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Tribble: At this point, you started working internationally as well, correct?
Donahue: They moved the [custom shop] to Los Angeles, and I stayed in Bensalem. My boss went out to Los Angeles-I didn't want to move there at the time-I had no desire. Back then, it was too weird for me, being from the East Coast. The first time I went to Los Angeles, I stayed right in Hollywood, and that flipped me out.
In 1991, my president called me in and said he needed somebody to go to Korea. We had just switched factories from Japan to Korea because the exchange rates were making Japanese guitars so expensive. They wanted me to teach the Koreans what a guitar is. Koreans knew how to make guitars, but not what it was. They can make a clock, a boat, a semiconductor, a guitar, but they don't understand that a guitar has soul. That's why the Japanese were always so good at making guitars and why the Chinese haven't quite got it. When I used to go to the factories in Japan in the late 1980s, all the guys in the factories were in bands-they could've been a John Lennon or a Beatles cover band or an AC/DC cover band, but it didn't matter-every guy was really into guitars. You'd go in there and say: "What do you have?" They'd say, "I spent all my money, and I have a '64 Fender Duo Sonic." He'd be so into it and know everything about it.
When I went to Korea, the Korean government had banned heavy metal music-it wasn't illegal, but you almost didn't want to do it. So, people knew nothing about guitars, and they had no history-they didn't know a Les Paul from a Strat from a violin. So, I had to go teach Koreans about guitars. I spent a lot of time in Korea-I learned to read and write Korean. I spent six years back and forth teaching them about truss rods and fretting, good necks and bad necks, good pickups that don't squeal, electronics, hardness of bridges, making better jacks. They were real cool about it and they knew they had to [learn].
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