Some guitarists have come up with really unique ways of accessorizing their instruments onstage. Former Rob Zombie guitarist Mike Riggs often filled his guitar with blood to make for a messy stage presence, but he had an even gorier idea — one that he wasn’t actually allowed to bring to fruition.
Riggs had multiple guitars he used frequently on tour. The clear one was called “The Blood Guitar,” and his green one was called “The Re-Animator.”
“I got the idea when someone told me, ‘There’s nothing new you can do to a guitar. Everything’s already been done to a guitar.’ So I came up with the idea of a clear guitar you can put different stuff in,” he recalled to Ultimate Guitar.
“Originally I had a ‘dead’ albino snake I was going to put in it and I had the idea to add rotten meat that would fill up with maggots, and I believe Rob [Zombie] said something like. ‘It’s going to stink up the trailer,’ or something like that… So it ended up being blood, and that worked out best since it gets the audience involved and covered in blood.”
To further add to the horror — Riggs used real blood in the guitar, not fake. He stated that bought the blood from a meat-packing plant in Austin, Texas, and that guitar has been used on just about every musical release he’s worked on since he got it in 1998. He also has a guitar covered in pigskin, which you can see a video of him playing on below.
The guitarist performed on two of Zombie’s albums, his 1998 debut solo effort Hellbilly Deluxe and 2001’s The Sinister Urge. Since then, he’s released several records with Scum of the Earth, which formed around 2003 when Zombie took a break from making music to focus on his film career.
