Written & Photographed by David Booth @hellbenderbluesmedia

Only two kinds of folks are known by all three of their names. One is murderers, the other is blues guitarists. Jared James Nichols? He might be a bit of both. Put a guitar in this guys hands and he’s an assassin. His unique playing style suits his personality. No fluff. Just genuine rock and roll. The guitar he is best known for, Old Glory, is a stripped down Korean Epiphone custom Les Paul with an empty neck pickup cavity and a Seymour Duncan bridge pickup. He has a tuner and a fuzz pedal, but for the most part he’s straight into the amp. The standard bridge has been replaced with a wrap-around tail. Short of bypassing the tone knob, it is literally as simple as one can make an electric guitar. All of his tones are straight from his hands, which is made all the more interesting by the fact that he plays with his fingers instead of a pick. His style is both quintessential classic rock and something that is very much his own. He’s making influential fans early. His name gets dropped by players like Joe Bonamassa, Joe Perry, Zakk Wylde and a few of the guys from Lynyrd Skynyrd. For a 30-year-old in the heavy classic rock genre, to have his name on the tip of so many icon’s tongues says something impressive. The best way I could describe him on stage would be like Ted Nugent in his prime without all the, erm… Ted Nugent. Early this year, his signature model Blackstar amplifier and his signature Epiphone have both been released. Jared’s reputation and following is growing in leaps and bounds. ANDIVERO Magazine had the opportunity to speak with Jared on his current North American tour with John 5 and discuss his sound, his career so far, and the challenges of navigating a career as a musician in todays environment.

Jared James Nichols: David it’s Jared. Is now a good time to chat? I’m on the road. I heard about it, I thought “let’s do it!”

Dave Booth: We were talking a few months ago in London, Ontario . we were going to set something up but life sort of happened.

JJN: Yeah. Of course. Always. We’ve been travelling since then so it seems like it was just yesterday

DB: You’ve been on with John 5 for most of that time?

JJN: Today’s the first day back with him. We just did 2 sold out shows in chicago with UFO which was insane. We just got back with john. It’s literally the first show back right now, tonight.

DB: Battle Creek, right? I’m going to see if I can manage the Detroit show. The first time I saw you was when you opened for Fozzy in London. To be honest with you, I hadn’t heard of you, but then you get on stage and I’m asking myself, “who the hell is this guy?” On stage you just have this presence where it seems you have to be a known commodity. I’d have to have heard this guys name. Like you’d been doing it forever. Almost all musicians talk about having a passion for music and and loving music, but there’s just something different about what you do and how you do it. When you talk about music You have an excitement about it. You talk about music like it’s something you live for. It’s great to see that kind of passion up on stage. You’ve been touring with skynyrd and wylde and a bunch of others over the last couple of years?

JJN: I’d say my first tour was in 2015 when I toured with Skynyrd and that was over in Europe, then after that I was out with Glenn Hughes from Deep Purple, with Doug Aldridge on guitar. That was a month and a half long. Gigs every day across Europe. After that I toured with Zakk Wylde, Blue Oyster Cult, UFO, Tesla, Saxon. We did John 5, Fozzy. I’ve played festivals with everyone from The Who to Ozzy. So many. We’ve done so much different stuff. I’ve been personally playing music since I was 15. Ever since I found guitar and playing it changed my life, man. It became everything. I was on stage a few weeks after picking up the guitar. My mom found an open blues jam and that was all it took.

DB: That’s insane! I was watching something a few days ago where I heard that you’re a lefty. You’re left handed, right?

JJN: Yes. I am left handed.

DB: Might sound like a bit of a weird question, but I’m a lefty as well. I tried for years to play guitar right handed. It just sort of came out like like a toddler with a nervous condition trying to play guitar. It was just horrible. A lot of it was just getting the rhythm and getting steady with it. It is kind of working against the body. Do you think some of the whole finger picking thing is related? I know I can play bass a lot better right handed than guitar when I’m playing with my fingers. Do you think it just has to do with making up for dexterity in your non-dominant hand, or was it just the thing that ended up getting you the sound you wanted?

