Ex-GUNS N' ROSES Guitarist BUCKETHEAD Says 10 Of His Most Important Guitars Have Been Stolen

Former GUNS N' ROSES guitarist Brian " Buckethead" Carroll, who was in the band between 2000 and 2004, says that ten of his personal guitars have been stolen.

The eccentric musician, who wears a fried-chicken bucket on his noggin and talks only through a hand puppet, revealed the theft in a post on his web site earlier this week.

"Ten of the most important guitars of [my] life were stolen," he wrote. "It's a tremendous loss. I'll never really be able to replace them but I'm looking for anybody who knows of any instruments that come close to these. Hopefully somebody can help out. I'm trying to get 2 Studio Gibson Les Pauls. Please contact [email protected]. Thank you".

Buckethead quit GUNS N' ROSES in 2004 after becoming fed up with GUNS' inability to complete an album or tour, his manager told MTV at the time.

A year and a half ago, GUNS N' ROSES guitarist Richard Fortus talked about what it was like to work with Buckethead for a couple of years in the early 2000s.

"Bucket is very musical, but I think a lot of guys like that — phenomenal, prodigious talent — they're not necessarily… I think Bucket's music is great," Fortus said. "What he does on his own, he's out there, but he did understand how to make three guitars work, and that's a very difficult thing. And he would lay out and just stand there and be weird and Bucket-y, and then he would come in on the choruses, and it would be huge. He got that; he understood that. [He's] a phenomenal talent. But the thing is, socially, guys like Bucket spend so much time in their bedroom practicing that they don't really — it's just different for them socially.

"Being in a band, you've gotta relate to people," Fortus continued. "And I think Bucket struggled with that. I always got along with him, but I think he really had a tough time with that."

In January, former GUNS N' ROSES guitarist DJ Ashba, who joined the band in March 2009 following the departure of Robin Finck, claimed that he took the gig with the Axl Rose-fronted outfit because "seeing a guy" like Buckethead "run around with a chicken bucket on his head, it's, like, to me, that took the coolness out of the band that I grew up loving, and that's one of the main reasons I wanted to get in there and try to do whatever I could do to get justice, bring back that reckless rock and roll vibe of what Slash was all about and GUNS N' ROSES was all about. To me, it was in a sense losing that thing that I loved about the band," he said. "And I love Buckethead as a guitarist. No disrespect at all — it's just, in my opinion, he didn't really fit the band."

Two months after BLABBERMOUTH.NET and other media outlets reported on Ashba's comments, he appeared on The SDR Show, where he was asked to elaborate on his apparent criticism of his predecessor.

"The media, they twist every headline," DJ said. "I didn't mean that in any bad way. Buckethead could play circles around me."

When host Ralph Sutton said that Buckethead is "a phenomenal guitarist" whose "look didn't go with GUNS N' ROSES," Ashba agreed, saying: "And that's all I was saying. No discrediting him at all. I just, as a fan, that just didn't… that wasn't rock and roll, the reckless rock and roll band that we all grew up on. So, you know, to me, it's, like, I just didn't feel like he personally fit. And that was just my opinion."

Image courtesy of Bill YouTube channel