Phish guitarist and latest Guitar World cover star Trey Anastasio has praised Paul Languedoc’s “genius” luthier skills while discussing the origins of his famed Koa electric guitar.
The instrument stands out for both its design and sound, created as a hybrid of several guitars – and sonic templates – merged into one to Anastasio’s varying demands. It has remained a staple of his live rig and has played a huge part in the creation of some of Phish’s most critically acclaimed work.
Speaking in the new issue of GW, the esteemed songwriter explained how an obsession with a series of wide-ranging guitarists inspired a blueprint that many would deem impossible to pull off. But not Languedoc.
As Anastasio explains, the pair first met in 1983, with the guitar builder then at Time Guitars. They became roommates, with Languedoc soon becoming Phish’s first, “and for a long time, the only crew member.
“He was our sound man, but so much more,” Anastasio recalls. “He had already made me a couple of guitars at Time – a solidbody and a miniature guitar that I traveled with. It was a six-string guitar that was so small I could put it in my backpack. I wrote a lot of early songs on that, including You Enjoy Myself.”
Fancying a new and greater challenge, Languedoc opened up the floor to Anastasio for a brand new model that could really test his limits as a guitar builder.
“At the time I was listening to a lot of jazz,” Anastasio explains. “I was really into Django Reinhardt, Pat Metheny and Wes Montgomery, which you can hear in the writing. I was trying to access the harmonic language of jazz, but I also loved Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin. So I asked him if I could have a guitar that does it all – which everybody always wants!”
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Undeterred by such a conflicted genesis, Languedoc turned wild ambitions into a tangible reality.
“His suggestion was a hollow body with a Strat scale length, long enough to twang,” Anastasio goes on. “He came up with this shape and made me the first one. That prototype was the blonde 'Mar Mar' guitar, so named because I put [an image of] our dog – who used to travel with us – on [the headstock].
“We have to give Paul credit where credit is due. He designed this unique-sounding guitar, and I started writing music that fit to the sound.”
Of the new stylistic avenues the build opened up to him, Anasatasio highlights 1990's The Squirming Coil as a fine example of how the guitar developed into a creative tour-de-force.
“The music in the middle section is some of my favorite composed music I’ve ever done,” he enthuses. “That guitar really had a midrange-y quality, because as a young guitar player two of my favorite guitarists were Robert Fripp in his Bowie era and the killer queen, Brian May, who is still the greatest midrange guitarist ever.
“This guitar allowed me to access that ‘wooooo’ tone, because it was a hollow body with long scaling. I started using it and writing a lot, so Paul said he wanted to make me one out of koa, and he gave me [Koa 1] in 1996.”
A love affair blossomed between Anastasio and the Koa 1. In fact, they were so inseparable that he describes his go-to guitar as a “phantom limb”.
“While Paul was developing it, he was making changes. We’d practice in his garage while he built guitars next to us, and he started building his own tools and normalizing the guitar,” he details.
“This prototype is not normalized yet, so it has a few weird qualities – like, the neck is really thin, almost like a Strat. He chose to start making the necks more like Les Pauls, and he also moved the rear pickup forward so it would be a little bit kinder to that central position.
“I carried it around with me everywhere and wrote so much central music on. The years 1996-99 were a really crazy time for Phish, with the festivals and everything, and this was glued to my body through that whole period. I basically slept with it – wake up and start practicing. I played it so much that I wore out the neck.
“So in 2002 he built me another one, a guitar we call Koa 2,” he concludes. “I would play it a while and then go back to Koa 1 because [Koa 1] is like a phantom limb. Paul was frustrated, saying, ‘The new one is better. I made a lot of mistakes on 1 that I fixed.’”
But despite Languedoc's protestations, even today, Anastasio cannot be separated from his iconic Koa 1.
To read the full interview, head to Magazines Direct to grab a copy of the new issue of Guitar World, which includes a cover feature with Anastasio, and conversations with Victory Amps, Fontaines D.C., High On Fire, and much more.
