Against Me!'s Laura Jane Grace Discusses Her Love of Rickenbackers, Her Musical Awakening

She’s a singer, songwriter, punk lifer, LGBTQ activist, book author and avid Rickenbacker collector, but what Guitar World readers really want to know is…

When I watched the “Thrash Unreal” video [from 2007’s New Wave], I got goosebumps when the water started pouring down on your Rickenbacker and James [Bowman’s] Les Paul. I felt like I was watching guitar abuse! Were the guitars ruined?
—Aimee Cole

[laughs] Actually that was kind of our grand scheme on how to scam the record label. But let me preface that by saying I hate that video. [laughs] I think it’s a terrible video. It was a compromised treatment. We wanted to do one thing and the label was like, 'no.' So we ended up going along with this plan that we didn’t want to do. But then when we were reading that they were going to be raining down fake wine on us and getting our instruments wet, I was like, “Well, let’s work money into the budget to get our guitars replaced.”

So we did the video shoot and immediately went outside and dried our guitars. [laughs] We took all the hardware off and set them in the sun and they were fine! The inside of the Rickenbacker that I played during the video is now dyed red, but other than that it’s totally fine. And I got a free guitar, another Rickenbacker, out of the shoot.

You’ve played Rickenbacker 360s in the past and seemed to have moved to Fender. Why the change? What is your number-one guitar right now?
—Greg Butcher

Initially starting out I was always drawn more to Fender than Gibson. I feel like that’s the divide people have when they’re first starting out. I always liked the twangy, chime-y sounds of the Telecaster.