Rig Rundown: Dead Kennedys' East Bay Ray

  • Home
  • Featured
    • Friends
    • Pedals
  • Latest
  • Playlists
  • Blog
  • Channels
    • Brands
    • Artists
    • Retail
  • Contact

Premier Guitar | 7 months ago

Full Rig Details: https://bit.ly/DeadKennedysRR
Punk rock is about energy, attitude, and message. It’s been the gateway drug for a lot of guitarists and music lovers. And those forces are what steered East Bay Ray away from his bar-band gig in 1978.

“The little hairs on the back of my neck stood up,” Ray remembered during a 2016 PG interview. “I saw the Weirdos playing. I said, ‘This is what I want to do.’ I phased myself out of the bar band and put an ad up in Aquarius Records and Rather Ripped Records. Klaus Flouride (bassist Geoffrey Lyall) and Jello Biafra (singer Eric Boucher) answered the ad.”

And with the addition of drummer Ted (Bruce Slesinger), the Dead Kennedys were born. By the time they recorded their 1981 EP In God We Trust, Inc. (on their own independent label, Alternative Tentacles), Ted was gone and D.H. Peligro (Darren Henley) became their stalwart skin slammer.

Through the band’s initial eight years, four albums, and an EP, their subversive harpoon of jagged political commentary was tipped by Biafra’s lyrics. That got the nation’s attention, but what inspires musicians to this day was the power trio’s cohesive combination of familiar and unfamiliar elements of punk and primal rock. Sure, you’ve got the power chords and the four-on-the-floor tempos, but depth and nuance under the biting messaging is essential to the DK’s chemistry. Their punk-rock bangers have modal tendencies and atonal flourishes, and some of their most thrilling songs have odd-metered backbones. Their debut single, “California Über Alles,” is a take on composer Maurice Ravel’s Boléro, no less. And nobody else in the land of the 6-string shreds quite like East Bay Ray.

“One of the reasons our songs have lasted so long is the structure underneath has a lot in common with a Beatles song or a Motown song or even a ’30s standard,” he says. “There are basic constructions that make a song work. I really had a hard time copying or figuring out solos off my favorite recordings when learning to play, so I’d develop my own musical method to get from one place to another. It’s actually a lack of technique that helped with the music.”

His creativity and resourcefulness don’t stop there. East Bay Ray was the band’s co-producer/engineer on most recordings, and he’s tinkered with his own tone tools, assembling partscasters that best suited his approach. Ray has jammed humbuckers into the bridge of a T-style for a twangier bite that helps his rapid-fire arpeggios sting a bit more. He’s slapped on short-scale Japanese F-style necks for slinkier playability. And, most notably, he put a Maestro Echoplex in front of his amp to create the signature clanging sound heard on his classic recordings with the band. (“One of my favorite records of all time is Elvis Presley’s Sun Sessions. That is one of the records that inspired me to get an Echoplex, to get that slapback echo.”)

“We just didn’t know the rules on what to play and how to play,” he relates. “That’s where not knowing something forces you to make your own solution, creating something unique and new, proving that necessity is the mother of invention. The lack of technique and knowledge helped create our sound and the music.”

Before the Dead Kennedys’ headlining show at Nashville’s Brooklyn Bowl on June 15th, PG hit the stage for a brief but illuminating tone talk. We covered Ray’s economically rich setup that includes a single Schecter doublecut and a simplified, solid-sounding Marshall, and we were enlightened about why he puts his Line 6 delay ahead of the amp and what that does to repeats.

Full Rig Details: https://bit.ly/DeadKennedysRR
Win Guitar Gear: https://bit.ly/GiveawaysPG
Subscribe to PG's Channel: http://bit.ly/SubscribePGYouTube
Don't Miss a Rundown: http://bit.ly/RIgRundownENL
Merch & Magazines: https://shop.premierguitar.com

PG's Facebook: https://facebook.com/premierguitar
PG's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/premierguitar/
PG's Twitter: https://twitter.com/premierguitar
PG's TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@premierguitar

[Brought to you by D’Addario Nexxus 360 Tuner: http://ddar.io/Nexxus.RigRundown]

00:00 - D’Addario Nexxus 360 Tuner
00:15 - East Bay Ray Intro
00:54 - Schecter S-1
05:33 - Marshall JCM2000
06:25 - Line 6 DL4
08:57 - Boss CS-3 Compression Sustainer

#rigrundown #deadkennedys #eastbayray

Two-Rock Joey Landreth Signature

TwoRockAmplifiers | 1 month ago

Rig Rundown: Bartees Strange

Premier Guitar | 2 days ago

Rig Rundown: Julian Lage

Premier Guitar | 1 week ago

Rig Rundown: Sunn O)))'s Stephen O'Malley & Greg Anderson

Premier Guitar | 2 weeks ago

Rig Rundown: Ariel Posen [2023]

