night —that gets re-strung every single day. Jimmy still sticks loyally to what he refers to as “real strobe tuners”: a Peterson R450 and a Peterson 490 Auto Strobe. “Being an old-timer, I’m also a little old-school,” he laughs. “I just find they respond much more accurately than the so-called virtual strobes. I have to have a real strobe tuner. I’ve tried the other ones and if anything new comes out I give it a shot, but quite often it just goes straight back to the store!”

To ensure all of Tommy Shaw’s guitars stay in tune once they hit the stage, Jimmy also utilises a couple of domestic temperature sensors. “I saw them and I thought, ‘I know what I can use them for! I’ve got one remote sensor down by Tommy’s MIDI Mitigator on the floor by his microphone position, and then I’ve got the other one in my guitar vault so I can look at that at any time to see if there’s, like, a jurassic temperature difference between the two positions. There’s always going to be some kind of a difference and it doesn’t usually matter too much, but if he’s in the throw of the air conditioning or if he’s got a lot of lights on him, then it could be important. Temperature change is usually a guitar player’s worst enemy as far as tuning goes!”

“I carry spare heads, spare Palmers, spare pedals, cabling, lots of guitars, lots of [Samson UR-5D] radio packs. I’m fortunate in my radio packs, in that I don’t have a guy who’s playing on his back, spinning around and crushing the radio transmitter! Tommy does play them and there are marks on them, but as far as the electronics go, he’s not smashing things and destroying stuff like a Nine Inch Nails kind of a set! But I do carry spares of everything and, the occasion permitting, I try to keep them as close to me as possible during performances, because they don’t do you any good if they’re sitting in the truck!”

Jimmy also has a load of great advice for any guitar player who doesn’t have the luxury of having a guitar technician waiting at his side, including some NASA inside tips. “The first thing I do when I grab a guitar is make sure everything is as tight as possible,” says Jimmy. “Because of what I do for a living, my friends want me to look at their guitars for them, which I’m happy to do, and the first thing I notice with a lot of guys is when I pull the strings off the machine heads will get a little loose, and the neck joints if you’ve got a Telecaster or a Strat. Make sure those smaller screws are tight! This is common sense stuff too, but you don’t think about it. When things are loose, everything suffers.

“Make sure things are clean. When you pull the pickguard off and you look underneath, blow all the dust out and contact clean everything. Over 90 percent of the time, a lot of repairs come down to the dirt in the system somewhere, and there are lots of products out there now. DeoxIT is something I use religiously, and it was originally developed for the production industry, not for musicians. A friend of mine who actually worked at NASA in Texas told me that every electrical contact of the Space Shuttle is treated with DeoxIT, which at the time was called Cramoline. Crackly sound when you wiggle a chord or something like that? Put a drop of this stuff on and it’s gone! It’s terrific stuff and it’s readily available now from most electrical spares shops.”

“I’m not saying this because I’m working for him right now, but Tommy’s such a sweet guy, and that’s all I ask! I don’t want to work in a position doing what I do if your stomach’s in a knot because you know the guy’s gonna be barking at you at dawn! Life is too short for that, and I can’t think of anybody right now who I wish I’d worked for and haven’t. I’ve turned down positions even if I need the work before because I’ve done my homework on who they are. I don’t need that in my life, to work for somebody who’s constantly miserable, and they are out there. I’m happy to be working with a guy who gives me full reign, a guy that makes you smile when he comes in, no matter how bad your day is. I know there’s nobody I’d rather work for!” 0

Tommy Shaw’s Styx rig

Guitars

1998 Gibson 1959 Historic Les Paul reissue.

Taylor SolidBody Custom.

PRS CE-24.

Fender Custom Shop Relic Telecaster.

Bill Nash Stratocaster.

Fender Custom Shop Relic Baritone Jazzmaster.

Gibson Custom Shop ES-356.

1986 Gibson ES-335.

1966 Fender Electric 12-string.

Taylor GA8 12-string.

Taylor GS8 six-string.

Amplification

Two Marshall TSL 100s with Groove Tubes Mullard EL34s with a six grade.

Two Palmer PDI-03 passive speaker simulators.

In the rack/drawer

Samson UR 5D wireless receiver.

Dunlop DCR 2SR remote wah with two VCA controllers.

Keeley-modified Ibanez TS9 Tube Screamer pedal.

DigiTech Bad Monkey overdrive pedal.

Boss BF-3 flanger pedal.

Boss CE-5 chorus pedal.

Boss DD-6 delay pedal.

Keeley Compressor pedal.

Keeley Katana clean boost pedal.

Dunlop Uni-Vibe pedal.

Lake Butler MIDI Mitigator controllers.

The legend of Gorgomyte

A few years back, Jimmy Johnson started the Gorgomyte company to market a new fret-cleaning product he had helped to develop. The product is now endorsed by a who’s who of some of the top guitarists and guitar bands right across the world, including Pete Townshend, Bob Dylan, Megadeth, Ted Nugent, Lou Reed, the Black Crowes, Bullet For My Valentine, ZZ Top, Foo Fighters, Trivium and Aerosmith, to name just a smattering. The origins of the product were relatively straightforward.

“A friend who’s a chemist said, ‘Is there any sort of stuff that you think you would love to have that you don’t have?’” explains Jimmy. “I said, ‘Well, there are so many different polishes and waxes and oils for a guitarist, but one part of a guitar that just doesn’t get taken care of is the neck of a guitar and the fingerboard and frets. Between the two of us kicking it back and forth for a while, we finally came up with a finished product that I was happy with!”

Originally, Jimmy wasn’t planning to start a business and market the product to other guitarists. That is, until a chance meeting with US country guitar god James Burton at Eric Clapton’s Crossroads charity festival back in 2004. Jimmy was working as a general guitar tech for anybody that needed him, and after explaining to Burton why he was at the festival the legend gave him his famous vintage Telecaster to clean.

“The first thing I did was open the case and I’m looking at the holy grail of Telecasters, but it needed love. I said to him, ‘I have this stuff that I like to use for polishing the frets and I’d like to use it on this!’ He said, ‘Son, you can do anything you want to this!’ So I started work on it. The whole process only takes a few minutes and the guitar came out great! He said, ‘Have you any idea how long I’ve had this guitar? Well, it’s never looked the way it does now!”

James Burton and country singer Marty Stuart, who was with him at the time, consequently talked Jimmy into making a go of it and starting a company to market it. Since then, he hasn’t looked back, and has never yet found anybody who hasn’t been duly impressed by what Gorgomyte can do to a guitar’s fret and fingerboards.

“I make this guarantee to everybody that I talk to about it: I will make your guitar better than new! I’ve gone to many shops on days off on the road, given demos and right out said, ‘Give me the guitar you’ll give to some young fella on a Saturday morning who’s gonna bug you all day by playing out of tune. The guitar that’s never had the strings changed and has never had a drop of polish on it I’ll make that your best guitar in the store in under five minutes!’ I have yet to find anybody who hasn’t said, ‘Wow!’”

To find out more about Gorgomyte and how it works, check out www.gorgomyte.com

Jimmy Johnson: Guitar Tech for Styx

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