JJN: I think that it comes to, with the finger picking thing, as a lefty I was never totally comfortable with a pick. It just never felt right. To me it was more of a control thing where when I use my fingers I control the whole neck of the guitar and can really understand and have a grip on the fundamentals. It’s really weird because I originally started playing lefty and within a few days my first guitar teacher said “hey man you can’t do that. You gotta flip it because you’re not going to be able to find good lefty guitars”, and this, that and the other thing. My fretting hand always felt right, but when it came to the pick, there’s no way, so I think you’re totally right. Using my fingerstyle comes directly from being a southpaw.

DB: One of my favorite guitarists, Pepper Keenan is left handed as well. You just notice little things about left handed people who play right handed. Like when he does an air guitar sort of motion, it’s always his fret hand moving. It’s just little unusual things like that, that you notice. The thing I found out when I was playing was I couldn’t get the rhythm. With my fingers I had more agility so I was moving better timing wise.

JJN: Definitely, everyone’s a little different with their motor skills, but for me it only made sense to play without a pick. It never ever felt right. As many hours and days and months I spent with it, eventually I just said “screw it, I’m just going to do what feels natural”. But I think that’s what became my style and became my feel. In the end it all worked out.

DB: If you were to design a guitar rig to be simpler, you couldn’t do much more than how you have it now. Old Glory. It is as little between the ends of the strings as you can. It’s just bare bones. Is it your view to keep things as simple as possible, or did simplicity just happen to be the thing that achieved the sound you wanted? Was it the cause or effect of your sound?

JJN: I think that really what it came down to was I never felt right with a big setup. Whenever I had a pedal board or I had some complex guitar with three pickups and a Bigsby, and whatever. I always felt like I was focusing more on the equipment than the actual playing and actual music. It was me more concerned about “Ok, if I hit this pedal or change pickups here or there or this and that, maybe it will make it sound better”. So when I found Old Glory, with a simpler setup, it took the emphasis off the gear and put it on the music. So for me I just started to whittle everything down. I went from what most guys had, six different guitars and a pedal board and different amps, and went down to me saying “You know what? I just want a great playing and feeling guitar, a p90 guitar, amp and a cable”. And that just forced me to push and create all the sounds using my hands and my imagination.

DB: The sound and tone is fantastic. You just got a signature Epiphone guitar and Blackstar amp within a few weeks of each other this year?

JJN: Right at the beginning of the year, we released Old Glory as a signature Epiphone and a signature Blackstar amp which was pretty incredible.

DB: To get one is a big thing, but to get both in rapid succession.

JJN: Oh yeah. It was the best weekend of my life man.

DB: It was in the same weekend? Jesus.

JJN: The guitar came out on the Friday and the amp came out on Saturday. It was in the NAMM show in LA in January. It was incredible. Mind blowing.

DB: I’m not overly tied up with gear setups, but I find it fascinating with how different your setup is and how you interact with the instrument. It’s unique to you. I find that part really interesting. You just got a new guitar. The red one is new right?

JJN: Yeah Old Red. It’s my newest acquisition. It’s a 1953 Les Paul.

DB: I was watching an earlier interview with you where someone asked what you would want if price was no object, and I think you said a plain top 50’s Les Paul with p90’s in it. It sounds like you found it. How did you end up with that one?

JJN: Sounds like I found it. It was pretty crazy. I think that was the law of attraction man. That guitar found me. That’s how that one worked out. It came into my life at such a perfect time. I was playing Old Glory so much and it was incredible then all of a sudden I had this beautiful guitar find me through a friend of mine and I just couldn’t be happier. Between those two guitars I can cover every single base that I’ve ever wanted to, which is saying a lot really. When you find stuff like that, a holy grail guitar, you really know and it makes you delve deeper into the music and deeper into the sound.

DB: I totally get that. I never thought I’d be a Strat guy until I found a Tokai Japanese early 80’s white Strat, and there’s just something about it. It’s got a soul to it. It feels different than anything else.

JJN: Absolutely.

DB: I love it. It is one of those weird things where sometimes, like you said, they do tend to find you.

JJN: Yeah, I’m a firm believer man.

DB: It still has the neck pickup and everything in it. Are you going to leave it as is?

