Janie Hendrix says, "This is just the tip of the iceberg."

Jimi Hendrix's half sister, Janie, is the woman who has been steering the course of the Hendrix estate for the last decade or so, or perhaps even longer if the stories of her manipulation of Al Hendrix (her and Jimi's father) are to believed. She has established her own company, specializing in the embarrassingly soul-less franchising, exploitation and general blood sucking of Jimi Hendrix.

"Boxer shorts!!! Get your Jimi Hendrix boxer shorts here!!"

Read this laughable story, detailing Gibson Guitar's plan to market a Janie Hendrix-approved cheap n' ugly clone of Hendrix's preferred instrument, the Fender Stratocaster, in a sickening and desperate lunge to suck a wee bit more money from Hendrix's bones.

"This is the ultimate tribute to the greatest guitarist who ever lived," says Janie Hendrix.

HA!!!

Yes, he was the greatest but this ill-conceived 'tribute' just plain makes me sick.

Congratulations Janie Hendrix! You have succeeded in presenting yourself as the world's most an unimaginative leech.

Why would a respectable company like Gibson stoop so low? Is the economy so bad? They are a well established and iconic company, having produced some of the world's finest instruments for over 150 years. Can they be hurting that badly? Doubtful. I guarantee their Les Paul model will never go out of style. Why pillage the legacy of a great musician just to make a few paltry bucks at the expense of cheapening a long standing reputation of quality? Are Gibson and Janie Hendrix really going to make a bundle of $ here? My prediction: No!

I'm willing to bet that money grubbing was never on Jimi Hendrix's mind. Today, it's a damn shame that others who never even knew him can so shamefully profit off his image. I guess it is better that someone from the Hendrix family might profit off this crap (as opposed to another Alan Douglas) but I am also fairly certain that the legendary guitarist would simply be embarrassed by this latest turn of events. Janie Hendrix: if you are hurting for money, why not spend some more time creating new ways for fans to experience Hendrix's music in the form of CD reissues or live concert DVDs? Howsabout promoting some kind of musical education for kids in Jimi's name? If you're going to profit off his image, why not do it in a way that contributes to others in a positive way instead of just scraping the barrel with this uninspired junk for your own $.02.

Shame on you.

Roughed in...

Here are my electric and acoustic guitar necks as they currently stand. After we glue the fingerboards to the mahogany necks, we'll be carving these into shape:

A glimpse at the electric in progress:

Resurrecting My First Guitar

When I started playing guitar at age 13, I had to prove to my folks that I was pretty serious about learning this instrument. While at camp Keewaydin in the summer of '92, a fellow camper named Dan Knight taught me how to play "Don't Cry" by Guns n' Roses. Yes, I must admit that Slash was the first guitarist who inspired me to play, although the lifetime commitment was due to watching Jimi Hendrix's performance at Woodstock the last day of 8th grade in Mr. Serraceno's social studies class... but that's another story. When I came home from camp that summer, I remember immediately running down into our basement to dig up the acoustic guitar I knew my dad had down there. I vividly remember the excitement as I opened the guitar's case... quickly followed by a deflating "chuh-wahng!!!" sound as the bridge popped off the face of the 30+ year old guitar. I guess my dad didn't know that you couldn't put steel strings on a classical guitar... oops. After begging my parents to have it fixed, I set about learning more popular MTV songs of the day, taking lessons at Nolde's Music in Flemington, NJ and scratching the heck out of the top of my dad's old guitar with a pick. I knew his España brand guitar wouldn't do though. I was 13 and needed to rock. So I asked for a Jackson Dinky Reverse:

Yikes... A near fatal "oops!" The above tiny photo is actually the same model I had my heart set on: faux stone flake finish, maple neck and Floyd Rose. Eeek. That thing was hideous. But to my young mind it was super cool. Thank God my parents saw fit to get me a real guitar: under the Christmas tree that year was a Gibson Les Paul Studio in wine red with gold hardware. Hot diggity that thing was a beauty! Although I must admit that at first I was a little disappointed that I had gotten the more boring of the two guitars. Thanks Mom and Dad for starting me off on the road to good taste... well, at least with guitars that is.

Fast forward a couple years: after absorbing many Metallica and Green Day songs, I snapped the headstock off for the first time while sleeping one night. I was a freshman in high school and had the guitar on a stand next to my bed. I must have rolled over and slapped it with my hand and it just fell smack on its face. The sickening thud of the Les Paul hitting the floor woke me up... but it was repaired.

It survived until one of the guitar's strap knobs broke during a Mr. Brownstone rehearsal in 2002 and the headstock snapped again. This time Sadowsky guitars in NYC fixed it, telling me that "if it breaks again, it's over."

