I met John Kuker in mid 1995 as I was starting ZVEX Effects and was immediately struck by the juxtaposition of his intense ambition with his extraordinary empathy and sensitivity for his fellow man. He had come to me for advice on building a recording studio. My advice was, and remained, don’t. I had just spent 10 years in the recording business and I tried to impart to him the wisdom of Hunter S Thompson: “The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side.”
John ignored my advice and built Seedy Underbelly, a gorgeous recording studio that showed off his eccentric fascination with colors and patterns and his heroic understanding of audio equipment, mostly formed by his months of time spent with Fletcher of Mercenary Audio, where he pestered everyone daily for information about microphones, preamps, compressors, consoles, recorders, speakers, you name it. John had the most incredible memory for gear of any human I’ve encountered. He could recite model numbers for Schoeps, Neumann and Telefunken microphones as if they were birthdays of his family members and could recall exactly when certain models had changed and what those precise changes had been. John was my earliest customer. He purchased many of my “serial number one” pedals as I created new designs, and sometimes provided me with rare vintage parts that he found on his travels around the world.
Over a 20 year period John opened additional studios in New York and LA and attracted some incredible stars that kept coming back because he was a true-blue kinda guy who would do anything to keep from letting you down. He’d bend over backwards until he snapped, flying across the country to bring a piece of gear or fix something for a session. Ultimately he rebuilt Pachyderm Studio in southeastern Minnesota into something fantastically and beautifully mad, his swan song perhaps, for in fact during that project he drove his car off a cliff and into a frozen pond but walked away only partially scathed. Beverages may have been involved.
John went through life pell-mell with reckless abandon, and although that might sound like a cliché, it’s the absolute truth, but that’s a story for another day. John passed away unexpectedly at his home in Los Angeles in February of 2015. A collection of germanium transistors were recovered from his workshop, part of an audio project he was working on at the time. We are very lucky to have received some of these, just enough to make 10 tribute Fuzz Factory Sevens, featuring Lucky Cat wearing John’s glasses and playing his black Les Paul, with knobs from his favorite API console floating in the background. The first of these is going to his son Max, and the remainder are being made available for sale immediately at zvex.com. John was an incomparably wonderful guy, and we’re really happy we have the opportunity to make just a tiny piece of his life available for your rocking pleasure. Thank you.
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