JJN: Oh yeah. With that guitar? The reason I started busting all that stuff out was in the beginning was that I was trying to find my sound, and what is great is that I found my sound and now this is like the succession of what I started with with Old Glory. When I found Old Red and I flipped to the neck I went “Oh my goodness”. It was insane. So yeah, that guitar will stay as is.

DB: You’ve been touring with a lot of different people. I remember seeing something about you meeting Leslie West and how jazzed you were about him signing your guitar and stuff. When I look at the people who reference you, it’s the people who guitarists look up to as THE guitarists. John 5, Zakk Wylde, Joe Bonamassa, Rickey Medlocke from Skynyrd, Billy Gibbons from ZZ top. They all seem to show up regularly on your media feed and such. You’ve toured with most of the best guitarists in the world. That has to be surreal.

JJN: Yeah. It’s pretty crazy. When I think about it, it’s more crazy from a fan perspective because at the end of the day I’m still a fan, so it’s a totally crazy experience.

DB: Is there anyone specific who stood out to you? You hear people name drop guys they tour with but it seems like every time I hear your name it comes out of a “Capital G” Guitarist’s mouth. The consistency of it surprises me. Was there anyone who meeting them made a bigger impact on you than you expected or something that someone said that stuck with you over other things?

JJN: Oh yeah. A lot of those guys, like Zakk Wylde. He was a big one for me, because when I was a kid he was the one I was hearing on the radio. I had a poster on my wall from a guitar magazine. And he was the first guy that I started touring with that went, oh, wow. And Skynyrd, and Billy Gibbons, all those guys to be honest. The common thread I found with all those players was the simple fact that they are all good people at the end of the day. Every single one of them I would want to hang out with, not playing guitar, they were all great people. To me that means everything. It shows. It’s more than just playing music. Those guys are just great humans. And I’ve learned so much about how to handle myself, how to be a professional. I think learning from those kind of people and heroes and legends, there’s no better way, man.

DB: I’ve had a chance to meet some of my musical heroes. The thing that has surprised me is how gracious and nice they are. I don’t think there’s enough room in the business these days. It’s not like money and advances are being thrown around like crazy anymore. More than ever, it’s a people business. If you don’t have people skills, I don’t know if you can ever get known.

JJN: You have to now. There’s no more of that you can just do your thing and be a jerk or think you’re everything. It really is all about being a good person. That’s what I’ve found. That’s the common thread with all the people that I really love and respect, they’re great humans before anything else.

DB: I think you can hear the character of people in their music and how they play. Not that someone is a bad person by playing bad or anything that simple, but there’s a certain purity that comes through when someone really wants to connect with people. To explain it just makes it sound dumb, but I think you understand what I mean.

JJN: Absolutely man. Absolutely.

DB: You’ve got this great singing voice. Even if you didn’t play guitar you could be fronting a band. You’re as good a singer as you are a guitarist. Writing is such a huge thing too, especially in blues music. If you don’t do that well, the other stuff almost doesn’t matter. Do you like all of it? Is some just the cost of doing the others?

JJN: Know what? It’s a great question. I love doing all of it. I think there are times when you need to get into a certain headspace. When I’m writing I’m in a different mindset than when I’m playing live. Vice versa with singing. That was a thing I had to take more seriously because when I wanted to start a band I said, “Well, who’s going to sing?” and I thought, “I have to sing, so I gotta take this seriously”. So I really buckled down and started treating my voice like an instrument and treating my singing as a real thing, and that’s when I started to notice the results. I think that in order to do this full time, 365, 24/7, you have to just be all in. You’ve gotta have that obsessive factor. I’m no different than the other guys we’ve talked about when it comes to that, you know? Whether I’m playing music on stage, writing or just walking through the store, I’m always thinking about music. So when I’m not on stage, I’m thinking to myself, “What if I wrote something like this or did this?”. It starts to be one and the same. To me there doesn’t seem to really be any sacrifice or anything that I kind of despise doing. I think it all just sort of goes together. What’s great about it is that it’s personal to me, in that I’m the one singing the music and the one playing the music, which really helps out.

