When guitar player Jeremy Brown passed away in March, Scott Weiland was left not only sad about his friend’s untimely death but in a unique quandary: a new album with his band the Wildabouts was being released and a tour was right around the corner. He needed someone to step in almost immediately, someone who could excite the crowd while playing signature chords of Stone Temple Pilots, Velvet Revolver and solo material that other guitarists had created before him. After a series of auditions, a young Australian who has made his name playing with such artists as Perry Farrell, Cherie Currie and Michelle Branch was offered the job and Nick Maybury has been burning up stages with Weiland’s Wildabouts ever since. “Nick is an incredible player and is a great fit for the Wildabouts,” Weiland stated.
At a recent gig in Baton Rouge, Maybury whipped his guitars into a furious frenzy: his 1962 SG Special on “White Lightning,” his Telecaster on “Big Bang Baby” and his early 1960’s Airline on “Unglued.” Fans of Weiland perked up their ears and took notice. Who was this kid? Glide decided to find out.
Maybury didn’t just walk out of the bush and onto Weiland’s stage in one fell swoop. He started at the bottom and with passion and perseverance has followed his dream. “It hasn’t always been easy,” Maybury explained, “but I figured out how to make money and save money and have a goal and work towards my goal and be really focused and inspired.” He started playing in bands early and around 2007, along with his band Mink, relocated to America, opening for KISS and Saliva and Perry Farrell, the latter providing him with future opportunities once Mink decided to cease. Session and tour work has kept him busy and now with the Wildabouts, he has a larger audience to showcase his talents to, something that is very exciting to the Sydney native.
Although he didn’t play on Weiland’s most recent and perhaps best post-VR record, Maybury has taken such Blaster cuts as “Amethyst,” “Hotel Rio” and “Modzilla” to bigger, bolder depths, adding in his own voltaic vibrations and versatility and gaining fans with every stop on the Wildabouts current tour.
“Go ahead and ask me anything you want,” Maybury said with a laugh when I told him that there wasn’t much information out there about him. Along with his bandmates, the band was in Cleveland when I called and had spent the prior day exploring the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame. “We had a great time there,” said Maybury. “We had special VIP tickets so we got to meet the historians and they took us around for a quick little look.”
What did you like the most there?
The Jimi Hendrix stuff was my favorite cause Jimi Hendrix is my favorite guitarist. They had a Jimi Hendrix Flying V, they had a Strat that he had, all his artwork from when he was a kid. And we saw a 1958 Les Paul that’s got to be worth a million dollars. That’s a real 1958 in mint condition, brand new. It’s amazing. They had Motown stuff and blues stuff, they had a Stevie Ray Vaughan guitar, an old Muddy Waters guitar and a lot of Rolling Stones stuff. It was really impressive.
When you first started to learn to play guitar, what was the most difficult thing to get the hang of?
I never had an electric guitar. We found out later we had an acoustic guitar at grandma’s house that my mom had bought and left in the cupboard for years that we had forgotten about. We looked in there one day and we found it and boom, we had a guitar (laughs). But I was lucky cause my friend that lived next door, his next door neighbor, and he was a lot older than us, he had an electric guitar so I was able to sit there and noodle on his and that was my first years of playing the guitar. It was amazing, so much fun. So the first thing I had to get the hang of and practice a lot was vibrato and bending because I was obsessed with that bending sound and that vibrato and the distortion. It was so cool.
Did you ever want to do anything else when you were a kid before music took over?
Before I was playing music I was doing sports. I played Minkey, which is a mini form of hockey, hitting a small ball around with these hockey sticks on a green grass field. That was the first sport I joined and it was co-sex, so it was boys and girls. I played field hockey and then I played soccer. I love soccer. I was very good at that. I wanted to be a world champion. My mentality is if I get really good at something, I want to be the best in the world at it. I wanted to be the best soccer player there ever was. After that, my friends were a bit tougher and were like, stop being a wimp and come play football, like rugby league. So I played rugby, rugby league and I’ve always been a keen surfer and skateboarder and BMXer. I always did BMX in the bush because I grew up in Sydney where there is a lot of bush terrain. So as kids we’d go riding our bikes in the school playground or in the bush and make tracks and jumps. Then we got into motorbikes, like a motocross thing. Normal kid stuff.
