When the Preatures stopped in to The Current's studio for a live session, guitarist Jack Moffitt took some time to talk about a guitar he serendipitously found just before the shop in which he found it went into receivership.

Moffitt describes his Gibson 335 as "me in a guitar," and he has a vivid way of describing it.

Tell me about the guitar you're playing.

It's a Gibson 335. I believe it's from the late '60s, I think it's '67. And at one point, it was a 12-string and someone chopped the headstock in half and re-drilled all the holes and turned it into a six-string.

How long have you had this?

I've had this guitar for six years, maybe a little be less than that.

Do you remember where you got it?

I bought it in Sydney, in Australia. It was unusual for me because I don't normally walk into guitar stores. I usually go in there and go, "Mmm-hmmm," and leave.

But we were working on an EP at the time and [Preatures bassist] Tom [Champion] and I went into a guitar shop that's quite infamous in Sydney — it's closed now — called Jackson's Rare Guitars.

What about Jackson's Rare Guitars made it infamous?

Jackson's Rare Guitars is infamous I suppose because the gentleman who owned it was a bit of a shark, I guess. He had a fantastic collection and a lot of it was on consignment, but he was trading while insolvent. He literally was broke and operating on credit, and one day the store shut down and all of those guitars just disappeared. So it was almost like, in the space of a few days, this kind of guitar mecca in Sydney had just disappeared and all of the guitars had suddenly vanished.

I'm sure they're all still in storage, and there's a lot of legal hoo-hah around how he shut the store down and where did all those guitars go, because there was lot of beautiful stuff in there, lots of early-'50s Fender stuff, and late-'50s Gibsons and beautiful hollow-bodies from Italy and just awesome pieces. And they've just suddenly disappeared.

Good thing you were able to visit before they all disappeared.

I'd never really set foot in there, and I didn't walk in expecting to find anything, and this guitar was just there. So I picked it up — I think I played it for like two hours or something, just trying to get a read on it because I never fancied myself as a 335 player; I was always into Les Pauls and Telecasters and stuff.

But I like the store, and I like that it's a bit of a pig and I sort of felt like was just me in a guitar, which sounds really silly but that's kind of the point.

What is it about the tone of this guitar that struck you?

I use words like "plug" and "squiggle" and "thump", I guess, because I can't really find the right adjectives to describe it. But it had all those qualities and sometimes I'm a bit messy and it seems to take that fight really well, and then when I'm trying to be articulate, it can take that as well.

And I love the sound of it. It's classic but it's interesting. And it doesn't take an awful lot of work for it to be in the right place. It just sort of takes me where I want to go.

You've been on tour for a while; how is it as a touring guitar?

It's great. But I do get worried about it. I was hesitant to take it on the road at first, and I still am. And I've got a big, old hard case for it, but I still get worried about it because GIbsons are prone to snapping at the headstock, especially because it's like 15 degrees [60° F] or something like that, but the headstock comes off the neck and all the Les Pauls and SGs and 335s are the same. They break where the joint between the neck and the headstock starts to flare out, so a lot of people get them deliberately broken and then fix them because apparently they sound different after that, they never sound the same.

Never sound the same in a good or a bad way?

Some people say it's an improvement. I guess it's similar to when people take the necks off their Telecasters and re-bolt them, and it changes the sound. And I guess you couldn't really refute it because it's all resonance, and suddenly you're disturbing the connection between all of that wood talking to each other.

But we'll see how it goes with this one. I take good care of it.

Watching and listening to you play, there's a jangly, almost Nick Valensi quality to your playing.

I like him a lot, I think he's really good, and Albert Hammond, Jr., I think he's a really good guitar player.

But growing up, I was really into Mark Knopfler and Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page and obviously Hendrix and all those big guitar players from the '60s. But I also like Ry Cooder, I think he's a great guitar player.

I love what Nick Zinner does in the Yeah Yeah Yeahs; he's just so reckless and wild and free to express himself. There are so many …

There are the people when I was learning — I taught myself how to play — I would steal licks from them. Another guy called Chris Cheney who's in a band called The Living End from Melbourne in Australia, and he's such a brilliant guitar player.

All those big famous dudes — I was in love with Scotty Moore when I was like, nine years old, I just wanted to play like Scotty Moore and have the Gibson ES-175 and just clip away like Cliff Gallup or someone. So yeah, I love a lot of those '50s players; I think they're the best.

Resources

The Preatures - official site

Gibson Guitar

Related

• The Preatures perform in The Current studio
• The Preatures
• Gibson Guitars