Ivan Julian Guitars & Gear: The Voidoids Punk Architect’s Complete Rig

Background

Ivan Julian — born Ivan George Delegas — came to New York in the mid-1970s from Washington DC, arriving in a city that was in the early stages of developing the musical culture that would produce punk and new wave. He brought with him a musical background that was considerably more eclectic than most of the musicians he encountered in the downtown Manhattan scene: he had absorbed jazz, R&B, and rock through his DC upbringing, had studied guitar technique with genuine seriousness, and brought a level of musical sophistication to the punk context that set him apart from players for whom technical limitation was either an accident or a political statement.

His connection with Richard Hell — the poet, novelist, and musician who had co-founded Television with Tom Verlaine before departing to form the Voidoids — was the defining relationship of his early career. Hell’s artistic vision for the Voidoids was genuinely ambitious: punk’s confrontational energy deployed in service of literary intelligence and musical experimentation, rather than the more straightforwardly aggressive approach of British punk contemporaries. The guitar work he needed for this vision required players who understood both the raw energy and the musical sophistication, and Julian and co-guitarist Bob Quine provided both in complementary ways.

Blank Generation (1977) — the Voidoids’ debut album — is one of the great records of the punk era and one of the most musically interesting. Julian’s guitar work throughout the album is characterised by a specific combination of angular rhythm playing and melodically inventive lead work that drew on jazz and free music influences without losing the forward energy and directness that punk demanded. His interplay with Quine — whose more aggressive, distorted approach provided a complement to Julian’s more melodically oriented playing — created a guitar dynamic that was genuinely more complex than any purely punk aesthetic would have required.

After the Voidoids, Julian pursued various projects and session work, eventually relocating to the West Coast and continuing to record and perform while remaining somewhat outside the mainstream of either the punk legacy or the commercial music industry. His reputation within the musical community remained consistently high, reflecting the quality of the work rather than the scale of the commercial success.

Ivan Julian Guitars Gear: The Complete Rig

Guitars

Ivan Julian’s guitar choices during the Voidoids period reflected the specific requirements of the band’s aesthetic: instruments that could produce the angular, slightly dissonant, rhythmically aggressive sound that Hell’s compositions required, without the slickness of more polished rock instrument choices.

His primary guitar was a Fender Telecaster — the two-pickup single-coil instrument whose bright, cutting character and mechanical simplicity suited the punk context perfectly. The Telecaster’s bridge pickup in particular — with its characteristic twang and attack — produced the angular, cutting tone that defined the rhythm guitar approach on Blank Generation. The single-coil’s inherent brightness and the pickup’s proximity to the bridge made each chord voicing precise and defined rather than warm and blurred, giving the rhythm playing the rhythmic clarity that the Voidoids’ specific groove required.

The specific Telecaster he used was a vintage late-1960s or early-1970s CBS-era instrument — chosen for availability and price in the mid-1970s New York scene rather than for collector value, and played with the pragmatic relationship to instruments that characterised most punk musicians: as tools for making specific sounds rather than as valued possessions to be protected from the rigours of use. The Telecaster’s mechanical robustness — its relatively simple construction, bolt-on neck, and straightforward electronics — made it practical for the demanding touring schedule that young punk bands maintained.

He also used a Gibson SG at various points — the double-cutaway mahogany solid body whose humbucker pickups provided a warmer, more sustained character that the Telecaster’s single-coils didn’t produce. For specific musical contexts where the SG’s warmer, more sustained tone was more appropriate than the Telecaster’s cutting brightness, Julian deployed the Gibson as an alternative voice. The SG’s standard T-Top humbuckers (7.4k to 7.8k ohms, Alnico V) produced a different harmonic character from the Telecaster’s single-coils — warmer, with more sustain and a different quality of midrange emphasis.

