Rex John Shelverton spirals out dreampop beauty on a decimated SG Junior
BY GREGORY ADAMS
Musical instruments are precious. That doesn’t mean you have to be precious with them.
When San Francisco-based guitarist Rex John Shelverton showed up in Vancouver earlier this month to play a set with Tamaryn — the dreampop performer he’s been working with off-and-on since the mid ‘00s — he brought along the classic white, 1962 SG Junior he’s been hoisting through a number of hardcore and rock projects over the past 30 years. Or, at least it used to be white. These days, the original paintjob has become more of a Guernsey cow-print patchwork of ivory paint and raw, exposed mahogany.
Rex explains that the nitrocellulose lacquer finish of his 60-year-old instrument is becoming increasingly brittle — thought it technically started flaking on him pretty soon after he got the guitar. Likewise, the relic’d, bare-wood aesthetic might have something to do with the veritable rolling canyon range of deep finger indentations the musician has pressed into the guitar top over the years, whether while picking into emo-adrenalized lines with the iconic Portraits of Past, thrumming into the gothic experimentalism of the Audience, or dialing into a primal Stones-iness with Vue. Through all that, his Junior has snapped and been glued back together a few times, too.
And still, the thing sounded so damned rich, resonant and beautiful in his hands as he was coursing out hypnotically delay-gazed waves of melody on Tamaryn’s latest tour.
Indeed, a lot of Rex’s gear has been through the ringer. Speaking with Gut Feeling, he explains that his main reverb unit on recordings remains the vintage Roland Space Echo he picked up for a couple hundred bucks back in the ‘90s, and used to haul out on tour both with Portraits of Past and Vue — essentially perma-running a wow-and-fluttering slapback ambiance, even in-between songs. But letting the delicate, free-running tape delay system bang around the band van without a proper case for years eventually forced him to retire it from the road. That’s more of a home studio flourish, now.
Like many players, Rex explains that he’s still deep into his tone quest. He’s played with Strats and Melody Makers, though ultimately always comes back to his prized-but-punished, single P90-loaded SG Junior. Though he started off as a more amp-based soundsmith, he now rotates pedals on the regular. But even while he admits he’s a gear-freak of the highest degree, collaborating with his friends is more important to the vibe than copping a cool new pedal.
“People get really hyper-focused on, ‘Do I need to buy this fuzz pedal or that pedal?’ I love all that stuff too, but in the end, you can just grab a Peavey Bandit and crank it. If you play cool chords and weird inversions, you can get these magical sounds out of the most basic stuff.”
“Unfortunately,” he continues through a laugh, “I still love all the boutique stuff.”
Speaking with Gut Feeling, Rex revealed a few more details on his dinged-up SG, his lifelong connection with POP/Audience/Vue co-guitarist Jonah Buffa — who was notably drilling into heavy, effects-pulsing four-string rhythms this past Tamaryn tour — and more.
This interview has been edited and condensed for flow and clarity.
You’ve played a bunch of other guitars over the years, but the SG Junior seems to stand out as your number one. It’s the guitar on the back of the Portraits of Past record! You toured with it so much in the early Vue days. You’re playing it tonight with Tamaryn. How did this guitar end up in your life?
REX JOHN SHELVERTON: When I was 19, I started working at this printing press that my friend owned, called Punks With Presses. I was sleeping on the couch and learning how to operate the press. My boss and friend Jux was like, “Hey, why don’t you take an advance if you need a guitar, and work it off over the summer?” That was his way of making sure I didn’t quit the job — either that or he was just really cool. [laughs]
I had a Gibson Challenger — like an ‘80s model bolt-on neck, fake Les Paul kind of thing — but I was going to borrow $1000 to buy a real guitar. So, I went down to Black Market, the coolest vintage shop in San Francisco at the time, but the guys that worked there were real fucking snobs. Total dicks. I was self-taught. I could play some Fugazi licks, but I couldn’t do a blues bend. I didn’t even know what a pentatonic scale was! So, I was really shy about my guitar playing, and they wouldn’t let you just try guitars out.
Then this guy Lance [Hahn] who sang in a band called J Church — and a bit before that in a legendary pop-punk band from San Francisco called Cringer — was like, “Hey I know all the guys at Black Market. I’ll get you a good deal. I’ll tell them you’re the next cool guitar player kid.” So, he hypes me up to these weird rocker guys who looked up to him. And if Lance said I was cool, then it was like, “Ok, he’s cool.”
They set me up through a VOX AC30 and started pulling guitars down. I’m trying Jazzmasters; Jaguars; a couple of late ‘70s Les Pauls. Then I tried a Les Paul Junior, a ‘56 sunburst with the single pickup. It was really beat up and affordable. They were like, “Dude, we could do you a really good deal on that one,” because the finish was kind messed up. Then the white SG caught my eye.