DB: Absolutely. I know you’ve been around for quite a number of years. I have a huge amount of respect for people willing to come up through it now.

JJN: Oh yeah man.

DB: It’s just a different thing. It seems like the paying your dues phase has stretched out so much longer these days.

JJN: I mean, we’ve been touring since 2015, and that’s a real thing. It just comes back to the love of the music. We love to play and we love to do it. The ones who last and the ones you see with the longevity, it really comes down to the love of that music.

DB: That jump between it being a hobby and being a way of life, having it be a living. When was the last time you didn’t rely on income?

JJN: To be honest man, I always had odd jobs until three or four years ago. I always had something I could do when I was off the road, especially before we really knew how to be on the road, because that’s a whole other thing too. We want to do it but HOW do we do it? So I always had random jobs. The easiest ones to do were always teaching guitar lessons. Do that, get a little extra money, but I did stuff other than that, like construction or stuff where friends would own a business and I’d help them do landscaping. It’s been years now and the only reason for that is I had to say to myself “I’m going to do music. No matter what, I’ll take the sacrifice to do music”. I think that’s what a lot of people who want to do this have to understand. If you want to do this you have to sacrifice a lot of things. That includes time at home. This year I’ve been on the road since January 16th. In that time I’ve had about a week off.

DB: Damn.

JJN: So there hasn’t been any time where I was at home and relaxing and thinking about my next move. It was always moving forward and pushing and pushing and pushing.

DB: It seems like you’ve been breaking through over the last year or two as well. It might just be the places I’m at, but I definitely think I’ve heard your name a lot more in the last year. Has there been a pretty significant bounce there?

JJN: Yeah, there has. I think it’s just keeping pushing and keeping on the road. Being in such great company and having some of these big guys preaching my name, you know. Like Joe Perry going on the radio and saying I’m his favorite guitar player of the last 20 years. From stuff like that, all of a sudden its like, Oh damn, look at that jump. Or we’d be on the road and social media just pushing on all angles man. It really, really started to add everything up.

DB: The reason I was asking about the job thing earlier, it blows my mind to think of somebody being able to do support on a world tour and going home and putting on an apron. It’s gotta be a mind fuck.

JJN: Oh yeah. And there are guys that especially if you rely on a specific artist, say they want to take some time off or they have a different gig, then you’re out of a job. It’s as simple as that, music is never an easy way out. There’s always the next step. What’s coming up next? Even with us touring, we’re always booking six months in advance just to keep everything flowing, so there’s always something.

DB: You swapped out bass players a while back. Is Elvis still playing with you?

JJN: Elvis plays with us from time to time. But now we’ve got a guy named Baron with us. Baron Fox.

DB: Drummer’s been kind of consistent throughout?

JJN: Yeah, Dennis has been around with me since I started. He’s been very consistent. There’s that thing too, that when you’re touring a lot, it’s happened to me before where some guys don’t want to tour like crazy. Or they say “I’m in it” but then when you say “Ok, we’re going to be out the next seven weeks,” they say “Oh man, I can’t do that”.

DB: There’s a point where it becomes a lifestyle and not a life. I’ve had jobs like that where I was working seven days a week, 12 hours a day out of town and you have time to do one good thing a day, whether that’s laundry or having a good sit down meal, or something else, but you don’t have a chance to do two. You end up buying a lot of socks and underwear. I always thought that when you’re on the road a lot, it’s not quite so bad, but it’s not like you can keep stopping. If you do, you never get there. A friend of mine used to work for a label. He was talking about going five or six days without a shower. No shower on the bus, and at truck stops you have time while the bus is filling to grab food and use the washroom and then you’re back on. When you think about that level of compression and time pressure where you’re doing so much to go play, I don’t think people appreciate the commitment that it takes.

JJN: It’s an interesting balance because there isn’t a balance. It’s always on to the next. Being in a band, especially in 2019, that’s pushing and trying to make something of it, it just takes so much more. You have to be completely be on with promotion. Often times too, you’re trying to fund it yourself. Especially in the early days we’d be using whatever we could to stay on the road because we weren’t making money. The lifestyle is always go go go, and you’re just trying to get to the next spot. Physically, you’re going “Ok, we’ve got a seven-hour drive tonight, then we get there and we’ll play then we’ll go straight back. There’s always a grind. I mean, I love it. There’s a sense of adventure and there’s this amazing feeling about it, but yes it definitely is a real feeling.