String gauges ran light-to-medium — typically .009–.042 or .010–.046 — appropriate for the rhythm playing and occasional lead work that his Voidoids role required. The lighter strings facilitated the rapid chord changes and the specific attack character of the punk rhythm guitar approach without sacrificing the sustain needed for the more melodically oriented lead passages.

Amps

Julian’s amplification during the Voidoids period was the pragmatic British valve amplification that characterised most punk and new wave guitar setups — Marshall heads and cabinets were the standard tool for the kind of aggressive, loud guitar playing the music required, and Julian used them consistently.

His primary amplifier was a Marshall JMP 50-watt head — the smaller-wattage Marshall that drove its EL34 output valves harder at comparable volume levels than the 100-watt version, producing a more compressed, driven character at the working volumes that the Voidoids’ live performances required. The JMP’s natural drive at working volume — the EL34 output valves contributing their characteristic harmonic richness and compression as the amplifier was pushed — gave Julian’s Telecaster tone the warmth and sustain that pure clean amplification wouldn’t have provided.

He ran the Marshall into a Marshall 4×12 cabinet loaded with Celestion G12M Greenback speakers — the 25-watt ceramic-magnet Celestion that was standard for Marshall cabinets of the era. The Greenback’s midrange character and natural compression at working volumes complemented the JMP’s drive character, giving the overall sound the specific combination of aggression and definition that the punk guitar aesthetic required.

The specific volume levels at Voidoids performances — not the extreme levels of some punk bands but sufficient for the CBGB and similar small New York venues that defined the scene — pushed the Marshall to a point where the natural output-stage saturation was present but not dominant. This gave Julian’s guitar a driven quality without the obscuring distortion of maximum-gain settings, keeping the rhythmic definition that his playing required.

Effects

Julian’s effects chain was minimal — consistent with the punk aesthetic’s general suspicion of effects as both a commercial rock embellishment and an obstacle to directness and rawness. The Voidoids’ sound was built on the direct guitar-amplifier relationship, and effects were selective additions rather than structural elements.

A fuzz pedal — various germanium or silicon-transistor units — appeared in his chain for specific applications where additional distortion texture was musically required. The fuzz’s harmonic complexity, added to the Marshall’s own natural drive, produced the layered saturation that certain Voidoids passages required — specifically the more aggressive, noise-influenced sections that drew on the free jazz and Velvet Underground influences that distinguished the Voidoids from more straightforwardly melodic punk bands.

An Electro-Harmonix Big Muff Pi — the sustain/distortion pedal using a multi-stage op-amp clipping circuit — provided the wall-of-fuzz character for specific passages requiring maximum saturation and sustain. The Big Muff’s specific quality of sustained distortion — harmonically complex, with a thick, slightly spongy character that distinguishes it from both germanium fuzz and Marshall overdrive — gave certain Julian passages their specific textural quality.

A wah pedal appeared for specific lead and textural applications — not the conventional rock guitar wah usage but a more angular, rhythmic deployment that suited the Voidoids’ rhythmically complex approach. Julian’s wah use was musical and specific rather than decorative, reflecting his broader approach to effects as tools for particular musical purposes rather than as default settings.

Beyond these elements, the signal chain was essentially direct — guitar into fuzz into Marshall, with the room’s natural reverberation providing whatever spatial dimension the music required. The CBGB’s specific acoustic character — a small room with specific reflective surfaces and a naturally short, slightly cluttered reverb — was part of the Voidoids’ live sound in ways that would have been altered by reverb processing. The directness of the signal chain was appropriate to the directness of the music.

Playing Style & Tone Philosophy

Ivan Julian’s playing style is one of the more interesting cases in punk guitar — a musician who brought genuine technical range to a context that supposedly valued technical simplicity, and who used that range to serve the music’s actual requirements rather than to display his ability or to subordinate it entirely to the aesthetic position of the genre.

