Nels Cline : Mercilessly Enabled Gear Accumulator
Malcolm X Abram
Guitarist Nels Cline has long been on that list of guitarist’s guitarists. The 65-year-old Los Angeles native has a musical career that spans 40 years and reaches into many genres and styles of music and more than 200 recordings as a bandleader, sideman, and guest. He has worked alongside music legends and adventurous artists, including Yoko Ono, John Zorn, Ornette Coleman, Martha and Rufus Wainwright, Lydia Lunch, Bill Frisell, Henry Kaiser, Rickie Lee Jones, the Tedeschi Trucks Band, Mike Watt, and many more. When leading, Cline spreads his unique abilities around several groups, including the largely improvised sextet, The Nels Cline Singers, and the Nels Cline 4, featuring another extraordinary guitarist and his duo partner Julian Lage. He has recorded with ex-Cibo Matto member and spouse Yuka Honda as Cup. Cline also periodically performs music from his pleasantly pastoral 2016 concept album Lovers, featuring a large chamber ensemble and some of his most straight-ahead and downright pretty jazz-influenced playing. But for many rock fans, Nels Cline is the longtime guitar god for Wilco. He’s had that gig since 2004, and it has not only introduced him to a larger audience but has also found him “mercilessly enabled” by bandleader/songwriter Jeff Tweedy’s love of musical gear.
Cline has amassed an extensive collection of guitars and pedals throughout his long career. It has only expanded since joining Wilco, but they are not items for fetishizing or collecting. They are simply tools for work and creativity. He just has a helluva LOT of work tools.
“Oh no, I’m not a collector at all. I’m an accumulator,” Cline said from his new home in upstate New York, where he and Honda moved to during the pandemic.
“Seriously, I just never bought anything because I thought it would have value in the future or however you want to look at it, as an investment. It’s just now how I roll,” he said.
Cline doesn’t check the trades or pay much attention to the latest music gear; he just buys what he needs or is frequently gifted and tends to stick with guitars and pedals that simply do what he needs them to do in any of his many musical situations.
Cline has decades’ worth of accumulated gear spread around the country, including the famed Wilco loft in Chicago. So much gear that he’s not even sure about the total.
“I swear to God I don’t even know how many guitars I own, so if I were to go to (the amount of) pedals. Whew!” he said.
Forced by the pandemic and rising housing prices to move out of their Brooklyn home, the musical couple (Honda also has quite a collection of gear) had to downsize a bit when they moved upstate.
“I have a smattering of pedals here that I deemed important, which might be 20, might be 25. I have more in storage on Long Island, where our stuff is mostly, and I don’t know how many are in there. I have two [full MOOG keyboard-sized] boxes filled with pedals that I sent to the Wilco loft...and I intend to give things away and whatnot. They’re all meticulously packed with bubble plastic and layered, and they weigh a ton, these two boxes. So I’m going to guess...200 all told? I really have no idea,” Cline said.
A Pedalboard For All Seasons
Currently, Cline has a few touring pedalboards. He uses a large bi-level board with the Nels Cline Singers that includes a “big old” Boss FV-500H volume pedal he’s used for years along with a compressor, his mainstay Electro-Harmonix 16-Second Digital Delay, a Klon overdrive, reverb, and a clean boost. The board also sports a Montreal Assembly Count To Five delay he loves. “Even its unpredictability is charming.” Cline has a medium board for his Lovers performances that include an EXH Ring Thing, and the EarthQuaker Devices discontinued Pitch Bay, an accidental discovery.
While taping his segment for Reverb’s 2021 “The Pedal Movie,” Cline grabbed a few pedals from the nearby Chicago Music Exchange, including one of his favorites, the ZFEX Fuzz Factory given to him by avant-garde guitar god Henry Kaiser years ago.
“It was one of the things that intrigued me the most, and I’d never heard of it because I’m not really paying attention. I thought, this is great because one of the many things that I like to do in most situations other than Wilco is detune my guitar with a whammy pedal,” Cline said.
