Gretsch honors Malcolm Young

[Dave W]

Gretsch USA Custom Shop Malcolm Young Salute Jet

$10K MSRP, with heavy relic aging.

[Basvarken]

I'm guessing this is old news? Cause under "the beast unleashed" I see they "placed it in Malcolm's hands and the cannons of rock erupted"

I could make all kinds of quasi funny remarks. But we best not go there...

Cool guitar, but I doubt there's any serious market for this.

[Highlander]

Not going to make a joke about this... all I feel is sadness...

[Dave W]

I'm guessing this is old news? Cause under "the beast unleashed" I see they "placed it in Malcolm's hands and the cannons of rock erupted"

I could make all kinds of quasi funny remarks. But we best not go there...

Cool guitar, but I doubt there's any serious market for this.

It says they started on it in 2008. He could play back then and for a few years more. But it is new, won't be out until this summer.

What do you consider a serious market? I'm sure they don't plan on making many.

Not going to make a joke about this... all I feel is sadness...

It is sad, but as they say, it's a salute to him. They can't put his name on it without his approval. Hopefully he'll get some royalties.

[Chris P.]

They already had a one pickup Malcolm Young sig, but not a real replica like this. I saw it at the NAMM and I like it.

[Alanko]

It reads like this guitar has been in the works since 2008. Some of the content now seems slightly bad taste given Malcolm's permanent departure from the band. It is a cool guitar, but without the Malcolm link it would be a very ugly guitar. On top of that, having such a detailed replica seems slightly at odds with the everyman nature of the original guitar. I would say the guitar is more about attitude and economy, which stretches right across the AC/DC canon, rather than a painstaking recreation. Having said that there must be rich AC/DC fans out there, so fair play giving them something cool.

[amptech]

In general I like instruments to be worn naturally, but Mal's hog differs a lot from most guitars. As a kid fan of them, it took me (before internet) to find out what guitar he played - it was always 'that mystery' guitar that only he played.

And I cannot see any bad taste in honoring/saluting him with a Limited run replica.

[Alanko]

In general I like instruments to be worn naturally, but Mal's hog differs a lot from most guitars. As a kid fan of them, it took me (before internet) to find out what guitar he played - it was always 'that mystery' guitar that only he played.

And I cannot see any bad taste in honoring/saluting him with a Limited run replica.

Apologies, I was running with two separate ideas at the same time and maybe didn't differentiate the two clearly enough. The bad taste comes from having some of the quotes on that web page in the present text (apologies for the shouting): "SOMETIMES I LOOK AT MALCOLM WHILE HE'S PLAYING, AND I'M COMPLETELY AWESTRUCK BY THE SHEER POWER OF IT..." / "MAL'S THE BAND'S FOUNDATION. HE'S ROCK SOLID AND HE PUMPS IT ALONG WITH THE POWER OF A MACHINE."  / "DRIVING, DEAFENING AND TOTALLY UNSTOPPABLE".

They are great quotes, but I feel they are slowly slipping out of context given Malcolm's deterioration and permanent departure from the band. Notably the notion that he is 'unstoppable' while a Malcolm-free iteration of AC/DC are touring and potentially, according to rumours, going to record a new album with Axl up front. Likewise suggesting that he is the foundation of the band, now in absentia, and suggesting that there is a 'sheer power' when he is playing onstage. Again the quotes probably made perfect sense in 2008, but less so in 2017.

My second thought was that there is something inherently everman about AC/DC. They were the perfect antidote to bands in capes and kimonos, with banks of Oberheim and Moog synths, twenty guitars in obscure tunings, Taurus bass pedals and Burmese dinner gongs littering the stage. AC/DC looked like the sort of dudes that wandered in off the building site or, in Bon Scott's case, like he'd just sidled in from some sleazy business in an alley somewhere. Virile, sweaty and iconoclastic music for young lads that wanted to headbang until their necks hurt and their ears rang. Likewise their gear was as unremarkable as their looks; a beat up SG with the headstock broken and repaired a half dozen times and a Gretsch robbed of perceived unnecessary hardware and treated with a sanding block. Between the pair of them Angus and Malcolm had a Telecaster as spare, at least during their early years. To then take an element of that whole ethos and aesthetic, and reproduce it ding for ding, dent for dent, seems slightly to be missing the point of the whole instrument. You are fetishising something that was more or less intentionally nonconforming and dissident; a knackered Gretsch that looks like it was stored in a hessian sack and thrown headlong into the back of a van endlessly for several decades. For me, the message of Malcolm's Gretsch is more important than the wood and metal of the instrument; go and find something that works for you and modify it until it fits like a glove. It doesn't matter if that instrument is all but entirely synonymous with a handful of genres you don't conform to yourself, be brave! Forget aesthetics, it just has to work every time and let you deliver your voice consistently.