His rhythm playing was the foundation of the Voidoids’ guitar approach. The specific rhythmic feel of his chord work — the way he placed chords within the rhythmic structure, the specific voicings he chose, the attack and articulation that gave each chord its distinct character within the groove — was sophisticated enough to contribute musically to the ensemble without sounding polished or commercial. This specific quality — rhythmic intelligence in service of rawness — is one of the harder things to achieve in punk guitar, where the temptation is either to be genuinely incompetent or to smooth the roughness away through excessive technical control.

His lead playing, when it appeared, showed the jazz and R&B influences that his pre-punk formation had given him. The melodic vocabulary he used in his solos — less pentatonic than most rock lead playing, with more chromatic approach notes and a more fluid relationship between pitch and rhythm — reflected his broader musical education and gave the Voidoids’ guitar work its specific character of controlled sophistication within a deliberately raw aesthetic.

The interplay with Bob Quine was the most distinctive feature of the Voidoids’ guitar sound. Quine’s approach — more aggressively distorted, more noise-influenced, more willing to use feedback and dissonance as primary musical elements — provided a contrast to Julian’s more melodically oriented playing that created a dialogue between the two guitars rather than a unified sound. This dialogue gave Blank Generation its specific complexity: two guitar voices that were individually distinctive and collectively more interesting than either would have been alone.

Tonally, Julian’s philosophy was the punk musician’s version of the blues musician’s directness: get as close as possible to the emotional content of the music, and don’t let equipment choices or effects processing distance the playing from its source. The Telecaster’s bright single-coil directness, the Marshall’s natural drive at working volume, and the minimal effects chain were all oriented toward this goal — a signal path that transmitted the physical reality of the playing rather than processing it into something more polished or more produced.

How to Sound Like Ivan Julian

Guitar Approach

A Fender Telecaster — vintage or vintage-spec, with the bridge single-coil pickup as the primary voice — is the correct starting point. Light-to-medium strings (.009–.042 or .010–.046) for the rhythm playing agility the Voidoids’ music required. The most important technical element is the rhythmic approach: develop the specific quality of angular, rhythmically assertive chord playing that characterises the Voidoids’ rhythm guitar sound — chords placed with rhythmic precision and physical authority, not smoothed into conventional rock rhythm playing. Study the jazz and R&B influences that informed Julian’s playing alongside the Velvets and Stooges — the combination of these influences is what gives his playing its specific character.

Amp Approach

A Marshall JMP 50-watt or equivalent (JCM800 in later versions), run at working volume where the EL34 output stage is starting to contribute its natural drive. The Telecaster’s single-coil brightness and the Marshall’s midrange character interact to produce the specific angular tone of the Voidoids’ rhythm playing. Add a fuzz pedal or Big Muff for the more aggressive passages; leave it out for the cleaner rhythm work. The CBGB aesthetic was never about maximum gain — it was about the specific character of a working-volume Marshall in a small room.

Ivan Julian Amp Settings (Marshall JMP 50W)

Control	Setting	Notes
Volume	6–7	Working volume — EL34 natural drive zone
Treble	7	High treble — Telecaster benefits from amp treble presence
Middle	6	Moderate mids for definition
Bass	4	Controlled bass — angular rhythm playing needs note definition
Presence	6	Presence for cutting through the Voidoids ensemble
Fuzz/Big Muff (optional)	As needed	For aggressive passages — not a constant setting

Influence & Legacy

Ivan Julian’s legacy is the specific legacy of the musician who made Blank Generation one of the finest punk records ever recorded — the legacy of a specific performance on a specific record that has influenced musicians for nearly five decades. The Voidoids’ music has been cited as a primary influence by a wide range of subsequent musicians, and Julian’s guitar work specifically — the angular rhythm playing, the melodically sophisticated lead work, the specific interplay with Quine — has been studied by guitarists who understood that the punk aesthetic and genuine musical intelligence were not opposites.

