Peter Mengede’s ‘Helmet’ Les Paul Anniversary
Peter’s guitarnerd article about his beautiful 70’s honeyburst Les Paul was so good, I asked him if he could write more about his other guitars and his times in Helmet. Read on… it’s awesome.
When writing this, I began to realise that this guitar plays an incidental part in another story altogether. One about the long term effects of spur of the moment decisions.
The first time I saw my 40th Anniversary she was hanging on the wall of the Gibson show room high above Broadway. I’d signed a Gibson endorsement deal and was picking out a guitar at their Broadway showroom with Jimmy Archey’s help. Gibson generously offered to let me have one guitar free and one at cost. I left that day with a 92 Yellowburst Les Paul classic weighing about seven pounds, and a 1991 40th anniversary reissue, ebony fretboard, loaded with P100s, weighing in at 11 pounds for a total of $960.
The next day in our Little Italy rehearsal room, I stood the classic in a guitar stand while I fiddled with preamp presets trying to match the hotter pickups when it tipped slowly forward in a tangle of guitar cord, landing face first on the carpet with a crack, the headstock hanging from a clean break. Sheepishly, I took her back to Jimmy who saw to it that she was repaired as best as possible. She was relegated to back up duties afterwards.
Luckily, the Anniversary had a better heft to her that’d come in handy later. The P100 bridge pickup was a little thin sounding tending to see-saw under the heel of my hand so I replaced it with a Bill Lawrence L 500 split coil humbucker and started using her as my main guitar.
At that time we’d also changed our backline. I went from using a Yamaha GEP50 through my Tweed 50 watt JCM 800 into two greenback loaded cabinets to a Harry Kolbe preamp through a solid state power amp into a wall of Kolbe quad boxes loaded with 200 watt speakers.
Although much louder, this set up effectively killed off most of the output stage and speaker distortion resulting in a louder, cleaner, more sterile sound. This clip will give you an idea.
By contrast, the old fashioned 50 watt head sounded markedly different …
The new rigs also had a habit of clipping and shutting down when the power amps overheated. Our guitar tech, Umbar ( Evan Bloom), seemed to cop the blame for this. I remember the other guitarist chasing him around the stage in front of 5,000 people one night in Toronto while we were touring with Ministry.
About a week later, in early December, John and Umbar’s girlfriends came to a Baltimore show. We left early after playing our set and drove to our hotel in North Carolina while John and Umbar decided to stay for a while and drive down later.
Sometime before dawn, Umbar fell asleep behind the wheel in Virginia about seven miles from the North Carolina border, John and Keith dozing in the cabin beside and behind him, taking out two hundred feet of guardrail before flipping the truck twice shearing off its roof. We found out about the accident after sunrise by which time Umbar had been airlifted and admitted to hospital in Richmond with severe head injuries. John and Keith were hospitalised in North Carolina.
When we visited them John sat up in bed and said “the tour’s over”. Nearby, Keith lay in traction with with a pin through his leg. Our gear had been strewn down the interstate during the crash. A tow truck driver had loaded it all on the back of a flat bed that now stood parked in the front yard of an Appalachian farm house. Henry, Page, Craig ( our tour manager) and I passed it down piece by piece loading it onto another rented Ryder. Apart from cracking in the edge of its case the Anniversary faired far better than the van’s occupants, as had most of our gear.
The tour over, we considered our options. Henry and Page were headed back to New York via Richmond where they planned to visit Umbar. I’d sublet my apartment in New York and was effectively homeless until the scheduled end of the tour months later. And, as I had no desire to return to New York where I’d been going through a protracted and painful breakup with an ex who I’d likely have to stay with, I followed the tour to Florida to stay with a friend and wait for news.
I would’ve done differently If I’d known what effect my decision would have had back in New York, with another band member’s girlfriend weighing in heavily on the subject of my whereabouts at our management office. By the time the tour re-convened in Texas a few weeks later the atmosphere had changed, probably aided by conversations I’d been having about increasing our publishing shares by contributing material on the next album with our manager, who also happened to be Page’s publisher. By February, we’d parted ways and I started building Handsome upon the principle of equitable partnership, splitting all recording and publishing income equally, and began writing a record.
The Anniversary collected dust while Helmet and I litigated over unpaid royalties, which, oddly, I’m still waiting for Amphetamine Reptile to pay. Umbar’s family sued Helmet for contributing towards the accident through overwork. I regret that I travelled south to Florida rather than north to see Umbar in Richmond that day, as I never got a chance to say goodbye. Sadly, Helmet let him go and he later passed away while working on an L7 tour.
Nowadays, I use the Anniversary through a JMP1, an ENGL E530, and a recently added Triaxis, through either the output stage a Marshall 2555 Jubilee Head (ala Slash) or a VHT Classic Power amp into a 300 Watt 1960 cabinet, depending on the occasion. As with all my guitars she continues to improve with age.
Here’s Peter reunited with Helmet in 2011, playing his Les Paul Anniversary.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWLu26VqyRA&feature=related
Well I’m speechless.
Quite the story. Rock on.