So, the way that I acquired musical knowledge was just by listening to a song and if I liked it, I liked it. It didn’t matter if my friend liked it or not. There were literally hundreds of hours spent sitting around a turntable, late at night in someone’s basement, plowing through all these classic rock records to find a song that was really great instead of really stupid.

DC: You mentioned SST. Apart from Sonic Youth, I’m hard pressed to think of another popular band that uses alternate tunings.

JM: Well, My Bloody Valentine.

DC: I guarantee if you walk down the street and ask random passers by who My Bloody Valentine is, 9 outta 10 people would have no idea. At-least Sonic Youth was on the radio in 1994. But how did you get into using different tunings?

JM: My first guitar was a little Harmony acoustic. My parents picked it up at a garage sale or something. It sat in the house and I never saw anyone play it. But I started to mess around with it. This thing was so beat up and had been neglected for so long, you couldn’t actually tune it. The tuning pegs were so rusted and bent, the gears were totally shot to hell. I got a can of WD-40 and sandpaper and toothbrushes. I tried to get the pegs to turn a little bit and had to use pliers to get them to turn. And when I could get it to a relatively decent sounding open tuning, I’d leave it like that until, it changed on its own.

One good thing about that was I didn’t have to know some standard folk song in a standard tuning. It opened my mind like nothing else. I had so much freedom. It maybe didn’t sound radical, but I came up with melodies and chord progressions that were really interesting and that made it inspiring to sing to. So, to this day, I have four guitars around the house in crazy tunings that would be impossible to duplicate. I have no idea what they are, but I still write songs that way. 

I was at the Salvation Army in Chicago. It was snowing like crazy and I’d never found that Holy Grail instrument people say they find in pawnshops. I look above the head of the clerk and on a shelf behind a bunch of decorations is a Harmony Sovereign, which is an excellent mid-grade guitar. Jimmy Page used them. The clerk gets it down and the thing is a train wreck: someone pulled the bridge off and used big wood screws, attached it back into the guitar. It split the body and the neck was all warped. But I strummed it and it was in this insane tuning. The most rusty, destroyed strings – the thing hadn’t been played in years. Approaching stringed instruments the way I do, without having to follow the classic structure of tuning and chord progressions, is really exciting.