Premier Guitar | 3 weeks ago

Rig Rundown: Blu DeTiger

Premier Guitar | 1 month ago

Your Favorite Rig Rundowns of 2022

Premier Guitar | 1 month ago

Rig Rundown: Shawn Tubbs

Premier Guitar | 1 month ago

Rig Rundown: Butch Walker [2022]

Premier Guitar | 2 months ago

Rig Rundown: Trivium's Matt Heafy & Corey Beaulieu [2022]

Premier Guitar | 2 months ago

Rig Rundown: Puscifer's Mat Mitchell

Premier Guitar | 2 months ago

Rig Rundown: The Smashing Pumpkins' Billy Corgan & Jeff Schroeder [2022]

Premier Guitar | 2 months ago

Rig Rundown: Mac Sabbath

Premier Guitar | 2 months ago

Top 10 Strat & S-Style Guitars in Rig Rundowns: Best-Ofs

Premier Guitar | 3 months ago

Rig Rundown: Pete Thorn

Premier Guitar | 3 months ago

Rig Rundown: Joe Robinson [2022]

Premier Guitar | 3 months ago

Rig Rundown: Foo Fighters' Chris Shiflett

Premier Guitar | 3 months ago

Rig Rundown: Marcus King [2022]

Premier Guitar | 3 months ago

Rig Rundown: Code Orange's Reba Meyers

Premier Guitar | 3 months ago

Rig Rundown: Amyl and the Sniffers' Declan Martens

Premier Guitar | 4 months ago

Rig Rundown: Exodus' Gary Holt [2022]

Premier Guitar | 4 months ago

Rig Rundown: Chelsea Grin

Premier Guitar | 4 months ago

Rig Rundown: Dragged Under's Ryan "Fluff" Bruce

Premier Guitar | 4 months ago

Rig Rundown: Anthrax [2022]

Premier Guitar | 5 months ago

Rig Rundown: Joe Bonamassa [2022]

Premier Guitar | 5 months ago

Rig Rundown: Megadeth's Dave Mustaine & Kiko Loureiro [2022]

Premier Guitar | 5 months ago

Rig Rundown: The Aristocrats' Guthrie Govan & Bryan Beller [2022]

Premier Guitar | 6 months ago

Rig Rundown: Coheed and Cambria [2022]

Premier Guitar | 6 months ago

Rig Rundown: Circle Jerks' Greg Hetson & Zander Schloss

Premier Guitar | 6 months ago

Rig Rundown: Foxing

Premier Guitar | 6 months ago

Rig Rundown: Def Leppard's Phil Collen & Vivian Campbell [2022]

Premier Guitar | 6 months ago

Top 10 Acoustic Guitars: Rig Rundown Best-Ofs

Premier Guitar | 7 months ago

Rig Rundown: Train

Premier Guitar | 7 months ago

Rig Rundown: Los Bitchos' Serra Petale & Josefine Jonsson

Premier Guitar | 7 months ago

Rig Rundown: The War on Drugs [2022]

Premier Guitar | 7 months ago

Rig Rundown: Old Crow Medicine Show's Mike Harris

Premier Guitar | 8 months ago

Rig Rundown: Mammoth WVH

Premier Guitar | 8 months ago

Rig Rundown: All That Remains' Mike Martin & Jason Richardson [2022]

Premier Guitar | 8 months ago

Rig Rundown: Shinedown's Zach Myers & Eric Bass [2022]

Premier Guitar | 8 months ago

Rig Rundown: Matt Sweeney & Emmett Kelly of Superwolves

Premier Guitar | 9 months ago

Rig Rundown: The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s Jeff and Jaime Hanna

Premier Guitar | 9 months ago

Rig Rundown: Nir Felder and Will Lee

Premier Guitar | 9 months ago

Rig Rundown: Dirty Honey's John Notto

Premier Guitar | 9 months ago

Rig Rundown: Tetrarch's Diamond Rowe & Josh Fore

Premier Guitar | 9 months ago

Rig Rundown: END's Will Putney and Greg Thomas

Premier Guitar | 10 months ago

Rig Rundown: Hannah Wicklund

Premier Guitar | 10 months ago

Rig Rundown: Shiner

Premier Guitar | 10 months ago

Rig Rundown: Goose's Peter Anspach and Rick Mitarotonda

Premier Guitar | 10 months ago

Rig Rundown: Tinsley Ellis

Premier Guitar | 11 months ago

Rig Rundown: Cory Wong

Premier Guitar | 11 months ago

Links

  • Contact
  • Advertise
  • Submit Channel

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Instagram
  • Android
  • iOS
  • © Ocean Reef Studios Pty Ltd. All rights reserved
  • Design: HTML5 UP

More

  • Terms & Conditions
  • Privacy Policy