The specific approach he brought to the Voidoids context — musical sophistication in service of raw aesthetic rather than in opposition to it — has been influential on the post-punk and alternative rock traditions that descended from the New York punk scene. The idea that technically accomplished musicians could serve a raw, confrontational aesthetic without smoothing it into commercial accessibility was not obvious before Blank Generation demonstrated it, and Julian’s guitar work was central to that demonstration.

The CBGB scene’s guitar tradition — the specific combination of angular, rhythmically assertive rhythm playing and melodically inventive lead work that Julian represented alongside Television’s Verlaine and Lloyd and the Ramones’ more deliberately simplified approach — became one of the foundations of American indie and alternative guitar playing. The specific Telecaster-through-Marshall combination that Julian and his contemporaries used, deployed with rhythmic intelligence and melodic sophistication rather than with heavy distortion and technical display, influenced a generation of indie rock guitarists who valued directness and character over polish and production.

For players exploring the New York punk and post-punk guitar tradition that Julian inhabited, the rigs of Lenny Kaye — whose Patti Smith Group work showed a parallel approach to guitar intelligence within punk’s broader aesthetic — and Will Sergeant, whose Echo and the Bunnymen work showed how similar influences developed in the British post-punk context, provide essential comparison. The broader punk guitar tradition connects to Billy Duffy‘s work with The Cult, which shows how the punk energy was extended into a more atmospheric and musically elaborate direction.

Blank Generation: What the Guitar Actually Does

Blank Generation deserves detailed examination from the guitar perspective because its specific qualities — the things that make it more than a period artifact and keep it musically rewarding nearly fifty years after its release — are substantially the product of the guitar work rather than merely the songs or the production. Richard Hell’s literary credentials and confrontational persona have received most of the critical attention, but the music’s enduring quality is inseparable from how Julian and Quine played on it.

The title track is the most widely known document of the album’s guitar approach. The opening rhythm guitar — Telecaster through Marshall, with the specific attack and rhythmic placement that Julian’s playing provided — establishes the song’s aggressive but controlled energy before the bass enters. The chord voicings are not conventional punk power chords (root and fifth only) but fuller voicings that imply more harmonic content — the Telecaster’s single-coil character giving each voicing its angular, cutting definition within the overall sound. The rhythmic placement — slightly aggressive, with the chords landing with physical authority rather than smooth even strumming — gives the music its specific quality of controlled urgency.

The lead guitar passages that appear throughout the album show Julian’s jazz-influenced melodic approach — lines that move through the harmony with more than pentatonic vocabulary, that use chromatic approach notes and passing tones in ways that conventional punk lead playing doesn’t, and that have a melodic direction and resolution that gives them a completeness absent from more conventional punk guitar solos. These passages are not long or technically elaborate — the punk context didn’t allow for the extended soloing that rock music traditionally featured — but within their compressed time frame, they demonstrate real melodic intelligence.

The interplay with Bob Quine is audible throughout the album in the way the two guitar parts create a dialogue rather than a unified sound. Quine’s more aggressively distorted, feedback-influenced approach sits in a different frequency range and with a different character from Julian’s more melodically oriented Telecaster tone — the two parts audibly coming from different places and creating between them a guitar texture more complex than either alone. This is the Velvet Underground’s twin-guitar approach (Cale’s drone against Reed’s rhythm) updated for the punk context, and it works for the same reason the Velvets’ approach worked: genuine musical difference creating genuine musical interest.

The New York Scene: Equipment in Context

The specific guitar equipment that Julian and his contemporaries used in the New York punk scene was shaped by the specific conditions of that scene — economic, physical, and cultural — in ways that produced the specific sounds documented on the classic recordings of the era.

Economically, the musicians who built the New York punk scene in the mid-1970s were working with extremely limited budgets. The guitars they played were typically instruments they could afford — which in 1975 and 1976 meant either cheap new instruments or used older instruments at low prices. The late-1960s and early-1970s Telecasters and SGs that Julian and others used were available at prices that contemporary vintage guitar prices make almost incomprehensible, but that in the mid-1970s represented the accessible end of the used guitar market. The Marshall amplifiers they used were similarly the working musician’s choice — powerful enough for the clubs they played, available secondhand at manageable prices.

