Rock czar Johnny Marr on his co-stars: the guitars

By Gabe Friedman

Courtesy Dey Street Books/HarperCollins

Johnny Marr isn’t sure how many guitars he has. If he had to guess — and he often does have to guess — he’d put the number at just north of 130.

“That’s the first question anybody asks me,” he says on the phone from London.

It’s an unavoidable query for the former guitarist of The Smiths and collaborator with everyone from Modest Mouse to Billie Eilish to Oscar-winning composer Hans Zimmer. Along the way, Marr has become well known for his array of axes and the different layers of sound he coaxes out of them.

It was also only a matter of time before he chronicled them in a book. “Marr’s Guitars,” which will be published next week, is a combination coffee table book and memoir, featuring large, richly photographed portraits of most of his guitars along with the stories of how they have intertwined with his career.

He’s promoting the book with two in-person conversations, including one at the Warsaw concert venue in Greenpoint on Monday night at 7 p.m.

It’s a busy time for Marr, who is consistently working on and releasing solo music. He has an album of solo greatest hits out on November 3, and in early December, he’ll play two concerts in England with a 30-piece orchestra.

But writing is increasingly finding a space in his schedule. He found writing this new book more cathartic than his first memoir, “Set the Boy Free,” in 2016.

“The guitars have really become the best way of me telling the story of the last 40 years, because my life’s been about my work, and my work is playing the guitar,” he says. “You hold them close to you, you carry them around, I’ve written so many songs on them — all of that tactile experience.”

The rock icon spoke to Brooklyn Magazine about the book, his favorite guitars and their stories, and his go-to spots when he’s in the borough.

This conversation has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

So how many of your guitars have ended up in this book?
I think there’s 130 in the book or something like that.

How would you describe the structure of the book?
It’s kind of chronological, and because of that, you kind of follow my life. The idea came from seeing photographs that my friend Pat Graham had taken. He used a microlens and took beautiful closeup pictures of different instruments. It wasn’t that I wanted to catalog my guitars. It wasn’t that I wanted to tell everybody about my guitars. But it turned out to be the story of my life since I was 18. There’s a lot of text that goes into the time before that, even. All of these stories came out — when I got [the guitars], why I got them, what I did with them, sometimes which other bands used this guitar or that guitar. Radiohead used some, New Order used some. Nile Rodgers had given me one, Bryan Ferry gave me one — all these stories that I hadn’t planned.

How much overlap is there with your 2016 memoir?
When I wrote my other book, I went into it thinking I hear that a thing that happens when you write your life story is catharsis. So I was quite looking forward to finding out what this catharsis would feel like. And actually, there was no catharsis. I’m still waiting for it now. But when I picked up a guitar that I used extensively, I was really transported back to who I was, how I felt, what I was thinking, and what my life was like at that time. It was emotional in all kinds of ways!

As a guitar player, I get it — they’re like your babies that you have to take care of and keep in good shape.
That’s right, and you have a different relationship with a Telecaster than you have with a Les Paul. I’m trying to explain all these things in a way guitar players will recognize but at the same time won’t be too nerdy or boring for people who aren’t guitar players. For example, my 1950s Gibson 295 Scotty Moore, it’s a very eye-catching guitar because it’s gold. I explain why it was called a Scotty Moore — it’s really a Gibson 295 but most guitar players know it as a Scotty Moore because Elvis Presley’s guitar player used it and kind of defined it. And when I got that guitar, I exclusively played 1950s style rock and roll on it. People who aren’t guitar freaks won’t know this, but from what some of them tell me, they find it quite interesting.

Do you have a favorite?
Some people associate me with the Rickenbacker, because when I first came out [onto the scene, with The Smiths], that’s what people saw me with. But I’ve been playing a Fender Jaguar almost exclusively really since 2005. I put my own name [on a model] with Fender in 2011 — that guitar really is the equivalent of me playing three others back in the day, because it covers a lot of ground.

You’re famously a Londoner, but what’s your relationship with New York and more specifically Brooklyn over the years been like?
I’ve had a very close relationship with Brooklyn over the last 10 years because my friend Andy Rourke [the bassist in The Smiths] lived there. Andy passed away earlier this year, so I’ve been there a lot, particularly in the last few years. Whenever me and the band played in Brooklyn, I invited Andy to come up and play with us. I know [Brooklyn] pretty well; I’ve stayed in many Airbnbs, apartments and hotels and that kind of stuff. I can see how it’s changed. I have really enjoyed being in Greenpoint.

Any favorite Brooklyn memories?
Modest Mouse was one of the first bands to play the Music Hall of Williamsburg when it reopened in 2008. Earlier in the night, we had played Madison Square Garden with REM. Modest Mouse did our set, then REM asked me to play the encore. But the guys in Modest Mouse took off after our set — we were scheduled to play at the Music Hall of Williamsburg, too. I think we were scheduled to go on around midnight. So I dashed off from Madison Square Garden and we ended up going onstage at 3:30 a.m., by which time some members of the band were on a completely different plane. But it was a steaming show and the audience stuck around. I ended up leaving the Music Hall around 7 a.m. I came out and was making my way home, I walked down the street with my guitar and I realized that I’m a boy from Manchester and I just played three shows in one night in New York — the teenage Television fan in me was blown away.

Any favorite spots you hit up when you’re here?
There’s a cool little restaurant called The Rusty Face. They had a couple of guys playing freestyle jazz guitar, and it was really, really good. I also love Cafe Mogador. I need someone to tell me a place to get a good vegetarian breakfast.