LUKE WOOD
Think of an amazing American alternative-rock record from the 1990s or 2000s; the chances are that Luke Wood was in the room when it was recorded. For several decades, the Rochester, New York native has been at the bleeding edge of the US music industry, whether helping shape the careers of Nirvana, Sonic Youth, Weezer, Elliott Smith, Jimmy Eat World and countless others during his time at Geffen, DreamWorks and Interscope, or heading up Beats Electronics–the headphone and speaker company founded by Dr Dre and Jimmy Iovine that was acquired by Apple for $3 billion in 2014.
Along with his role at Beats, Wood holds a seat on Fender’s board of directors and he also recorded one of Phoebe Bridgers’ first demos. To refer to him simply as influential would be a huge understatement.
High over the achingly hip Los Angeles neighbourhood of Silver Lake, we wind our way up the driveway of Silvertop, the mid-century modern masterpiece that Luke Wood calls home. It was designed by John Lautner–the famed architect who cut his teeth under the tutelage of none other than Frank Lloyd Wright back in the 1930s and went on to create modernist structures including Elrod House in Palm Springs, better known as Willard Whyte’s residence in Diamonds Are Forever. Wood and his wife, writer Sophia Nardin, bought Silvertop in late 2014 and carried out extensive renovations over the following three years.
The setting, with its panoramic views across LA and beyond, is as breathtaking as the daring concrete and glass structure itself, but before we head downstairs to check out Wood’s studio space and gawk at his array of guitars, we wonder what inspired him to pick up the instrument in the first place. “I started playing guitar when I was eight years old,” he remembers, “because I fell in love with Blondie’s One Way Or Another. So my version of that was a Dunlop tennis racquet and a tie, in front of the mirror.”
Before too long, he graduated to a real guitar–an Electra model with humbuckers and active electronics–but Rochester’s northerly location on Lake Ontario meant it wasn’t exactly a regular haunt for touring acts.
A pivotal moment of inspiration came courtesy of Chas Lockwood, guitarist in Invisible Party. One of the local bands Wood fell in love with as a teenager, he remembers them sounding “exactly like Big Star meets The Modern Lovers”.
Luke recalls Lockwood as “an incredible dude” who played a Strat and idolised Tom Verlaine. “I just started talking to him and I asked him, ‘How do you become a guitar player?’. And he told me to listen to three records. He said, listen, listen to and listen to Richard Thompson’s . So I honestly never had a guitar lesson, I just started playing along to those records.”
