Guest post by Nathan Arizona
One of the most highly regarded guitar players of the past four decades has just sold about 80 of them for nearly $5 million. But don’t worry British rock fans: Johnny Marr will keep on plucking.
Marr played a lot of those guitars with the Smiths, the influential 1980s indie band he co-founded. Since then he has led his own groups and been an in-demand contributor to other bands. When he comes to Noel Gallagher’s studio, the guitarist and vocalist for Oasis becomes just another fan.
“Me, with my arms folded, telling Johnny Marr how to play guitar? I wouldn’t fucking dare,” he once said. “I normally go into another room while he’s doing his thing but keep the door open so I can marvel at the magic.”
The auction at Christie’s in London on Sep. 17 raised more than three times the estimate and drew bidders from 34 countries. The sale included amps, harmonicas and other items.
Marr apparently wasn’t selling his guitars to pay the rent. His net worth is said to be about $14 million. He’s donating some (or all, depending on who tells you) of the proceeds to the Guide Dogs for the Blind Association and Britain’s National Autistic Society. He has said he’d rather have the guitars played by somebody else than sit in storage, although they might be looked at and bragged about more than played. Let’s hope Elon Musk isn’t a guitar fan.
With the Smiths, Marr avoided familiar blues-based licks and was not given to flashy solos, but he drove the band. His ringing, jangly playing style helped bring a new focus on guitar bands that led to the Britpop trend of the ‘90s.
He also gets credit for putting up with and counter-balancing the band’s equally important co-founder and singer, the mopey, foppish, over-all eccentric Morrissey. Marr wrote the music, Morrissey the lyrics. The two have had a long-running feud.
One of the guitars sold at Christie’s was the 1960 Gibson Cherry Red ES-355 given to him in the early ‘80s by the president of Sire Records, who was trying to persuade the band to sign with his company (they didn’t.) Marr took the guitar home and wrote the first part of “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now.” Yeah, that’s a Morrissey title. “Many instruments come with songs in them,” Marr has said, That one sold for $270,703.
Also on the block was a 1984 Gibson Les Paul featured in the 1985 video for the Smiths’ “The Boy With a Thorn in His Side” ($274,000), an oddball nine-pickup Fender Stratocaster ($50,750) and the 1982 Rickenbacker 330 Jetglo he played on the first Smiths album ($473,709).
Marr loaned the Rickenbacker to an up-and-coming guitar band he took a liking to called Oasis, which was building on the Smiths’ work. Oasis used it when they recorded their first album, “Definitely Maybe,” in 1994. The guitar was also seen on the cover for Oasis’ first single, “Supersonic.” Nobody knew it would one day be worth almost $500,000.
Marr released his latest solo album, “The Age of Everything,” on Oct. 2 to good reviews. He and his band worked on the songs during a U.S. East Coast tour and recorded them back home in Manchester.
Here are the Smiths with “The Boy With a Thorn in His Side.” Morrissey takes up a lot of psychological and emotional space in any Smith’s performance, not least when he pretends to, well, have a thorn in his side. But, hey, it was the ‘80s. Meanwhile, Johnny Marr abides.
This is a performance of Oasis’ “Champagne Supernova” by Noel Gallagher and Johnny Marr with some unwelcome audience singalong. But it does give a picture of how the two relate on stage. Marr takes over at 4:44. They bonded faster than a cannonball.
