HOW GA-20’S MATTHEW STUBBS AND PAT FAHERTY CRACK DOWN ON THE SLICK, OVERPRODUCED SOUNDS OF MODERN COMMERCIAL BLUES
By Jim Beaugez
THERE’S NOTHING REVEALING about the band name GA-20 — unless you happen to be obsessed with Holy Grail vintage guitar tones like guitarists Matthew Stubbs and Pat Faherty, who founded the raw blues trio in 2018.
You read that correctly: Instead of merely referencing their favorite guitar tones from early electric blues and rock ’n’ roll records, Stubbs and Faherty went all the way and named their band after the period-correct Gibson GA-20 amplifier — which Stubbs keeps front-and-center in his amp arsenal — as a statement of intent to avoid the slick, over-produced sounds of some commercial blues.
“I want to make classic-sounding records. I want them to be timeless,” says Stubbs, seated next to Faherty, his foil in GA-20. “But,” he adds, “there are things on those albums [from the Fifties and Sixties], sonically, that I always chase. And not just blues, but soul and jazz records, country records, old pop records.”
Stubbs discovered his love for classic electric blues while growing up in New Hampshire, half a country away from the traditional blues alleys of the South as well as Chicago’s South Side, where electrified blues came of
age. It wasn’t a blues desert, though; players like Duke Robillard, who co-founded Roomful of Blues in 1967 and later took Jimmie Vaughan’s spot in the Fabulous Thunderbirds, were regulars on the New England club circuit. Stubbs quickly graduated from Lenny Kravitz and Jimi Hendrix to Albert King, and “pretty much had blinders on” for the next decade as he absorbed and learned to play traditional blues.
Stubbs says the collaborative nature of Chicago blues is what spoke to him. “With Chicago blues, especially if it’s ensemble playing, it’s a band of musicians playing off of each other,” he says. “It’s not just a riff or a straight beat and then a guitar player going crazy. That Chicago stuff in the Fifties, I don’t know if it gets more ensemble-playing than that.”
Stubbs’ syllabus, which included heaping doses of Chicago greats Little Walter and Hound Dog Taylor, prepared him to take over the guitar role in harmonicist Charlie Musselwhite’s band 15 years ago. In addition to hearing Musselwhite’s endless repertoire of stories about hanging with Muddy Waters, Magic Sam and Walter, he found himself in the role one of his idols
