Pepper Keenan has a guitar origin story like few others. For many players, a first guitar comes as a gift from parents, a hand-me-down from a family member, or something bought with hard-earned teenage savings.
The Corrosion of Conformity guitarist’s first instrument arrived under far stranger circumstances: He stole it. Not from a store or another musician, but from a deceased friend.
Keenan was born in Mississippi but raised in New Orleans, where the electric guitarist developed a love of stoner rock, sludge metal and punk.
“I was kind of a punk rock kid,” he tells Kerrang!. “I was a city kid in New Orleans.”
Thrash metal — and later Black Sabbath — were early obsessions, but Keenan also spent plenty of time at the city’s punk venues catching bands like Black Flag and Bad Brains — along with the group he would eventually join.
“At the same time,” he said, “there were older stoner dudes in the neighborhood with shitty mustaches who were listening to Robin Trower and stuff. I got into all that shit, too.”
New Orleans proved a fertile environment for Keenan’s musical development, and he would eventually become one of the central creative forces in Corrosion of Conformity. But it was in the city that he acquired his first guitar — in circumstances that were anything but ordinary.
“I started playing around 14,” he explained. “I had a friend named Pat the Rat. He was a complete red-haired hooligan.”
He got killed on a motorcycle trying to outrun the police on his shitty dirt bike.”
— Pepper Keenan
Pat lived recklessly — and died doing the same.
“He got killed on a motorcycle trying to outrun the police on his shitty dirt bike,” Keenan recalled. “He went over this thing on the levee by the Mississippi River, and there was a cable going across it. He didn’t see the cable and went straight through it.”
The loss hit Keenan hard. But he’s also candid about what happened afterward.
“He played guitar,” Keenan explains. “After his funeral, me and my buddy snuck into his house and took the guitar. I’m sure his mother wasn’t going to do anything with it, and I’m sure Pat the Rat would have wanted us to have it.”
Keenan never specified the guitar’s make or model, but its importance in launching his career can’t be overstated. While playing in one of his early bands, Graveyard Rodeo, he met the members of Corrosion of Conformity, who regularly performed in the city. By 1994, Keenan had stepped into the role of lead vocalist and lyricist as his influence within the group continued to grow.
Later, he formed another notable partnership with Crowbar guitarist Kirk Windstein in the Phil Anselmo–fronted supergroup Down, further cementing his place in New Orleans’ metal lore.
It’s a storied career that, strangely enough, began with death.
Still, his instrument didn’t end up like Pete Townshend’s first guitar, which was smashed to smithereens as a prelude to the career that was to come. His grandmother had bought it off an Italian restaurant, which itself is an odd origin story,
Alex Lifeson’s first guitar — a $57 Japanese knock-off — still gets plenty of play time under the Canadian’s fingers.
Zakk Wylde, meanwhile, sold his first good guitar and went to great lengths to get it back as he soon regretted parting with such a sentimental instrument. He sees it as a cautionary tale so other players don’t make the same mistake.
