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This guitar was originally ordered with a natural wood finish with no pickguard. My other Andersons all had pickguards and I missed that look...so I drew one on this guitar - along with fake screws. I then started drawing a little space alien crouching down in the lower corner by the "tone" knob. I started to see little visions forming that I wanted painted onto the guitar but I'm not a painter. But one of my best friends is an incredible artist. His name is Aaron Brown and he used to be the drummer for my band Private Parts back in Wichita, Kansas in 1986 - right before I joined the band CHICAGO. Aaron and I are both big Frank Zappa fans and we met at a club I was playing in Wichita in 1984. We talked about Zappa albums we loved and he then told me has was working for Steve Vai - doing the artwork for Vai solo records like Flex-able, Flex-able Leftovers and later Passion & Warfare, The Ultra Zone and numerous Vai guitar books. So I called Aaron and told him of my visions for this guitar in May 1990. I told him I saw little aliens reaching out and turning the knobs and basically creating havoc on the face of the guitar. I told him I saw a trio of aliens sitting together and the guitar's 3 toggle switches would be their male penile genitalia. Aaron agreed that would be a funny addition to the painting. Aaron added another alien sitting under the volume knob, which makes it look like the alien is holding the knob in his hands - and of course the toggle switch is also his metal male appendage I then told him there should be an alien squatting at the end of the pickguard - blowing into it, which inflates the pickguard, causing the human female breast at the other end of the pickguard to spray mother's milk - or the milk of human kindness as I saw it. So he did it and it came out great. As you can see at the upper left hand corner, Aaron painted a mouth. That's because my friend Roy Fought bit into the guitar - kind of like leaving his mark on the guitar after it was completed. Roy used to work on my guitars when I was still playing with Bob Seger in 1984. He later joined the Tom Anderson team and is still there today. So Aaron painted a mouth around Roy's bite mark. One of the most amazing things I found in the grain of the guitar was the grain itself. If you look closely, you'll see that Aaron's painting is transparent and you can still see the natural grain of the wood. If you look at the top of the guitar at center left and right, there are images of a god pointing his finger, and the finger transforms into a guy's nose. Aaron painted all of that outlining the natural grain of the wood. The most amazing part of it all is the alien head right next to the god creature. This alien head, along with it's adam's apple in it's throat, is a part of the natural grain of the wood, including it's forehead, cheekbones, ear, jaw, neck - everything. Aaron basically painted some lip and eye color, but that actual face is in the wood grain itself. Pretty freaky stuff. Especially knowing it fit into the whole "alien" concept of the painting. It's an amazing one of a kind wood grain. Now to top it all off, what you can't see in this photo is the headstcok and the back and sides of the guitar. They are covered in autographs from my friends, fellow musicians and various celebrity autographs I collected on the road through the years. This all started when I first ordered the guitar from Tom. I told him since the guitar started with a natural wood grain finish, I didn't want his usual "Anderson Guitarworks" plastic decal logo on the headstock. I wanted him to stamp the capitol "A" on the headstock, along with his real signature next to it on the headstock. Tom's was the very first signature on the guitar and was followed by signatures from many of the Anderson employees at the time in 1990 - Brett Gould, Roy Fought, etc etc. When they delivered the guitar to me with these autographs, I decided to use the back and sides as a canvas to collect autographs from whoever seemed interesting when I had the guitar with me on the road. I ended up not playing or abusing this guitar on the road, so it's in pristine condition for a 15 year old guitar. I only played it twice onstage with CHICAGO and you can see me play it in the episode of The Arsenio Hall Show when we perform "Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is" from 1991. This is a list of some of the autographs on the back and sides of the guitar: Aaron Brown, Milton Berle, Danny Weiss (Milton's manager), Pat Boone, Paula Abdul, bassist Stuart Hamm, Mike Keneally, Rick Musallam, Bela Fleck, Victor Wooten, Howard Levy, Futureman (Roy Wooten), members of the band CHICAGO at the time - Robert Lamm, Lee Loughnane, James Pankow, Tris Imboden, Bill Champlin, Jason Scheff, Dawayne Bailey, Kate Lamm, Steve Brumbach, producer Peter Wolf, pianist David Benoit, my brother Daryl Bailey, producer Jeff Weber, Drake Macy, Tom Anderson, Brett Gould, Roy Fought and various other Anderson team/family members and others too numerous to mention. Guitar specs: Model - Pro
Am Enjoy Tom
and Aaron's one-of-a-kind masterpiece - from me to you, Aaron Brown's Steve Vai album covers
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