Brian Setzer says he destroyed his beloved 1959 Gretsch 6120 once after a favorite stage stunt went disastrously wrong during a show in Japan.
Setzer and the vintage electric guitar had been inseparable since he bought it as a teenager. But during a concert in Tokyo, he recalls that a crowd-pleasing move he’d performed countless times finally backfired.
“I used to throw the guitar up, way as high as I could, and I would go ‘Wham!’ and snatch it out of the air, and start playing it again,” he says in an interview posted to his YouTube channel.
The crowd loved it, and Setzer loved doing it. So he repeated the stunt night after night — until it finally went wrong.
I lost it in the lights. I couldn’t see it. It disappeared, and then all of a sudden, down it comes.”
— Brian Setzer
“I lost it in the lights,” he explains. “I couldn’t see it. It disappeared, and then all of a sudden, down it comes.”
Instinctively, he threw out his hands to catch the falling Gretsch. It was too late.
“I missed it. And it made this god-awful sound, like, ‘How could you do this to me?!’
“The neck flew into the audience, and I had the body in my hand, thinking, Oh my God, I ruined my guitar!”
Fortunately for Setzer, the accident happened in Japan, where respect and politeness are deeply ingrained cultural values.
“Some guy brought me the neck back,” he says. “Anywhere else, it would have been stolen.”
Renowned luthier and pickup designer Tom Jones eventually repaired the guitar, although Setzer says it wasn’t quite the same afterward.
“It didn’t play right for a couple of years. It just didn’t have it.”
Then, just as mysteriously as it had lost its magic, the guitar recovered.
“All of a sudden it started to play right again,” he says. “I don’t know why!”
It should be noted that his guitar tech, Tyler Sweet, tells the story differently. In a “Rig Rundown” with Premier Guitar, he says the Gretsch was damaged in a handoff to Setzer's former stage tech and that the guitarist threw the damaged neck into the audience, forcing his crew to retrieve it.
No matter how the episode went down, the loss of the Gretsch would have been especially painful given how long it had been part of Setzer’s life.
I found it in this local paper. I called the guy up and asked, ‘Is it like Eddie Cochran’s?’ He was like, ‘Who?’”
— Brian Setzer
“I was 17 years old and found it in this local paper, The Byline Press,” he told Guitar Player in 2019. “It said, ‘Gretsch guitar, 100 bucks.’ I called the guy up and asked, ‘Is it like Eddie Cochran’s?’ He was like, ‘Who?’
“So I went to his house, and there was the guitar, the 1959 orange 6120. It was exactly what I was looking for. He was going to refinish it and make it natural. He had all of the electronics for it in a shoe box. I gave him 100 bucks, took the guitar and the shoe box, and off I went. It was destiny.”
The 6120 became his main guitar as the Stray Cats sparked a rockabilly revival on both sides of the Atlantic.
By then, Setzer had customized the instrument with a sticker depicting a 1950s pinup girl sitting on a vinyl record and replaced the original knobs with a pair of dice taken from a Monopoly board game.
“The stickers and the dice became trademarks,” he says, “but I put them on without much thought. I found the pinup girls in an old lawnmower repair shop. And I put the dice on because it didn’t have any knobs. I just got a set of Monopoly dice, drilled holes in them, and squirted in some Krazy Glue.”
The only meaningful modification the guitar received, he says, was the addition of Sperzel locking tuners. The stock Filter’Tron pickups and most of the original hardware remained untouched.
Setzer eventually retired the guitar. “It had beer spilled on it and smoke blown all over it,” he says. Besides, he already had a worthy replacement waiting in the wings.
“In about 1984, I ran into Steve Miller in a bar in Germany,” he recalls. “We talked about Gretsches and how mine was getting trashed. When I got back to New York, there was a big box waiting for me, and, to my delighted surprise, it was a 6120 from Steve Miller. And not just a 6120 but a great one!”
Setzer's original 6120 would ultimately become the basis for a Gretsch tribute model. But more importantly, it’s the guitar that launched him on a career that continues as the Stray Cats undertake their current tour — their first since his recovery from an autoimmune disorder and an inadvertent dependency issue.
Despite everything that happened to it, the original 1959 Gretsch survived, and more than six decades after Setzer bought it for $100, it remains one of the most famous rockabilly guitars ever played
