In 2010, Kieth Urban was preparing to enter the studio to record his sixth album, Get Closer. Then came the devastating Tennessee floods, which hit Nashville particularly hard. Urban's guitar collection was left trapped underwater in his storage complex, and there was nothing he could do about it.
The Aussie-American songsmith relived the nightmare during a recent chat with YouTube favorite Rick Beato, saying that a last-gasp online guitar purchase made him feel like he was “cheating” on his go-to guitars.
The floods affected several areas in Tennessee and Kentucky in May 2010, causing $2.3 billion in damages, with Urban's instruments among the collateral.
“So we know that our stuff is floating in the water in this warehouse every day, and we can't get in there to get it and get started drying it out,” he reflects. “[It’s] days and days of that going on. I've got to start my record, and I have no guitar.”
His begrudged solution was to “buy a Clapton Strat off eBay”, but that left him feeling dirty.
“It shows up. I start the record with this Clapton Strat, and then I'm looking on eBay and I find some nice guitars,” he continues. “I felt like I was cheating on my guitars that were on life support in the hospital, and I'm looking at dating sites.
“That's what it felt like. I'm, like, ‘You never know. I might have to start a new relationship.’ It felt so awful getting anything new while all my babies were floating around in a river. So I got one or two guitars, and that was it. I couldn't get a bunch of new stuff. I just couldn't do it.”
Blitzen Trapper's Eric Earley will no doubt sympathize with Urban's woes. His beloved Gibson Hummingbird acoustic guitar was “warped and screwed up” in the wake of Hurricane Sandy in October 2012.
Luckily for the guitarist, the vintage Gibson proved it was made of stern stuff as his luthier successfully brought it back from the dead. Today, it still plays a role in all of his live shows.
Likewise, Black Crowes guitarist Rich Robinson lost “scores of vintage guitars” after Hurricane Sandy hit. Yet his 1968 Goldtop Les Paul came out of its resulting surgery better for the experience.
Goldtops featured in Urban’s wider chat with Beato. Ten years the senior of Robinson’s axe, his ‘58 Goldtop proved equally as hardened after it was resurrected following the flood.
“A lot of this stuff started chipping away post-flood,” he details. “But [the Goldtop] came out of that thing sounding exactly the same as it was.
“[It was] crazy the work that [Nashville-based luthier] Joe Glaser and those guys did, and my guitar tech, Chris Miller, did so much restoration work to drive everything out and put it all back together. It's remarkable how everything survived the way it did. The old guitars fared better than the new ones.”
All the evidence points to vintage guitars being incredibly resilient to the elements. But, according to David Gilmour, guitars sound better with age and time, too.