The specific venues of the scene — CBGB above all, but also Max’s Kansas City and the other Manhattan clubs that hosted punk performances — had specific physical characteristics that shaped the equipment’s sonic contribution. CBGB in particular was a small room with relatively low ceilings, specific reflective surfaces, and an acoustic character that gave performances their specific sound. Playing in CBGB at working volume with a Marshall — not the arena rock volume that some players imagined required for the Marshall to “open up,” but the club volume appropriate for a 300-person room — produced a specific interaction between the amplifier, the speakers, and the room’s acoustic response that gave the guitar sound its character. The recordings made in this context, whether live or in studios that attempted to capture something of the live energy, preserved something of this specific acoustic reality.

The cultural conditions of the scene — the deliberate rejection of the polished production values and stadium rock ambitions of mainstream 1970s rock — also shaped equipment choices in specific ways. The Voidoids’ approach was not to use as little equipment as possible (Julian was not a primitivist) but to use equipment in a way that prioritised directness and character over smoothness and production value. The Telecaster’s angular, defined character served this priority better than a warmer, more polished-sounding instrument; the Marshall’s working-volume drive served it better than a clean, studio-quality amplification approach. These were choices in service of an aesthetic position as much as in service of specific tonal preferences, and understanding them as such gives a more complete picture of why the equipment was what it was.

Julian and Quine: The Twin-Guitar Dynamic

The Julian-Quine guitar partnership that defined the Voidoids’ sound deserves specific examination because it represents one of the more interesting twin-guitar dynamics in punk and post-punk music — a pairing that worked through genuine difference rather than similarity, and that produced results neither player would have achieved alone.

Bob Quine — who came to the Voidoids with a background that included both jazz study and an intense engagement with avant-garde and free music — brought an approach to guitar playing that was fundamentally different from Julian’s. Where Julian’s primary concern was melodic and rhythmic — chord voicings placed with rhythmic intelligence, lead lines that moved through the harmony with melodic purpose — Quine’s approach was more concerned with texture and noise, with feedback as a musical resource rather than a problem to be avoided, and with dissonance as a compositional element rather than an accidental byproduct of aggressive playing.

The equipment differences between the two reflected these different approaches. Quine used more distortion than Julian — the Big Muff and similar high-gain devices were more central to his sound than to Julian’s — and was more willing to push the amplifier into feedback territory. The specific choice of amplifier settings that Quine made produced a more heavily saturated sound than Julian’s more moderate approach, giving the two guitars clearly different tonal characters within the ensemble mix.

This tonal difference served the music in specific ways. The two guitars occupied different frequency ranges — Julian’s Telecaster brighter and more cutting in the upper midrange, Quine’s heavier distortion filling the lower midrange and producing more low-frequency content — which meant they didn’t fight for the same sonic space. The rhythm playing of one guitar could sit in the mix alongside the lead playing of the other without one obscuring the other, creating a natural stereo spread of guitar sounds that gave the recordings their specific spatial character. This spatial separation of the two guitar voices was not achieved through studio processing but through the genuinely different characters of the two setups, which is the most effective and most durable way to create space in a guitar-heavy mix.

The legacy of the Julian-Quine partnership for subsequent American guitar music is considerable, if often unacknowledged. The idea that two guitars with genuinely different characters and genuinely different approaches — rather than two guitars playing similar parts in similar tones — created more musical interest than any more unified approach, was a lesson absorbed by various post-punk and indie rock guitar pairs who came after them. The Replacements, Sonic Youth, and various Matador Records bands of the 1990s all owed something to the specific model of differentiated twin-guitar playing that Julian and Quine had demonstrated on Blank Generation.