So what made you pick up a guitar when you were having so much fun outdoors?
Well, when I was a kid, we went to church every Sunday but we were like a cool rock & roll church (laughs). They had Christian rock music so I heard the guitar players with all the effects and distortion in the church and I liked how you could get so many sounds out of the electric guitar. There was something about it that spoke to my heart because there is so much emotion behind that sound. You can bend it, you can make it cry, you can make it scream. There’s just something about it that just grabs you in the gut and inspires you. I was exposed to it there but it was Dad’s records really too. We’d play with tennis rackets and put on a show and jump on the little couch and put hats on and glasses on and put on a show. It was hilarious. I stood on my grandma’s back dinner table, outside dinner table, and played the broom to Bruce Springsteen’s “Born In The USA.” (laughs) The first song I ever remember as a kid was “Born In The USA” and the thing is, I’ve never been a Bruce Springsteen fan ever. I don’t have any of his records. No offense but it’s just not my thing. But as a kid, something about that song struck me and we all sang it.
So yeah, I heard the music in church so the quote/unquote devil’s music was being played IN church (laughs). I started getting more into records from kids at school and my neighbors and stuff. I listened to Beatles records while some kids were listening to Guns N Roses. But my parents didn’t really like us listening to too much hard stuff at the first so we didn’t have Guns N Roses or any of that heavier stuff. We had like soul and blues. I found the harder stuff like Sabbath through my friends. Hearing Black Sabbath’s Master Of Reality in seventh grade just blew my mind. We had Pantera and Metallica when we were growing up. That was the heavy music. I went to an all-boys school and Pantera was the cool band to listen to. But when I heard Sabbath, they became one of my favorite bands of all time. Then I got into Led Zeppelin a little later, Stevie Ray Vaughan and Hendrix and Deep Purple and the list goes on.
Also, when I was growing up in my community, it was very punk rock, around the time Nirvana was breaking so I was exposed to that very like punk metal scene that was kind of having it’s day at that time. I had like a year’s phase of listening to that and never listened to it again. It was more just like a rebellion against your parents or your school or whatever but that can only go so far (laughs).
You came into Scott’s band after Jeremy Brown passed away earlier this year. How did you get the gig?
Rocco [Guarino] was the guy that found me. He manages Lavish, which is Scott’s studio, and Rocco emailed me after Jeremy passed away because they wanted to do the tour. They could either cancel the tour and not promote the record as opposed to keep going. So I got the email from Rocco saying, “Would you like to come out with Scott?” So I went down to audition and I got a call back and a second call back and they said, “You got the gig.” They had a bunch of people that were trying out but they picked me and we went straight on the road like two weeks later. We did Rock On The Range, Rocklahoma and all those big monster music festivals and club dates.
You must have had to learn the songs pretty quick
Oh yeah, I had to learn I think four songs; two or three Wildabouts songs and one Stone Temple Pilots song for the audition: “Vaseline,” “Modzilla,” “Hotel Rio” and “Way She Moves.” Then the rest was like “Parachute” and the rest of the set. So I had four down perfectly and I had nine songs down by the time the second audition came. They could have done a gig with me by the time the second auditions came around (laughs). Also, at the first audition they made me learn “Amethyst” IN the audition. But I work as a professional musician and in the Sayers Club, which is probably the best club in Hollywood, and the guy that curates the club is Scott’s next-door neighbor and he gave me a thumbs up. So I’ve been fortunate enough to put the time in and be blessed with enough talent or skill or whatever to hear things or pick it up because I’ve done so many gigs and had to do it for so many years, especially in the Sayers Club where we have to learn so many songs every week. Learning the Scott thing was just a piece of cake, a walk in the park, to learn the tunes.
