Vigier spent 5 months building this guitar by hand, truly a masterpiece.  Incredible detail on the guitar, down to the toenails.  When you bend down the vibrato bar, wings pop out of the sides.  They gave me this guitar at the NAMM convention in Los Angeles, January 1998.  Plays and sounds the best of all my guitars - it's my main guitar.

It has one push/pull volume knob that switches the humbuckers into single-coils, and a 3-way toggle switch to select pickups.  DiMarzio pickups - Tone Zone at the bridge, Chopper at the neck.

This guitar gets some funny reactions.  At the airport when it would go through the X-ray machine, it always got the same confused look - you'd think airport security never saw a bag with a giant electronic foot in it.  At NAMM shows, kids always laughed at the guitar - then I open the wings and they laughed even more.  If something makes kids laugh, keep it.  Example - my former car.  I had this old Hyundai Excel with 140,000 miles on it.  This was my second Hyundai Excel.  I drove my first Hyundai into the ground - I bought it from this slimebag who put the wrong brake parts on the car just so it would appear sellable.  So one night I'm driving home with my girlfriend at 2am from Long Island and BAM! there's a trail of car parts on the road behind me and I have no brakes.  Luckily it happened 2 miles from my house on an empty road, going slightly uphill.  I had just driven 70 miles mostly at 70mph and by luck it happened when it did.  I had the car towed to a shop where they showed me what happened, how the guy cut away parts of brakes from another car to make them fit in my Hyundai and how it was a matter of time before they literally fell out.  I went back to the shop that sold me the car and he offered me $100 to go away.  I wanted him to pay my $500 bill for getting new brakes.  He wouldn't, I took him to court and won.

I used that car to drive 500 miles each way to North Carolina and back, where my girlfriend was going to veterinary school.  I'd finish giving guitar lessons Friday 10:30 at night, drive for 9 hours, spend the weekend with her, drop her off at school Monday morning, I'd drive straight to the Sam Ash Music Institute in Edison NJ and start teaching that afternoon. 

Back to the car...  it reached a point where I couldn't make it up a hill and actually started rolling backwards when I tried.  So I parted with my red Hyundai and got a gray Mercury Topaz.  That car was good too, but every week the police would pull me over, don't know what it was about that car...  After that I got another Hyundai Excel.  When we were filming the 'T-Jonez' music video, we needed some more footage.  We filmed a big intro where my car pulls up to a club, the band gets out of the car and walks up the red carpet while a roped-in crowd cheers us on.  So I painted my Hyundai with green and orange swirls for the film shoot, *assuming the next heavy rain would wash away the paint.  It didn't.  Also gave the car zebra-print window shades, cow-print seat covers, big fuzzy dice hanging off the mirror, strings of gold beads hanging across the windows, and a big rotating lit-up disco ball on the roof.  After the video shoot, the car stayed green and yellow, I kept the cow-print seats.  It would make kids laugh when I'd drive by.  So I kept it.  Turns out we didn't even use the extra footage.

Usually at NAMM shows, after days of noise and staying at the booth I'd get a little 'anxious'.  So I'd turn the amp up loud, step into the middle of the aisle where people are walking and do a spontaneous 'guitar solo' with the foot guitar, where I'd be lying on the floor twisting, and making horrible guitar noises with the wings flapping on the guitar, legs in the air, and a crowd of bystanders scratching their heads.  That's one way to combat anxiety...