The Jazz Influence: What It Actually Meant in Practice

Julian’s jazz background — one of the things that distinguished him from most punk guitarists of his era — is worth examining in concrete terms, because “jazz influence” in the abstract doesn’t tell us much about what specifically he brought to the Voidoids that another guitarist without that background wouldn’t have brought.

The most directly audible jazz influence was harmonic. Julian’s chord voicings — the specific notes he chose to include in his rhythm guitar parts — reflected a harmonic vocabulary that goes beyond the power chords (root and fifth) and basic triads of most punk and rock guitar playing. His understanding of chord extensions, inversions, and altered voicings gave his rhythm parts a harmonic richness that contributed to the Voidoids’ specific sound without making the music sound like jazz. The specific quality of controlled sophistication that distinguishes Blank Generation from simpler punk records is partly a product of this harmonic intelligence operating within the punk formal constraints.

The melodic vocabulary of his lead playing was equally influenced by jazz. The specific scale choices, the use of chromatic passing tones, the approach to melodic phrase construction — these reflected a musician who had absorbed the jazz tradition’s approach to improvisation rather than the blues-derived pentatonic vocabulary that most rock guitarists use. The result was lead guitar playing that moved through the harmony in ways that conventional rock playing doesn’t, giving the solos their specific quality of melodic interest within the compressed time frame that the punk format allowed.

The rhythmic intelligence he brought was also jazz-influenced — the specific quality of groove in his rhythm playing, the awareness of rhythmic displacement and syncopation, the ability to create rhythmic interest within a repetitive chord pattern through variation of attack and timing rather than through harmonic change. This rhythmic sophistication gave the Voidoids’ rhythm section its specific quality of forward momentum combined with rhythmic interest, distinguishing it from the more mechanically even rhythm playing of bands without this specific musical background.

The equipment that served these jazz-influenced qualities was the same equipment that served the punk qualities: the Telecaster’s bright, defined character gave the jazz-influenced chord voicings their clarity; the Marshall’s working-volume drive gave the jazz-influenced melodic lines their sustain and harmonic richness. The same rig served both purposes because the purposes were not in conflict — the jazz intelligence and the punk energy were both part of what the Voidoids were doing, and the equipment choices that served one served both. This is the clearest possible demonstration of the principle that good equipment choices serve the music rather than the genre, and that genuine musical range requires equipment that is responsive enough to serve multiple musical purposes simultaneously.

Ivan Julian’s reputation within the musical community of the New York punk era, and his influence on the generations of guitarists who have studied Blank Generation seriously, reflects the specific combination of musical qualities he brought to the Voidoids: the technical range to play with genuine sophistication, the musical intelligence to deploy that range in service of the specific aesthetic the band was pursuing, and the physical commitment to make the music feel as urgent and direct as punk demanded. The equipment — the Telecaster, the Marshall, the minimal effects — was exactly right for exactly this combination of qualities, and the recording that resulted from their deployment is a permanent document of what they achieved.

The specific Telecaster pickup configuration that Julian used — bridge pickup as the primary voice, neck pickup as an alternative for specific warmer passages — deserves technical examination because the Telecaster’s bridge pickup has characteristics that are genuinely different from other guitar pickup designs in ways that affected his specific sound. The Telecaster bridge pickup is the most tonally extreme single-coil design in common use: its position close to the bridge saddles means it picks up the string’s vibration at a point where the harmonic content is at its highest and the fundamental frequency is relatively reduced. This gives notes played on the bridge pickup a specific quality of edge and definition — almost abrasive in its clarity — that contrasts with the warmer, fuller character of pickups positioned further from the bridge. In a punk context, this extreme upper-midrange emphasis and the characteristic Telecaster “twang” were not problems to be solved through modification or effects but features that suited the angular, cutting aesthetic perfectly. Julian’s use of the bridge pickup as his primary voice for rhythm playing was thus not merely a conventional choice but a musically intelligent one: the specific character of the Telecaster bridge single-coil — its cutting attack, its harmonic definition, its rhythmic precision — was exactly the tonal character that the Voidoids’ rhythm guitar parts required. Understanding this specific reason for the equipment choice deepens appreciation of both the guitar and the music, and provides a model for how equipment decisions should be made: start from the music’s specific requirements, identify the equipment characteristics that serve those requirements, and choose accordingly.