You said you went on tour like two weeks later. How did it feel at those first couple of shows getting on stage with them?
I’ve been playing with quote/unquote rock stars pretty much my entire career in the States so I’m used to playing with like celebrities and top musicians, people who’ve sold platinum records, people like Perry Farrell, Matt Sorum, Cherie Currie, the Runaways, Angus & Julia Stone, a bunch of people.
So you weren’t intimidated at all
No, no. Actually, when I was a kid, Stone Temple Pilots for me, I didn’t really know what it was. When I started touring America and stuff when I was in Mink, we played like Hard Rock Cafes and they have a rotation of music on the programing in the restaurant and I remember one day sitting there and “Vaseline” came on and I was like, “Oh man, I love this song. Who is this?” (laughs) I just loved this song because it’s like this edgy, raw, Zeppelin-y kind of rock but it’s also super-commercial, super-wide-audience but it’s still really artistic and gutsy and ballsy; it’s not homogenized pop music. So hearing “Vaseline” with these great riffs and great chords and great melody and awesome lyrics in the format of a pop song is like a brilliant piece of music. But I was really excited to play with Joey [Castillo, drummer] because he was with Queens Of The Stone Age and Eagles Of Death Metal. The fact that Joey was involved was a big thing to me and that Scott was the frontman of Velvet Revolver. I was more hip to VR than Stone Temple Pilots. So I’d never heard “Meatplow” before. I’d never heard “Meatplow” until this year. I’d never heard “Dead & Bloated” before.
But I’m a bit biased. I like all the old music (laughs). I like fifties and sixties and seventies. I’m not really that much into the eighties. But I love nineties music. I like Stevie Ray Vaughan and some of the electronic music but I’m not a big hair metal guy, not big into Poison or anything like that. But I love Slash. I own Slash’s Snakepit record and the VR record. They’re like twenty years older than me so it’s interesting cause my background is sixties and fifties and seventies and that’s their generation and what they grew up on so it’s perfect. I was born twenty years later but we like the same music and stuff.
My dad educated me on the blues and Jazz. I was listening to like Lightnin’ Hopkins and BB King and Chuck Berry when I was five years old. Before I heard Jimi Hendrix I was listening to Ben E King cassettes and Sam Cooke. I came from that soul/blues background before I hit rock or metal or anything like that so I’m more of an R&B/soul/blues guy at heart. From there I stretched out to psychedelic rock and hard rock, so I was into Hendrix and Deep Purple and Led Zeppelin and all that kind of stuff. Later I got into Prog and more intricate, complicated music.
You have a strong connection to Jazz as well
I actually started with Jazz, university grade Jazz at the Sydney Conservatorium Of Music. I had a Jazz future and my plan was to go to the Boston College Of Music but I could never afford to pay it. I got two scholarships to Berklee College Of Music around 2000, I think, or 2003 or something. I toured the school and auditioned and then things kind of picked up for me in Sydney. I got session gigs and eventually got into a band with management and a label and a publishing deal and a recording deal. I had my first recording and publishing deal in Sydney about 2006, I guess, 2007.
And you came over to America around that time with your band Mink
We came out from Sydney and moved to New York in 2007; well, 2006 we started traveling and we were situated in New York for about half a year in 2007 as a home base cause our singer was from New York but the rest of the band was Australian. We actually ended up opening for Saliva, KISS, Perry Farrell, Angels & Airwaves, all these groups, and that’s how I met Perry Farrell and that’s how I got into the rock world. By around 2008, my band finished cause the singer wanted to have kids and have a family so the band folded and I moved to LA. I’d met Perry Farrell on the road already – we jammed together, played together, hung out while doing the tour together as the opening band –and I got a call from Perry to come try out for his project – his Satellite Party was on hiatus and Jane’s Addiction was on hiatus so it was just Perry Farrell solo, which was like a hybrid rock/electronic act with DJ beats and playing rock songs that he did with Jane’s Addiction and Porno For Pyros.
How often do you switch guitars during a show?
