Staind Guitarist Mike Mushok Recalls Getting Favorite Christmas Gift

2011-12-23

Story by Charles Ken

Staind’s Mike Mushok remembers getting his first guitar

Staind guitarist Mike Mushok was drawn to the guitar at a young age. Before he could start to play, however, he needed to actually get his hands on a guitar! So, one Christmas, he asked his parents, with all kinds of sincerity, for that prized instrument.

While Mushok finally got his guitar, his parents made him work for it a bit. “I think I was six, and my parents, being the evil people that they are, knowing that I wanted a guitar, on Christmas Eve came down with a guitar case, and me going, ‘I finally, you know, got a guitar,'” he told the Pulse of Radio (via Blabbermouth). “Well, they had taken the guitar out and left it upstairs and gave me an empty guitar case, and I started crying (laughs)! That explains a lot, doesn’t it?”

Staind frontman Aaron Lewis earlier this year told Audio Ink Radio that the guys are planning a full-fledged, North American tour in 2012. He also gave fans credit for the band’s decade-plus reign in the rock genre. “… Maybe [the success is] because we have amazing fans. I don’t really know what we might have done differently over the years,” he said. “We’ve always tried as hard as we could to not let anybody else’s visions or interpretations be allowed to be applied to us in any way, and we’ve always stayed very true to ourselves, and we’ve never gotten sucked into the over exposure machine.

“I can count on one hand the amount of award shows I’ve been to and red carpets I’ve walked down, and we’ve just really never cared about that stuff. Maybe it’s the fact we’ve quietly sold 15 million records. Maybe that’s the reason why we’re still here, because we did it quietly.”

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Charles Ken

Meet the expert - Charles Ken is a graduate of Michigan State University where he studied writing and history. He's a longtime music buff and covers classic rock for Audio Ink Radio. Contact him at ken@audioinkradio.com.