Richard Hell’s vision for the Voidoids — music that combined punk’s confrontational directness with literary intelligence and musical sophistication — required guitarists who could serve both dimensions simultaneously. Ivan Julian was exactly this: a technically accomplished musician who understood how to subordinate his accomplishment to the aesthetic requirements of the music rather than displaying it at the music’s expense. The equipment he chose — the Telecaster’s angular directness, the Marshall’s working-volume authority, the minimal effects — served this dual requirement with the same intelligence that his playing did. The gear and the music reflect the same musical values, which is the mark of an artist who understands both.

The Big Muff Pi’s specific role in Julian’s rig — appearing for certain passages rather than as a constant setting — is worth noting because it reflects a more sophisticated approach to effects use than the “always on” philosophy of some punk guitarists. The Big Muff’s multi-stage op-amp clipping circuit produces a specific thick, harmonically rich sustain that differs from both the sharper clipping of a silicon transistor fuzz and the warmer, softer clipping of a germanium fuzz. At high settings, it produces an almost infinite sustain with a specific compressed, gated quality that gives held notes an unusual sonic texture. Julian engaged this for specific passages — where the textural quality served a musical purpose — while leaving the more transparent Telecaster-and-Marshall combination to carry the rhythmic and melodic work that required clarity and definition. This selectivity — knowing when the Big Muff’s specific quality would serve the music and when it would obscure what was musically important — reflects the same musical intelligence that characterised every other aspect of his approach to the instrument. Effects used selectively and with specific musical purpose serve the music in ways that effects applied habitually without musical judgment never can, and Julian’s approach to the Big Muff demonstrates this principle as clearly as any example in punk guitar history.

Ivan Julian’s place in the history of American guitar music is more significant than his public profile might suggest. As one of the primary architects of the Voidoids’ sound on Blank Generation — a record that continues to reward listening and continues to influence musicians four and a half decades after its release — he made a contribution to the development of American alternative guitar music that his commercial success during his lifetime didn’t proportionally reflect. The guitar community’s recognition of this contribution has grown as the record has aged and as musicians who study the roots of the music they make have traced their way back to the specific moment of originality that Julian and Quine created together in the mid-1970s New York punk scene. The Telecaster and the Marshall and the CBGB room were the instruments of that originality; the playing was what made them matter.

One final observation about the Voidoids’ recording approach and how it affected the way Julian’s equipment sounds on Blank Generation: the album was produced by Richard Gottehrer (who had previously produced Blondie’s debut and the Strangeloves) at Plaza Sound Studios in New York, with a specific approach to capturing the band’s live energy in a studio context. The production was relatively direct — not the dense layering of classic rock recording, but not the lo-fi primitivism of some punk recordings either. The guitar tones were captured with enough fidelity to make the specific characters of Julian’s and Quine’s rigs audible as distinct sonic entities, while maintaining the energy and directness of the band’s live sound. The specific microphone placement for Julian’s Marshall cabinet — close enough to capture the direct speaker output, far enough to include some room acoustic response — gave his guitar tone the combination of clarity and atmosphere that the angular Telecaster-and-Marshall setup deserved. These production decisions, made quickly and pragmatically rather than through elaborate planning, produced a recording that accurately documented what the Voidoids actually sounded like — which was, as it turned out, exactly what the music needed to be preserved as it was rather than improved into something more polished and less real.

Frequently Asked Questions: Ivan Julian Guitars & Gear