For the Scott set, I’m playing four different guitars. I’m playing a 1958 Plaintop reissue Les Paul, custom shop ‘58, through most of it, the STP stuff. For “Big Bang Baby,” I use the Telecaster. And then for the last song, “Unglued,” I use an old sixties Airline which is a great guitar. For “Circles,” I’ve got a D’Angelico endorsement and they gave me a guitar this year so thank you D’Angelico, and I use that for “Circles” and that’s more like the traditional Gibson 325 hollow body sound, more like a country picking thing tuned down a whole step. So that would be four guitars. Oh wait, it’s actually five cause there’s one more. I’ve got an SG as well. The oldest guitar I have is the Airline. I love that guitar, which Jack White inspired me to get because Jack White played the Airline in the White Stripes. And this Airline has the same pickups you hear in all those White Stripes records. That’s why I like it.
Do you have other guitars?
Yeah, I’ve got an old seventies Gibson 335 copy, which is amazing, which was my main guitar for a long time. I’ve kind of retired it from the road because it’s so old and I don’t want to beat it up because I’ve played that one to death. It’s probably my best sounding guitar ever. It’s a $400 Japanese seventies knock-off. I’ve also got another Telecaster and another SG actually, a black SG, which was the first SG I bought in 1997, I think it was. I saved up working for it in a cake shop. My first job to make money or to buy things I had to save up for was a paper run and I used to deliver chemicals to people at their homes on a bicycle for a pharmacy. But my SG, the first guitar, I paid for it myself and it was about $1100 or whatever it was, and I saved up working in a cake shop, cleaning floors, cleaning toilets, doing dishes, sweeping the floor, cleaning the benches, whatever they needed me to do. So I did that and saved up and bought my first SG and that’s how I bought my first Marshall amp too. Once I had my amp and my guitar, I said, “Thank you very much, I’ve got my amp and my guitar and I’m going to do this.” They said, “I appreciate your honesty and you’ve been a great worker and if you ever need a job give us a call back.” (laughs)
How long did it take to earn the money?
A couple of years. I think by the ninth grade, tenth grade, I had my SG. After that I got lucky because I used to lurk in guitar stores, and I still do, just lurk in them and look at every guitar in the store. So a local guitar shop, a used store, had a lot of vintage stuff. I knew a lot about old blues and records and what guitars they played. I’d be like, “Hey man, that’s a Firebird. Johnny Winter played that.” I was like this twelve year old kid and they’d go, “How the hell do you know who Johnny Winter is and how do you know he plays a Firebird?” (laughs) Eventually he goes, “You’re hired. Come work for me.” He hired me to like clean guitars and restringing and doing demos. Like, “Play this guitar and show this kid how that amp sounds.” That kind of stuff.
Eventually that led into, “You should teach guitar here, teach beginners and you can make more money.” So I was doing the store and guitar teaching and then helping manage the store and all that stuff and that’s how I met a lot of people in the music business. Musicians would come into the store and invite me to come jam with them and that’s kind of how I got into the scene and playing gigs around town. I used to do a Led Zeppelin cover band. I had to dress up as Jimmy Page and wear a wig. I was eighteen years old playing with thirty and forty year old men blowing cigarettes in my face at rehearsals.
Do you remember your first paying gig?
I was in a grunge band when I was like sixteen. I started playing live music in clubs when I was sixteen but when I was starting pro I was eighteen. So my first paying gig, I was playing in an African restaurant strumming on an acoustic guitar, not very much lead, mainly keeping the rhythm down, and we did that two nights a week. I got paid $200 a night. We’d get a free meal, if you wanted a drink you’d get a drink, unlimited tea and coffee and then $200 bucks and I did that two nights a week for a few years. And I’d teach guitar. I could make a thousand dollars a week just off music so it kind of worked out for me. You know it hasn’t always been easy but I figured out how to make money and save money and have a goal and work towards my goal and be really focused and inspired and work for that myself.
