The Man Behind The Signature

We catch up with Eric Steckel while he’s hunkered down in LA and waiting to get back on the road

- Dave Burrluck

Joe Knaggs’ business partner, Peter Wolf, has been around guitars and guitar players all his life. “You gotta hear this guy,” he exclaimed to this writer a few years back when a mutual friend had sent him a video of Eric in action, playing a Knaggs Severn X. Indeed, Eric has quite a backstory, playing with John Mayall when he was 12 and touring with him the following year, as well as contributing to Mayall’s 2005 Road Dogs album. But the old Strat and Fender Super Reverb of his teens gave way to more modern tastes and, as he recounts today, he had been a Tom Anderson player since his Feels Like Home album, released in 2008. By 2015, Knaggs had started to register on Eric’s radar.

“I’d been seeing quite a lot of chatter about Knaggs on online forums,” he says, “and it seemed to me like the people with the best tone and taste were playing them. At this point, I didn’t know either Joe Knaggs or Peter Wolf. Anyway, one afternoon I was searching on Reverb and I found a really cool-looking Knaggs Severn X. I just bought the guitar and paid the asking price. When I got the guitar it was like, ‘Wow, this is a cut above,’ and it became my number one guitar instantly. I used it for all my tour dates in the USA, Europe, Australia, wherever.”

As videos of Eric’s performances with his Knaggs began to circulate, one found its way to Peter Wolf who had neither heard of Eric nor had any idea he played a Knaggs.