DB: How do you keep playing all these dates playing with your fingers? How do you keep them attached? I’ve never seen them taped. You must have calluses hard enough to drive nails at this point but I don’t know how the hell you do it.

JJN: It’s pretty tough man. I’m not saying that like “Oh yeah”. I’ve been working it to a point to where it’s all good. I’ve never had a show where I’ve even really felt something like that. In the early days, of course, but it got to a point with my hands where I was playing so constantly and consistently that they were trained. Your body gets into a mode. There hasn’t been one day this year, unless I’ve been on a plane for the entire day, where I haven’t had a show. We don’t have time to heal.

DB: So what’s the next step? Have you been recording? Do you have a new album? Are you starting to write? Is it just touring until you get there?

JJN: I’ll have the holidays off and we have a bunch of new material written for a new record, so we’ll be recording a bunch of stuff to release. So that’s the ying of the yang. You spend the year on the road, and when you have time off you’re in recording, so we’ll be pushing on and recording some new music and getting ready for next year. Thankfully, I’m a crazy guy and I’m writing on the road and doing a bunch of different stuff, just trying to push for the next recording stop. We have a bunch of ideas that once we get home we’ll be working on.

DB: Nails In My Coffin. It’s a great song. It has a different feel to it. More of a modern feel to my ear than your last album. Do you see yourself changing direction musically, how do you feel the next album will be different from the current one?

JJN: I don’t see changing direction musically, I just see bringing more to the table. I think a lot of artists maybe get stuck making the same record and they keep doing variations on the same theme, which is great, but for me I always want to continually push forward. The only way to do that is to really push the envelope. When we did Nails that was a direct departure for the sake of a direct departure, not to release the same old thing. I think that it’s all about switching it up, changing it up, but it’s always going to sound like me, me playing guitar, me singing. I’m definitely not afraid to switch gears and try different things. That being said, I love rock and roll, I love blues rock, so that will always be the underlying theme.

DB: There’s that weird middle ground where if you change too much, people start talking about how you don’t have it, or you’ve changed or sold out or whatever. If you don’t change, you release the same album eight or ten times.

JJN: If the people want to continually hear the same thing, I think that it’s great and has its place, but some of my favorite records that were a little different, that didn’t sound a lot like the other stuff they did, like Led Zeppelin III, people were up in arms. I loved that record. But you’re right, there’s a balance. A certain kind of road you gotta walk, so for me I’m still getting my footing but I’m really excited about the new material man. It’s really some hip, cool new stuff. It’s pretty heavy, it’s pretty bluesy, it’s pretty awesome.

DB: I’m looking forward to hearing it. Are you playing the new stuff on the tour now?

JJN: Yeah we’re starting tonight, two new songs in the setlist for the first time tonight.

DB: Grand Rapids tonight. Detroit is on Friday right? Do you actually get Thursday off?

JJN: No day off. We’re going to Cleveland tomorrow. We have a show almost every single day.

DB: You’re doing Michigan by way of Ohio, back to Michigan? That’s one way of doing it. But you book when you can book. That’s a lot of time on the road. Last time you were in London you sounded great. If you’ve been on the road that consistently, I’m really impressed you can keep it up.

JJN: Sometimes you don’t have a choice my friend. It’s either feast or famine, you go for it, you really push or you don’t and you go home. There’s a point you have to say to yourself “How bad do you want it?”.

When you combine Jared’s ridiculous amount of talent, winning personality, good old fashioned stadium guitar rock swagger, and his three-name handle, you’ve got a guy who is going to cut heads and take names wherever he plays. Like many of his three-named brethren, expect his legend and reputation to grow as the hits accumulate. Classic blues-based guitar rock maintains a steady demand, with an ever shrinking group of touring legends wanting or being able to spend their retirement years on the road. Artists like Tyler Bryant and Jared James Nichols are the names and voices that will pave the path forward and keep rock and roll honest and in touch with its roots.