In high school, I burned and smashed a guitar and played “Stone Free” and sang it. I played “Purple Haze” in school and got picked to play in the big band and toured Australia in the big band when I was in the ninth/tenth grade. I toured Australia before I got out of high school in the Jazz band in a bus. I was lucky because we had a good program and a good teacher and if you look up Angus & Julia Stone, they’re big in Australia and Europe, their dad was my music teacher. He was great and took us to band camps around Australia in the school band. We always wanted to play rock so we played Steve Vai and Satriani in our break and goof off over that, and Zeppelin and Sabbath and Pantera and Metallica and Primus. Everybody loved Primus. That’s when I started hearing about Jane’s Addiction cause this punk metal band I was in did a cover of the “Mountain Song.” It’s funny because I covered that song and then years later I was in a band with the guy! Funny how things work.
Rock is really what got me to America but having the knowledge of Jazz and all that stuff has helped me go even further in my session work because having those skills gives you a bit of an advantage over people who don’t do it. They can’t do as many gigs, they can’t work as much. I’ve played punk, I’ve played blues, I’ve played psychedelic music, electronic music; I’ve been in bands with Perry Farrell and there wasn’t even a drummer. I’ve done a lot of different styles of music. I call myself a versatile, eclectic musician. I mean, I am a rock & roll guy but I’m not JUST a rock & roll guy.
How do you stay healthy on the road?
Luckily now since we have a lot more health consciousness in America we have places like Whole Foods where you can get your all-organic stuff, gluten-free stuff. So what I do is, I will never try and eat too much of one of the same things. That’s a big problem I find about the road. Every day you’ve got the meat tray. I mean, how many rockers do you know don’t eat meat trays anymore. So unless you’re really starving, stay away from meat trays, stay away from bread, stay away from a lot of sugar. I don’t do any soft drinks, I don’t do any like fake food, I try to stay away from candy, although I do have a sweet tooth. I just keep it all organic and keep the chemicals away. Instead of going to the liquor store and buying a case of beer I’ll be going to buy a case of Kombucha (laughs). I don’t do soft drinks, I don’t drink alcohol, I don’t smoke cigarettes, I don’t do drugs; I just play guitar and be inspired and I listen to certain frequencies. Like, if I put on a certain tone or a certain frequency and listen to it, I notice it affects your mind or your health. I will wake up the next day and feel great. People will go, ah, that’s all hippie dippy stuff (laughs) but I’ll put meditational music on in the bunk to help get to sleep and I’ll wake up feeling refreshed. And that can be just as important as your diet.
Are you working on any music of your own?
I have a record that I made with Elmo Lovano, who has worked with Christina Perri and all sorts of people like that; he’s a drummer, he owns an app called Jammcard. He’s a co-producer on that and we have more of a Mahavishnu/Miles Davis kind of sound. It hasn’t been released yet but we have streaming links online you can get and a YouTube video, which has gotten 20,000 views. It’s called Pluuto and features the Sexy Saxman, Sergio Flores, on sax and flute, and my longtime friend from Sydney who is also based in LA, Kristian Attard, on bass. My friend Mykul Lee helped co-produce.
I also have a rock record of my own that I worked on with Kim Fowley of the Runaways before I met Scott and before Kim Fowley passed away in 2015. I was in a session with Cherie Currie for her new record, which came out this year or last year, and I got called in to come play with Lita Ford and Kim started doing this psychoanalysis on me: “I’m seventy-four years old with cancer. You should have your own record. I’ve got two records out. You’re great, you look good, you play amazingly. Can you write? Can you sing? Blah blah blah.” Next thing you know he took me to his house and we ended up writing a whole record together. Then I got distracted and I had to go on the road and do an arena tour in Australia, which is a good distraction (laughs). By the end of 2014, we recorded it, then mixed and mastered it this year. But they want to write a new Wildabouts record so I’ll be a part of the new record, actually a writer on the new record, so that’s another good distraction to have (laughs). But I’ve got some ammunition up my sleeve for a rainy day. When there is nothing going on I can try it then.
Live photographs by Amy Harris & Leslie Michele Derrough
