It all started here, in the mid 1980s..My first guitar mag..
I'll be honest, I have recently been re-visiting the guitars of my youth. Maybe because I saw Def Leppard this summer for the first time live. Yeah, i'm re-defining Johnny come-lately. I started playing guitar in the mid 1980's (yes I'm old). The age of day glo guitars, of which I only skirted with my metallic coral/salmon Charvel. The time of spandex and hairspray, and shred guitar. The Guitar for the practicing musician magazines had all of the serious guys. All the guys that used to be in the ads for Shrapnel records decorated their pages on a regular basis. There were instructional articles in that now long gone magazine, one was by Joe Satriani. His articles were pretty simple in comparison, they covered basic concepts and ideas in an easy way to follow. It's not hard to realize why he was a good guitar teacher. If a guy that plays that well, can break down the things he does down easily, giving the student the confidence to tackle new things. I was immediately a fan. His main guitars were by Ibanez. But they didn't fall into the 1980's mentality of gimmics and graphics. In fact he used to do his own graphics with paint markers:
Ibanez first made a guitar called the 540R, The "R" meaning Radius. It was a thin body with an airfoil like taper to it; the lower bout was thicker, and the upper side thinned out. Along with their other guitars of the time, it has Ibanez's locking tremolo, and was available as a SSH pickup configuration as well as with Twin Humbuckers. Ibanez kind of names their guitars with numbers, like BMW's so it's easy to mix up model names. I thought I found one of these 540's in the want advertiser, as the seller stated it was like the Joe Satriani guitar, it turned out to be one of Ibanez's S540's. I had a guitar magazine with me, that had a pic of the guitar I wanted. After driving all the way out to Worcester, and then finding out it wasn't the guitar advertised. I realized it was no intentional fault of the seller, when I showed him the pic of Satriani with the guitar, he was stumped, as the guy at the music store who sold it to him was wrong, and perputated the confusion. Regardless, I didn't buy it, much to the seller's chagrin. I think he was more bummed that the music store told him it was a Joe Satriani Guitar.
Don't get me wrong, it was a nice guitar, it's a thinnish body. So thin that the 5 way switch needs a bezel to compensate for the lack of body thickness. The input Jack design is great too, no need for an input jack plate here.
When all I had was free time, I used to run around music stores. Mostly it was because I was looking for other musicians to possibly play with. But at times I came across a few interesting nuggets hanging on the walls and on the shelves of these Mom and Pop Stores. There was this lil music store in Belmont with wood paneling on all the walls, big amps and speakers crammed in there, making it difficult to walk around such a small square footaged area. They had a black SSH Ibanez 540R for sale used. The previous owner must have been a Satriani fan, as it had the Dimarzio quick lock guitar strap on it as well.
The guys that ran the store seemed pretty cool, and when I asked to try it out, I got a great "go for it" response. They asked what Amp I had and when I said a Fender M80, I expected to get pelted with insults. They simply responded with "well we got one in the back, but it's a full stack", I replied that this was not a problem. So there I am, wearing an acid washed denim Jacket, the Ibanez 540R strapped on me, with two 4x12 cabinets. I was in my teenage guitar heaven. It played great, and sound wise was really cool.
If I recall the asking price wasn't too bad, but I had just plunked down $400 on my Charvel model 375, as well as just paid for a brake job on my 1970 Dodge dart. I didn't think I could pick up enough shifts at Star Market to cover it, So I asked if they did trades, and they said yeah, and I said I'd be back tomorrow. I did briefly think I could do an even trade, but Something got in the way and the 540R became one that got lost in time for me.
Years later Joe Satriani's JS series guitars came out, based on the 540R. For some reason they didn't catch on a lot round these parts, either in players hand's or even on music store walls. Then in 1994, WHAM! They were everywhere. Of course at this point the Seattle music scene was all over everything. A shredder's guitar was way out of vogue. The prices were kind of high too, somewhere around 899ish. Considering I got my used PRS for 899 in 1995, I wasn't bumming for cool guitars in my budget.
One thing that did surprise me was around 2000ish, I started seeing them used for $599, but even a few years later, I was seeing new ones at that same price. I used to talk to a buddy of mine, and we used to have a wish list of the guitars we lusted for in our youth. In most cases we marveled at how the prices were far more reasonable, and the fact we didn't have to work our butts off bagging groceries, or running a register to come up with the scratch. His choice of a Floral Pattern Jem, brought me to re thinking the JS. I'm certainly not at a loss for any guitars, but If I was going to go down that Ibanez shredder road, I know who I'd be surfing with.
