Nashville I was sort of back in the
trenches, playing on lower Broadway,
and Reeves is a more common name in
the south, so I grew out my hair, grew
a beard, and no one knew I was the
guy that played with Bowie.
In around 2012, out of the blue, I
heard from Robert Smith. He asked me
if I would (on very short notice) learn
30 or so songs for the summer of 2012
tour which then turned into me having
ten days to learn 52 songs and then
the first show was in front of 72,000
people. So since 2012, I’ve been
balancing my time between the Cure
and my trio, Reeves Gabrels & his
Imaginary Fr13nds.
PHILLIP: Switching over to gear,
what’s in the rig you’re using with the
Cure? Does it differ from what you
use with the Imaginary Fr13nds?
24
INTERVIEW //
REEVES: With the Cure, we’re looking
at 30 years of music and maybe 100
active songs. Any night, we could be
pulling songs from throughout the
band’s history so my pedalboard has
to give me a big enough palette so I
can do that. And the Reverend guitars
are a big part of that. The secret
weapon with the Reverends is that
they have this bass contour control
which is a passive bass roll-off, which
lets me go anywhere from a Gibson
335 type sound to a Jazzmaster tone.
Part of it is having a flexible board, but
the other part is having a flexible
instrument that melds all of that. When
I was working with Joe [Naylor] on the
R & D of the Reverend Spacehawk, my
second signature guitar for Reverend,
one of the things I did was spend a
few months getting springs from
Gift of Gabrels: A Chat with the Almighty Reeves Gabrels