SGs were so emo at the time — like Fugazi and all these other bands — but I’d never seen anyone play a white one. And this one was weird, too. Usually, SG Juniors have a baseball bat neck, but this one was a special order with a slim taper neck. The binding had been painted over with white paint. It had a factory tailpiece on it from a Firebird, with a Maestro Vibrola tremolo arm. That’s not supposed to be on a Junior!
It was mint condition, no nicks out of it, and the neck on it was resonant. I think a lot of sustain comes from the neck, not the body, and the neck on that thing really vibrates. It almost feels like it’s hollow; I guess the mahogany is really dry on that thing. And it’s the lightest guitar ever.
I was like, “Dudes, this one plays so good, but I don’t want an SG. I want something cool, like a Les Paul.” Again, every emo guy was playing an SG at the time, because they were cheap. You could jump around on stage with it, and if it broke you could go buy another one. This sounded so good, though. Acoustically, it’s still the loudest solid body guitar I’ve ever played.
So, you got this thing in mint condition, but that’s obviously changed. Like, the finish is just decimated on this guitar. Seems like you’re embracing that relic’d aesthetic, but what was the first piece of damage on this SG? And did that gut you, at the time?
SHELVERTON: No, not at all. I didn’t even care. I loved the guitar because it was easy to play, it sounded good, it looked cool, and no one had one like this. [I’d thought] SGs [were] supposed to be cherry mahogany with two humbuckers. That’s what Ian MacKaye used, or Angus Young. Our heroes! This one was weird. But then [the paint] started chipping. The lacquer on it is super brittle, so it was chipping all over. It started getting the checking on the first tour – like really crumbling.
The first time I broke something was when I bent one of the Kluson tuners at a show. I remember bending it back in place and being worried it’d break off. But it didn’t…at least for a while.
This is really embarrassing, but the first time I really broke it was at a Vue show. I was jumping off of the drums, and there was this ceiling fan above us. Luckily it wasn’t my head, but I cracked the side of the headstock off [in the fan]. I got it glued the next day at a guitar shop in Texas, I think in El Paso. He was like, “Oh, it’ll be fine. Just wait a day and you can play it.”
The other side of the SJ Junior’s headstock has gotten cracked, and the neck has been broken in half, but it doesn’t sound any different. Actually, Rafael [Orlin], who was playing drums in Vue, broke the neck when he was borrowing it for a song and the strap came off. I was really angry in the moment, because I’d bonded with that guitar and it meant a lot to me. I was actually angrier that it was broken during a mellow song. [laughs] I was playing a maraca on this one, so then I threw that really hard at Rafael. It missed him, but hit this guy’s girlfriend, and it almost started a fist fight. It was really bad. Embarrassing. I hate losing my temper.
But then Rafael paid up Gary Brawer — a world-renowned luthier in San Francisco [who] works for Neal Schon, and built Prince’s guitar — to do the neck repair for me. [Gary] had laser sights. The real pro way to do it. So, it came back and it was fine.
Beauty is, all of my mahogany guitars have since broken so many times, but Titebond wood glue is amazing stuff. It’s super easy to work with, and you can basically fix anything with it.
Jonah told me tonight that you had to rescue this guitar from an armed compound at one point…
So…the theft story in brief is that our van was broken into when I lived and worked in West Oakland at Punks With Presses. After canvassing the neighborhood and of course checking the local pawn shops I finally found one dude from around the corner who said he saw my guitar case at the nearby “Fence” — a house that stolen goods were stored at for later sale.
He thought I could probably hire a few of the young hustlers who worked our part of Dog Town to steal it back. So, in desperation I approached a few of these kids who were armed — it turned out they assumed I was as well — about making a deal to bust into the Fence for my SG, which had a distinct blue-and-gold, racing-striped case. $76 and a few minutes later, I was excited to see these kids laughing and swaggering back with my spraypainted Gibson flight case in hand. Somehow the narrative has since taken a Robin Hood-esque turn, with a righteous neighborhood justice vibe.
Anyways, my guitar case hadn’t even been opened. I’ve done my best to keep a better watch on it in the following years.
You played a Vue reunion show earlier in the summer; you’re doing these Tamaryn shows at the moment. How different is your setup between those two projects? Any differences?
SHELVERTON: When Tamaryn and I first started doing what we’re doing [in the mid ‘00s], it wasn’t long after Vue had stopped…[and] the setup wasn’t really different. I would use a little more delay on my Space Echo for Tamaryn. I have a ‘64 Fender Pro Reverb that was my main amp, but we can’t play loud at clubs anymore. So now I have a ‘76 Princeton Reverb with a 12-inch Alnico Creamback in it. But even with the Princeton sometimes, I can’t turn up as loud as I want.
