11.14.11
Henry Juszkiewicz, Gibson’s Corporate Pest
Readers know I like Gibson guitars. They may have read when I tried to do the company a favor by successfully pressing the Washington Post and others to drop website ads selling Chinese counterfeits of the iconic brand.
But it’s been increasingly hard to not be turned off by Gibson. And this is all due to its CEO, Henry Juszkiewicz.
With his company raided twice by government agents — the first time for buying blackmarket protected wood from Madagascar, the second time for impropriety with Indian imports — Juszkiewicz decided to go extreme right wing and cry about the alleged tyranny of the US government.
At one point, the Wall Street Journal tries to imply the real reason the US government may be after Gibson is because Juszkiewicz is a conservative businessman. This is done with the full knowledge that the investigation which led to the first raid was started during the Bush administration.
In the interview, Juszkiewicz is the very epitome of the bigshot from corporate America, the kind a great deal of the country is coming to visibly detest in street protests.
Juszkiewicz apparently believes in favors for corporate America. So what did he do, according to the WSJ?
Try to get President Obama to let him off the hook. And the Prez ignored him. The nerve of the man. Even his daughters have Gibson guitars, he said.
“[I] will say this: I wrote a letter to President Obama. I spelled out what happened. I said: You know, we got raided and here are the facts, I think it’s unfair. What do you think we should do? No response.”
Maybe the president is not a music lover? “He knows who we are,” Mr. Juszkiewicz says. “His daughters have a couple of Gibsons. [Mrs. Obama] gave a guitar to [the French president’s singer-songwriter wife] Mrs. Sarkozy. And we called up to make sure that he saw the letter, and he did. No response.”
You read this blog or just about anything else these days and you know this attitude. Laws are for little people, not for the wealthy, those who think of themselves as the drivers of job creation in China and capitalism.
At one point Juszkiewicz inexplicably goes into a riff where he tries to explain that guitars are too hard to play for average people while implying the company will expand into consumer electronic products for those who don’t.
Juszkiewicz presides over a company where all the everyman instruments are now made in China. This leaves the domestic end of the market priced so high in relation to, say, the wages of music store workers, that his instruments are now mostly only for the wealthy hobbyist or musician who can put it on the record label advance.
From the WSJ:
“Consumer electronics is a big target of ours because it’s a much bigger market than the M. I. [musical instrument] industry. . . . Right now we have a brand that people recognize and value. But only 5% of those people can buy something with the Gibson brand. . . In order to buy a guitar you actually have to play guitar. . . . You may say, ‘Wow that’s pretty cool to do,’ but . . . it’s like learning Greek. It’s not intuitive to sit down and start playing rock and roll. So guitar players reflect one in 20 consumers. But high-fi speakers [can be used by] 20 out of 20, so it’s a much larger market.”
So what does Juszkiewicz think is the next hot product? Expensive speakers. I can hear the air going out of the balloon six months to a year from now.
For the Journal, Juszkiewicz emits even more dipshit quote.
Gibson guitars do well during hard times, he says, neglecting to mention that if his high end guitars are indeed selling now it’s precisely BECAUSE the wealthy who buy them haven’t seen hard times at all.
“We did really well in the Great Depression,” the Gibson CEO tells the Journal. The company and its instruments were then nothing like now.
“Because everybody wanted to be like Woody Guthrie?” asks the paper, generating unintentional hilarity.
Guthrie, was known, among many other things, for the slogan, “This Machine Kills Fascists,” on his instrument. And it almost goes without saying that Guthrie spent his life in protest against the wealth barons of the country and, for that along with the writing of a column called Woody Sez, was called a commie.
In answering the newspaper reporter’s question about sales during the Great Depression being good, maybe because everybody wanted to be like Woody Guthrie, Juszkiewicz seems to realize he’s dangerously close to stepping in excrement:
“No, I would guess not,” comes the reply. “He did play our guitar, though.”
Reading an interview like the one in the Journal can cause you to lose all faith in a brand. One can imagine the company would only improve if a criminal charge caused Henry Juszkiewicz to step down.
The CEO also plugs his newest offering, the Firebird X, a robot-tuned guitar equipped with, no joke, Bluetooth, priced for the princes at $5,500.
Woody Guthrie, of course, wouldn’t have been able to afford it. (He did say he was for “singing for the plain folks and getting tough with the rich folks.”)
Made long before Henry Juszkiewicz showed up.
Chuck said,
November 15, 2011 at 9:33 am
Fortunately, the development of the art doesn’t depend on Harvard MBAs like Juszkiewicz. I’m thinking of the phenomenal players from Mali who use unraveled bicycle brake cable for strings on home-made instruments.
Let’s face it, the sale of much of the fancy high-priced Gibson product is not to people who have an abundance of talent, but wannabes and collectors.
I had a teacher who hypothesized that much of the jazz idiom was the result of poor blacks acquiring mostly old beat-to-hell-worn-out Civil War surplus band instruments. Sounds plausible, at any rate.
George Smith said,
November 15, 2011 at 12:06 pm
Yep, sounds plausible. The really old country blues originated from those so poor they invented four-string guitars made from cigar boxes tuned to an open chord. They were made so anyone could pick it up and make the music.