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Strings of the Stars; Md. Firm Turns Out Hot Guitars, Seeks Out Rising Acts
Washington Post February 27 2002
Rock-and-roll's Next Big Thing might be shredding chords on a six-string in a lonely southern juke joint. He might be howling into a microphone to warm up the early arrivals at the District's 9:30 Club.
He is out there, somewhere. And Jeff Lanahan is hunting for him.
Lanahan doesn't want to record his album. He just wants to give him a guitar. A really nice guitar.
Lanahan scouts talent for Paul Reed Smith Guitars, which has grown from a one-man operation in an Annapolis attic to a $22 million-a-year juggernaut on Maryland's Eastern Shore. The company has pulled even with venerable Fender and Gibson as the nation's largest manufacturers of high-end guitars.
Lanahan and the company's founder, Paul Reed Smith, have a knack for getting their guitars into the hands of the right young rockers, the ones about to burst onto magazine covers and saturate MTV. Their uncanny star-spotting skills will be on display at tonight's Grammy Awards, where the list of nominees -- Linkin Park, Train, Lonestar and P.O.D. -- reads like a Paul Reed Smith brag book of overnight sensations.
Reed Smith, 46, once thought he would be the rock star. But the guitars he shaped and repaired in his Annapolis attic apartment attracted more attention than the riffs he played.
The skinny kid from Bowie with the giant glasses toted his handmade creations to his heroes' concerts, schmoozing with the roadies so they would take his guitars backstage.
He made his first big sale in 1975 to power rocker Ted Nugent, then added such clients as Peter Frampton and Heart's Howard Leese. But his business didn't grow beyond a custom boutique operation until the early 1980s, when he caught the eye of guitar legend Carlos Santana.
The Santana connection paid huge dividends. In the early years, it gave the young guitarmaker legitimacy. Then, two years ago, Santana made a giant splash, winning nine Grammies. Television crews swept into Reed Smith's factory on Kent Island, thrusting microphones into his face.
"It was like I'd won the Grammy," said Reed Smith, still amused and slightly baffled by the onslaught of attention.
Sales jumped from $14 million to $22 million the next year as aspiring head-bangers and collectors alike scooped up the company's glossy guitars, many costing $2,500 to $40,000. Demand was so high that the company made plans, set for completion next year, to nearly double the size of its factory.
Paul Reed Smith had hit the big time.
Lanahan is paid to keep him there by identifying the next generation of Santanas. No one has a hotter hand in the star-picking and wooing game these days.
The weekly Billboard charts testify to his phenomenal hot streak. The artists occupying the top five spots in the modern rock category this week -- Puddle of Mudd, P.O.D., Default, Linkin Park and Hoobastank -- all play Paul Reed Smith guitars.
"They have spotted the trends," said Michael Ross, a veteran industry watcher for Guitar One magazine whose editors have put artists playing Paul Reed Smith guitars on six of their last 12 covers. The company is "riding a fad right now. . . . There becomes a certain element of copy-catism."
Many of Reed Smith's chart-topping clients and Grammy hopefuls were nobodies when the company began to woo them. Lanahan haunts them backstage but always plays it cool.
"I'm not, like, a sales lizard," says Lanahan, a floppy-haired former motocross star whose cadence draws more from his California surfing days than his Southern Maryland roots. "It's casual."
He specializes in handling the "guitar emergencies" that inevitably materialize on a rock-and-roll time schedule, which means anywhere from midnight to 4 a.m.
"It's not a heart or a liver being flown in on a helicopter, but sometimes it's treated that way," said guitar technician John Ingram.
Recently, Lanahan flew down the hall at the Paul Reed Smith factory swinging a guitar painted like an American flag. This was not a guitar emergency; it was a guitar crisis. This was a guitar that Creed's Scott Stapp, the lead singer of the biggest rock band in the country, wanted to play at the Winter Olympics.
Lead guitarist Mark Tremonti had used the custom guitar at a Feb. 8 Creed show at MCI Center. But Stapp planned to play it at the Olympics, and he likes the control knobs in a different configuration.
Not a problem. A technician quickly rewired the guitar and shipped it to Salt Lake City in time for the performance.
Reed Smith's crew has matched guitars to artists' favorite shirts. It has glazed flames across guitar bodies.
But even an accommodating sort like Lanahan had to finally say no when a rocker, whom he politely declines to identify, asked for a guitar shaped like a unicorn.
The guitarists' whims are scratched on scraps of paper in Paul Reed Smith's headquarters, a 25,000-square-foot factory in Stevensville where 130 employees -- many of them guitarists -- sand and whittle the instruments by hand next to space-age robots that tackle the grunt work.
They produce just 52 guitars a day, crafting subtle curves from stocks of grainy maple and a tiny stash of Brazilian rosewood that draws shivers from the company's wood aficionados because of its resonant sound.
Tremonti and the rest of the band stopped by before the MCI Center show. Lanahan had cozied up to them before Creed sold its millionth record. He smelled a blockbuster. There was something about Tremonti's soaring sound, something about Stapp's look, plus they had the right managers and promoters, a key ingredient in Lanahan's forecasting formula.
Reed Smith thought Tremonti was a heck of a player. But he wasn't sure he should bet the company's name on Creed's success.
Yet Lanahan kept pushing.
Lanahan wanted a Paul Reed Smith guitar named after Tremonti, and he argued so intensely that he was afraid he might lose his job. He was treading on Reed Smith's equivalent of sacred ground. The company had named guitars after only two people: Santana and Ted McCarty, an industry pioneer and former head of Gibson Guitars who became Reed Smith's mentor, unlocking the mysteries of using fish glue to hold the instruments together.
Finally, Reed Smith relented.
It was a sharp move, said Greg DiBenedetto, publisher of Guitar World magazine. Too often, DiBenedetto said, Paul Reed Smith's competitors have relied on guitars named after rock-and-roll icons long past their primes.
That's not to say the industry leaders -- Fender and Gibson -- aren't cutting deals with hot young acts. Kid Rock's Kenny Olson endorses Gibson; Fender named a Stratocaster model after Blink 182's Tom DeLong.
But the stables of these guitar industry stalwarts are primarily stocked with music's established glitterati. Fender has named guitars after Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and Muddy Waters. Gibson touts Chet Atkins and B.B. King.
Chasing the next hot act might not always be the best strategy. Pop bands tend to tank as quickly as they rise. Gibson's best-selling guitar is named after Les Paul, an artist who hasn't recorded much since the 1960s but is beloved in the industry for building the first solid-body electric guitar.
Even so, the competition for up-and-coming artists can be fierce. Each of the big guitar companies sends a Jeff Lanahan into the clubs. They hang out backstage, ready to pounce on a cracked guitar knob or a wobbly fret. They are also watching to make sure that their coddled rocker isn't lured away by a tempting new plaything.
Once, Lanahan said, he bumped into another company's star hunter while leaving the dressing room of Disturbed, a powerhouse nu-metal band. Lanahan got an icy stare.
"It's like he caught me coming out of the door of his house with his wife," Lanahan said.
Not long after Lanahan left, Disturbed's debut album, "The Sickness," went triple platinum. When the band went on tour, lead guitarist Dan Donegan was playing a Paul Reed Smith.