In both Wilco and his own music, Cline has long used a Digitech Whammy WH-1. He has had many over the years. “They all eventually break,” he said, adding that he doesn’t like any of the later versions. But during the filming, he found that the Pitch Bay was smaller and tougher, perfect for his non-Wilco touring boards, and gave him different but exciting results.
“I quite often put an out-of-tune sixth just to get chord clusters that are microtonal, either for pure texture or just to sound..almost like a metallophone or some sort of industrial drum or lid. Just a kind of a detuned clanging, and one of my favorite things, besides the clanging, is to go behind the bridge pickup and hit a chord cluster. Now that’s a double cluster, and a great thing would be to hit that cluster with a Fuzz Factory on and just create a really unpleasant sound that I like,” he said.
“I thought, well, this thing is great because I can put it on my little pedalboard and it’s not completely detuned because it’s kind of step-wise pitches, so I can’t get microtones off the Pitch Bay. But the fact that I can mix it and get two pitches in addition to my root note is fucking cool!”
The Loyalist Accumulator
With hundreds of guitars, “I need another guitar like I need a hole in the head,” he said of his collection. Cline tries to accumulate only the gear he’ll use. Once he likes a pedal, he tends to stick with it and buy more as the road takes its toll. Cline has three of the fabled Klon overdrives. During a recording session in the 90s, his buddy Kaiser brought two sizeable pedal-filled plastic bins to a recording session featuring Cline, Kaiser, and trumpeter, composer Wadada Leo Smith.
“Henry’s a really interesting guy, and he really changed my life, introducing me to a few particularly salient pedals, and one of them was the Klon which I used on that record [Yo Miles!]. I loved it, and I went out and bought one right after the session for the list price, $325 or something. It was the most expensive pedal I ever bought until I bought my Fuzz Factory; the other one Henry turned me on to,” he said.
He got two more before they “exploded into this sort of weird legendary status” and has kept one, a gold one, on his Wilco board during his entire tenure with the band.
“If I ever get desperate, I guess I can sell ‘em, but I hardly ever sell anything,” he said, though he often gives or permanently loans pedals away, including a custom color EQD Aqueduct he gave to his friend Sean Lennon.
Along with the Klon, the EHX 16 Second Delay, the Fuzz Factory, and the Whammy, Cline is loyal to the Boss DD3. “I can dial it in the dark, and I don’t need light to get the settings right, and it does things that I’m sort of used to, and it’s small. Small is important,” he said.
He even still has his very first pedal and guitar. The pedal was a gold Rosac Nu-Fuzz he got in 1968 and his first guitar, a Melody ¾ quarter scale with one pick-up he got when he was 13 and decided he wanted to be “a rock and roll player.”
He already has an impressive collection. But since joining Wilco, the “accumulation” has gotten even more intense.
“When I joined Wilco, I was surrounded by guitars, and I was mercilessly enabled by this Jeff Tweedy fellow and enjoying, for the first time in my life, solvency. And, I had low rent and no kids to put through college, so going to music stores on tour was this exciting thing to do because I didn’t just have to look like I used to. I could actually, maybe buy something! But then Gbase happened, and Jeff’s always scouring the internet for stuff. He just is. It’s just part of what he does,” he said.
Though Cline isn’t constantly scouring like his bandmate when he finds something he wants, he is now happy to go to Reverb or Gbase and simply buy it. He’s not into bidding wars or looking for deals. The retail price is just fine with him. Plus, the many pedal creators he’s befriended over the years in the business frequently gift him pedals, providing another steady stream flowing into his pool of gear.
“I have so much stuff, man. It’s just so wrong,” Cline said with a chuckle.
“So many guitars and pedals, and it wasn’t an intended thing. It just sort of happens over time.”
Malcolm X Abram is a recovering reporter and music writer and a proud 40 year guitar noodler. He lives, works and plays in the bucolic dreamland of Akron, Ohio in an old house with two dogs who don’t really like each other and way too many spiders.
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