In the last few months I’ve spent loads of time at work on the smash-proof guitar film project. This has probably been the most fun project I’ve ever worked on, not least because I’ve been such a guitar nerd for most of my life. I’ve not contributed anything at all to the construction of the guitar, but I have been part of the project group from the start. And by chance I ended up being in the film because one of the engineers couldn’t make it to Miami for the finale, where Yngwie Malmsteen played and tried to smash the guitar. The most shocking part of seeing that was how very hard he tried to break it. Especially when he threw it 3 meters into the air and let it drop onto the stage, headstock first. If any part was going to break it was going to be that relatively weak point. We were anyway relieved when it didn’t break.
On the day following the in-concert scenes, Yngwie was interviewed at The Hit Factory in Miami and me being let loose in that studio was a real treat. The walls are covered with gold records for iconic recordings made there, including Hotel California, Rumours and albums by REM, Rod Stewart and many, many others. The Hit Factory (or Criteria Studios as it’s really called) was also home turf for the Bee Gees and they recorded most of their stuff from the 70s and onwards there, being Florida residents. Including Saturday Night Fever of course.
The entire idea for the film was presented by our creative bureau at the first project meeting and the presentation included photos of Pete Townsend, Jimi Hendrix, Matt Bellamy (Muse) and other famous guitar-smashers, to illustrate the idea. Some time after that Andy Holt of Drewman Guitars in the UK was contacted and he agreed to do the designing and CAD drawings. Drewman build guitars in aluminium, so Andy brought plenty of experience of metal guitars with him. Then it was all down to the engineers to build it. I saw a lot of the daily correspondence between the engineers and Andy, but I was not at all involved in the technical discussions. Not one of my strengths.
People are generally very interested in the guitar and last week I visited Stockholm’s University to play and briefly talk about the guitar for a few hundred students. I was onstage with Frances Arnold (Nobel prize-winner for Chemistry in 2018), and Donald Johansson, the paleoanthropologist who found the 3.2 million-year-old mummified remains of a woman in Ethiopia in 1974: “Lucy”. At the suggestion of one of the organizers I played the intro to John Lennon’s Lucy in the sky with diamonds, from the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper album. That was a perfect introduction for Donald to tell the story of how Lucy got her name from that song. And Frances played a short classical piece on the guitar (with a drop-D!). At the end of the session, I had a queue of 30 or 40 students and others who wanted to hold the guitar, talk about it and take photos. That was fun, though the wait between setting up and testing my amp and finally playing for an audience was a long 4 hours.
The Let’s Create smash-proof guitar films have apparently been seen by about 35 million people around the world so far, in various media. Quite amazing really, but people obviously still like guitars. The creative team behind the film (from Forsman & Bodenfors in Gothenburg) also made the “Van Damme Volvo epic-split” film. So, it was no great surprise that they made a couple of very good films for us too.