Well, the third and final charm was my friend, Dave Godowsky, who wisely packed my guitar in the trunk of his car while on a 5 hour drive from Boston to NYC in February the following year. Contrary to popular belief, freezing temperatures are actually bad for guitars and headstock cracked yet again. At that point, I thought my Les Paul was a goner. I stripped it of its parts and put it away in its case for a few years, thinking that one day maybe I'd fix it myself.

So...

Now that I'm at R-V, I'm learning how to properly fix this type of breakage. Tonight was the first step in resuscitating my '92 Les Paul. Below, the guitar on the bench, with the headstock crack fully epoxied and clamped to sit overnight:

Mega thanks to Robert Mazzullo of Mudd Guitars for his help on this.

A Real Working Band

Just a great photo I came across on the Steel Guitar Forum of a working band from the 50's. Legendary steel player, Buddy Emmons, is on the right. You can see his Bigsby pedal steel guitar was too short for his long legs so he propped his right knee out. Looks kinda uncomfortable, huh? Great looking band in their country duds! Looks to be a Martin D-18? D-28? on the left obscuring a fella playing a who-knows-what kind of archtop. Early Gibson Les Paul in the middle and a Gretsch Duo Jet equipped with a Bigsby vibrato arm on the right. Looks like all three of those electric guitars are being played through the tweed Fender Twin amp!

R.C. Allen

Holy serendipity, Batman!!!

My connection to Paul Bigsby gets one big step closer:

We had an unexpected guest at R-V today: R.C. Allen. Although I had heard his name in the past, I really only understood the man's story after reading Andy Babiuk's book, "The Story of Paul Bigsby: Father of the Modern Electric Solidbody Guitar." I've been referring to my copy on a near daily basis for information on the electric I'm building here at school. R.C. Allen is known in certain circles because of his unique relationship with Bigsby, who as I've mentioned in earlier posts, had a massive yet somewhat unsung impact on the development of the electric guitar. In a nutshell, Bigsby was the man who built the first "modern solidbody electric guitar." What I mean is that the instrument he designed and built for Merle Travis in 1948 was truly the first solidbody electric guitar built with a full size solid body and 6 inline tuner headstock. (see top photo) His design predates Fender's Telecaster (1949) and Gibson's Les Paul (1952). Even under casual inspection, you can see the obvious Bigsby influence in both of these other classic instruments.

R.C.'s claim to fame is that he owns Bigsby solidbody electric guitar #2, acquired from his uncle, George Grohs, in 1952. The "Grohs guitar" was actually the first of Bigsby's solidbody electric guitars to feature the now famous 6 inline tuner peghead shape (similar to the Fender Stratocaster). While the Bigsby/Travis guitar also had the 6 inline tuner setup, it originally was built with a large knob on the top side of the peg head (or headstock). Travis later had this shape changed when he saw the headstock of the Grohs guitar.

R.C. (a luthier himself) gave a short lecture on the instruments he has been building over the years and told us some stories of how he came to own the Bigsby/Grohs guitar as well as some anecdotes about his pals: Leo Fender, George Fullerton, Merle Travis, Joe Maphis and of course, Bigsby himself. Amazing stuff! The whole thing was made that much sweeter for me as I was given the opportunity to demo R.C.'s guitars for the class.

R.C. Allen looks at me and says, "Do you wanna plug this in?"

"Um... yes, please."

So I played three different instruments. The first was a Stromberg influenced archtop with a Johnny Smith style floating pickup. Instructor, Don Windham, with the guitar:

Me playing one of R.C.'s Bigsby replicas (note the headstock):

R.C. hung out at Bigsby's workshop throughout the 50's picking up different tips on guitar building. He has spent his whole life building, repairing and setting up guitars. Since R.C. was one of the few people Bigsby allowed in his shop to learn his techniques, playing one of his instruments might be the next best thing to an actual Bigsby. He even builds Bigsby replica pickups, an absolutely crucial component to the sound of an electric guitar. ($500 for a pair!)

Below, a closeup of R.C.'s Bigsby guitar with his hand made pickups. (Guitar Geeks note the aluminum compensated bridge and tremolo arm, two more of Bigsby's revolutionary innovations.)

A student, Paul Barnstable, with R.C.:

The guitar in the above photo is R.C.'s replica of Chet Atkins's 1950 D'Angelico Excel, which Mr. Guitar himself modified with a Bigsby pickup, a Gibson P 90 pickup and three way switch. It's tough to see in the photo, but the switch itself was simply mounted over the bottom F-hole...