I used to only use amp overdrive, never had an overdrive pedal. I just don’t like the feel of them, generally. But now I’m using a Knight Audio treble boost — a traditional treble boost, but I put a thicker cap in it — going into a Hudson Broadcast transformer. So, you get transformer saturation, which sounds like what amps do so much more than just a regular overdrive pedal. It’s pretty ugly sounding.
And then I have an older Chase Bliss analog delay, which is basically like a Memory Man with presets. I use that as an “always-on thing.” Even for Vue, I would always have my Space Echo on, just for slapback.
I also have an ambient delay that’s from this Norwegian company Pladask Elektrisk, this granular delay that’s super fun for doing ambient stuff with. I was using a 1985 Ibanez Power Series digital modulation delay, this green pedal, but it’s kind of rare — they only made it for one year. I don’t bring it on the road, so I bought this Norwegian thing to replace it in the chain.
You’ve said in earlier interviews that Portraits of Past was less effects-based, that it was more your downtuning and lack of proper intonation that brought out a natural chorusing on the full-length. Where were you sitting with that tuning?
SHELVERTON: Standard tuning, but down to C sharp. And then we double tracked all of the guitars on that. We spent time making sure that the double tracking was really tight, so that it wasn’t flamming. We’d just been on tour, so we were really tight at the time. But then that warbly-ness [between the tuning and the intonation] created this kind of chorusing, weird Sonic Youth-y thing. Or, Unwound was what we were going for — [they were] our favorite band.
Back then I had a Fender Quad with Greenback reissue speakers. I bought two Greenbacks, and then the other two were just some cheaper Celestions — I had blown the blue label, awful Oxfords that were in the Quad while out on tour. This was in ’95, so the idea of spending $1000 dollars on a speaker was insane to me, but a Guitar Center would let you return stuff up to 30 days. So, I put in the Greenbacks on the top, and the cheaper Celestions on the bottom, and we miked the Greenbacks for the record — but I was always going to return those after we recorded.
I mean, it was a great Fender tone: a Blackface amp with extra mid-range from the Greenbacks, with the P90 of the SG also adding mid-range to that classic, scooped Fender thing. The top end details were super smooth sounding. It really worked. We didn’t know at the time that this was a classic combo. Jonah had a JCM800 and a 4x12 with Celestions, but it was always harder to get that [same tone] for what we were doing.
Another classic combo, you could say, is Rex John Shelverton and Jonah Buffa. We’re 30 years into this musical partnership, this connectivity through Portraits of Past, the Audience, Vue, Bellavista, and now with him playing bass for Tamaryn. How different of a vibe is it, though, with him handling the low-end rhythm?
SHELVERTON: It’s different, because Jeremy [Bringetto, also of POP/Vue/Bellavista] has always been our bass player. We all went to junior high together. Music was the way to get out of our little town, so we’ve all been playing together for so long. But yeah, Jonah had always been more of a guitar player.
Jeremy was playing bass with Tamaryn. I played on the recordings, but I would always be writing through Jeremy’s style of bass-playing, because I’d been around it so long. He’s actually more like a Peter Hook, guitar-y bass player [using] a pick, delay, reverb, and overdrive.
Now Jonah adds his own flair, and it’s really exciting. He’s so used to playing music that we’ve written together; we have the same musical intuition. And he’s a total tone-freak, too. He loves trying all the different gadgets and amps. We’re actually using Jeremy’s bass right now. Jonah just bought a really nice Dan Armstrong bass before this tour, but Jeremy’s ‘60s Vox beat it out, sound-wise. So, we took that out with us!
Is there any new music coming up with any of these projects?
SHELVERTON: Tamaryn and I are working on some new songs, and hopefully we’ll be getting something out in the next year or two. She’s focusing on school, but she lives in my old hometown, in Half Moon Bay, so she’s close to San Francisco. We’ve been jamming and we have a bunch of stuff.
I’m always doing Bellavista, and I’m also doing production. Right now, I’m working with a cool band called Pink Breath of Heaven, who are really awesome. Kinda shoegazey. It’s a similar production style to the other stuff I’ve done. It’s a whole different creative world, though, twisting knobs [and] getting the tone quest [down] for other people.
Further reading: You can read my vintage interview with Tamaryn on dreamscapes, love songs and working with Rex – done in 2008, but left unpublished until 2021 – over here.
Even further reading: You can read Gut Feeling’s beginner’s guide on Ebullition Records-style emo-hardcore, including Portraits of Past, over here.
