Ron Asheton Guitars & Gear: The Stooges Guitarist’s Flying V, Strat, Marshall and Fuzz Rig

This is the guitar Asheton himself talks about for the first Stooges album. In the Shimamoto interview he says he “used the Flying V for half the tunes, every song but three.” The Perfect Sound Forever interview likewise has him on the Flying V for every song but three, and that page gives the exceptions as “Real Cool Time,” “Not Right” and “Little Doll.” He says “Flying V” without a maker in the passages we read; Equipboard, a community gear database, lists it as a Gibson, and we have no better source for the year or finish. Our Gibson Flying V guide covers the instrument itself.

In the Premier Guitar feature, Deniz Tek recalls that Asheton “was using a Strat” in 1968, and says he thinks it was a 1957 sunburst. That is one man’s recollection, not a documented serial number. Equipboard quotes a Vintage Guitar article as saying a 1957 Strat with a maple neck, “the one that got away,” ended up with Dan Erlewine of the Prime Movers. We could not open the Vintage Guitar original, so we treat that as second-hand. The Premier Guitar article also reports, with Wujak as the source, a black Mexican-made Strat at the 2003 reunion debut at Coachella. See our Fender Stratocaster guide for the model’s background.

A Premier Guitar photo caption identifies a Guild X-79 in a 1995 studio shot. Equipboard lists three X-79s and attributes a quote about its pickups to vintageguitars.com; we have not verified that quote. Treat the Guild as documented once, by caption, with the rest unverified.

Premier Guitar shows two custom three-pickup Avenger models built by Joe Naylor for Asheton, in a 2007 tour photo. Naylor says a bass roll-off control from that work became Reverend’s bass contour control.

Premier Guitar and Guitar.com both report that Asheton played a Jetstream 390 at a Stooges reunion show, and that it was stolen with the band’s other gear in Montreal in 2008 and, per Reverend’s 2020 announcement, has since disappeared. The Reverend Volcano signature prototype went missing at the same time. We cover the guitar in our Reverend Jetstream 390 guide.

Naylor designed it “a few years later” than the Avenger, according to the Premier Guitar feature, with a stop tailpiece, a set neck and three P-90s. Guitar.com describes it as Reverend’s first signature model with Asheton, V-shaped with three P-90s, available mainly in Rock Orange with Midnight Black and Ice White versions as well.

Marshall is the one amplifier name that runs through every Asheton interview. He says the band knew one setup for the first album. In his words to Shimamoto, “all we knew was stack of Marshalls on ten.” The studio would not allow that, and the accounts of the compromise disagree. Shimamoto has him saying he went “down to like nine,” and Phawker records him saying the amps were turned down to nine. Perfect Sound Forever quotes him at “something like eight and a half.” We cannot say which is closest, and a memory of a volume knob from decades earlier is not a measurement. In Phawker he also says the amps were baffled a little more to cut bleed.

Asheton told Shimamoto that for the second album he went down to a Marshall 50 in a smaller cabinet, which he called “the refrigerator top.” He thinks it had six 10-inch speakers, and he is not sure of that detail himself. No model number for these amps appears in the interview, so we do not assign one.

Deniz Tek says it was Asheton’s first amp in the late 1960s, followed by “Sunns and Marshalls.” Tek also says Asheton later used 100-watt Marshall Super Leads and may also have had a Marshall Major. All of this is Tek’s account in Premier Guitar. Our Marshall 1959 Super Lead guide explains the amp family.

Premier Guitar quotes Naylor as saying Asheton played Naylor amps, the company he ran before Reverend.

According to the Premier Guitar article, the reunion tours usually used rented JCM800 heads with two Marshall 4×12 cabinets.

The one effects detail Asheton repeats across interviews is that in the early band he ran a fuzz and a wah pedal with his bass guitar, not his guitar. He says this to Shimamoto (“I would use the bass guitar that I was playing with fuzztone, wah pedal”), in Perfect Sound Forever and in Phawker, where he describes himself on bass with a “fuzz-tone wah-wah.” The Shimamoto interview also has him recalling his fuzz and wah being dragged across the stage by a camera operator’s cables at the Cincinnati Pop Festival.

Tek recalls a Vox wah in Asheton’s early setup. For the reunion era Premier Guitar lists a Dunlop Cry Baby. Our Cry Baby GCB95 guide covers the pedal.

This is the weakest part of the record, and the sources point in different directions. Tek lists an Arbiter Fuzz Face in the early setup. A 2017 press release from Reverend and Daredevil Pedals, carried by Premier Guitar, says the Ron Asheton edition of Daredevil’s Real Cool Fuzz is based on a 1960s Tone Bender that Asheton used on the first two Stooges albums. Daredevil’s own page for a later limited edition repeats that claim, while its standard Real Cool Fuzz page calls that pedal a silicon Fuzzrite-based design. These are a maker’s claims, and we found no interview in which Asheton names a Tone Bender. Equipboard credits a Vintage Guitar interview with him saying he moved on to better fuzzboxes such as the Fuzz Face, a second-hand attribution we could not check. For how those circuits relate, see our fuzz pedal origins explainer, and for a modern Fuzz Face, the Dunlop JH-F1.

Premier Guitar says one of these served as a solo boost on the reunion rig, with the distortion otherwise coming from the amp. A Boss chromatic tuner doubled as a mute.