The truly hair raising part of the day was when R.C. presented the class with some original Bigsby templates. These were the actual templates Paul Bigsby crafted and used to build his guitars in the late 40's and 50's. Below are templates for two guitar bodies, an armrest and the famous headstock:

Below is the actual template (as seen on page 49 of "The Story of Paul Bigsby") which became the standard Bigsby peg head. To me this is a fairly big deal: this was the headstock shape that first introduced the now industry standard 6 inline tuner layout. This shape is the basic idea Leo Fender incorporated into all his electric guitars. (In fact, Leo once borrowed Travis' Bigsby guitar for a week, dissected it and returned with a prototype that was to become the Telecaster.) The Bigsby peg head shape was to become world famous on virtually every Fender guitar or bass model. Fender's iconic instruments from the 50's and 60's are some of the most highly collectible guitars on the vintage market. I remember a Burgundy Mist Strat at Rudy's that clocked in around $125K. I'm not trying to take away anything from Leo, mind you; he certainly had his own ideas and introduced instruments that redefined what a guitar should be, not to mention pioneering the concept of well made, mass produced instruments. Leo might be compared to Henry Ford in terms of his assembly line approach to instrument manufacturing. His gift was the ability to examine something (such as the Bigsby/Travis guitar), and come up with his own version (the Telecaster) that sounded great, was affordable for the working musician and was easy to manufacture and repair. In contrast, Bigsby would take upwards of one month to build each of his custom guitars, taking pride in crafting each unique instrument... a far cry from the high volume factory that Leo developed.

R.C. told me the birdseye maple used in this particular template came from the same batch that Bigsby used to craft both the Travis and Grohs guitars. The Holy Grail indeed... shivers. Looking closely at one side of the headstock template, you can make out Bigsby's scribbled some notes, apparently a "to do" list for some guitar he was working on at the time.

So here's me, a novice luthier who is basing his first instrument on the Bigsby/Travis guitar. For R.C. Allen to come waltzing in one day, unannounced, out of the blue, never having visited our school before... well, you can imagine the goose bumps. Unbelievable.

And yes... I traced all those templates for future use.

Designs and the first few wooden parts

Three weeks in and they've got us pepping along at Roberto-Venn. The first section of the course focuses on the design and construction of electric and acoustic guitars. We are building one of each simultaneously. There's a ton of great information to soak up! At this point we've drawn full size plans for both the electric and the acoustic. I whipped up a design for my electric based on the solid body guitar Paul (P.A.) Bigsby built for Merle Travis in 1948 (more on this fascinating and historically important instrument in a future Twang). I'm not trying to reinvent the wheel with my design, just to learn some fundamentals while at the same time experimenting with some ideas that I've always thought would make a great guitar. In terms of the acoustic, Martin pretty much set the industry standard with their guitars so that's what we're focusing on at school. As mentioned in a previous entry, the acoustic will essentially be a Martin - OM (the other choice being the larger bodied Dreadnought model). Some shots:

Project Telecaster body roughed out on day 2:

First strip of the OM two ring rosette:

Roughed out rosewood back for the acoustic: joined, back strip glued in, brace pattern drawn:

Below is a full size drawing plan for the electric's headstock. I modified the curve on the upper knob slightly from the Bigsby/Travis guitar. Guitar geeks note: while the 6 inline tuner layout and headstock shape are most commonly associated with Fender instruments, Bigsby's design actually predates Leo Fender's. Fender began selling his first guitar, the Broadcaster, in 1950 while the familiar 'Stratocaster' headstock did not appear until the model itself was introduced in 1954. As the story goes, Travis requested that Bigbsy build his guitar with 6 inline tuners so as to allow for easier tuning and string changing. Many people consider the Bigsby/Travis instrument to be the first true modern solid body electric guitar.

The body outline:

My work bench at the end of week 3:

Off To Arizona!

Busy bees, busy bees...

A full update coming soon but in the meantime: While on an amazing camping trip in Vermont, I asked Carolyn to marry me. She heartily accepted. Their was much rejoicing. We had an incredible time camping with some dear friends that weekend at Lake Dunmore. The bugs were plentiful. Fast forward a few weeks and we're now living in Phoenix, Arizona where I am attending The Roberto-Venn School of Luthiery and Carolyn is continuing to pursue her music, writing and photography. All her goodies can be had at carolynsills.com During the six month program I'm enrolled in, I'll be learning the fundamentals of guitar design, construction and repair. Pretty amazing stuff to get inside the builder's head and know what it takes to create a great instrument. Of course, true mastery can take years... but we're on our way.

One photo for now: my work bench as it looked this morning. Sitting in the center of the bench is a long aluminum sanding block and two pieces of spruce that will make up the top of the Martin OM style acoustic I'm building.