Ahrue Luster - Biography

Biography

He joined Ill Niño during the recording of their second album, Confession. He was asked to try out by long time friend, Dave Chavarri, who he had originally met during the Thrash Metal heyday of the San Francisco Bay Area.

Ahrue has an ESP Signature Series guitar. The guitar was released while he was in Ill Niño but was based on a design that he came up with while he was still in Machine Head. The guitar is thinline, sunburst ESP viper that has spades as fret inlays. He chose the spade inlays because his mother, who bought him his first guitar, was a career blackjack dealer in Las Vegas.

Although he wasn’t the original lead guitarist of Ill Niño, Ahrue has become one of the main songwriters and musical contributors. Ill Niño is a great fit for Ahrue musically because of his love of not only aggressive, heavy music but many other styles of music including the cultural music of South America and Spain. Ahrue grew up listening to Metal but as he became more and more of a musician he began to explore many other styles of music.

Ahrue’s first professional recording experience was with Machine Head on their most controversial release, The Burning Red. The record received mixed response. It was both praised and hated by fans as well as the press. The Burning Red is Machine Head’s second best selling album in the United States, however, it sold as many albums in 3 years as Burn My Eyes sold in almost 8.

He left Machine Head because he felt creatively unfulfilled with his role in the band and was told that, as a member of Machine Head, he was not allowed to seek fulfillment in any side projects. Ahrue decided that he had to remain true to his convictions as an artist so his only choice was to leave the band.

Ahrue is often thought responsible for the controversial musical direction of Machine Head's albums The Burning Red and Supercharger, though the other members of Machine Head have insisted that the change in sound was down to pressure put on them by their label, Roadrunner Records, to adopt a more nu-metal sound as the genre was doing so well at the time.