Feedback is Holy

How rad is this TEE VEE?

These RS Guitarworks guys make em..

The Ones That Got Away

You know the one that got away? Well, here are some of mine. Owww..

Steinberger

When in 1992 I had a dream about a yellow Jazzmaster, I was actually playing a Steinberger GL2T. Yes, I was. That Steinberger had been a very expensive guitar. Maybe still the most expensive instrument I’ve ever bought. I took it to music school (Berklee) in 1990 and played the shit out of it. It was the guitar I played in Road Parrot, and it was the guitar I played in the first days of Pie - the Soft Broth days. Whatever for that thing. It was completely Spock, but it was not cool. 

My First Jazzmaster

But then I had my dream about the Jazzmaster.. a pale yellow one with a dark tortoise shell pickguard. I’d never played or even thought about one before, but I knew when I woke up in the morning that I must have it. Well, no music store in town had a pale yellow one. And the stores didn’t have any vintage ones that I could afford. But Central Sales Music on Mass Ave in Cambridge did have a sunburst MIJ reissue with a red tortoise shell pickguard. So I bought that. That guitar, Seymour Duncan “Hot for Jazzmaster” pickups and the 1969 Marshall Super Lead 100 that I’d bought from Hal Pecher in 1991 became MY SOUND and I’ve never looked back. Not successfully, anyway. Nothing else compared or compares. 

Dickey, Boston University, February 17, 1996

just like the dream guitar

I didn’t mean to break that beloved guitar. But I did. It was the night when Pie played Boston University. My friend Dan set up the show, which in itself was pretty amusing. Dan took a few great pics during that show. One is above. And I know he got another of the moment just after I’d snapped the neck, when I was slamming the thing into the ground. Maybe he gave me that other pic and I lost it.. anyway I don’t have it. At the end of our set I was manhandling my guitar a bit, like I often did. I’d thrown it onto the ground many times, but this time the neck caught at just the wrong angle and it snapped in half. Feeling like an ass, not to mention angry, I completed the job by slamming it around. Parts went flying and kids grabbed them. I don’t know why I didn’t save the body. I guess I didn’t see it and someone made off with it. Or maybe it was split too. All I got were the pickups and the Mustang bridge.

I’m so bummed I broke that guitar. It was perfect and I loved it. It was the sound of Pie.. just all over all the recordings. RIP Jazzmaster.

MIJ Jaguar

We had more shows scheduled right after that BU one, so I had to have another guitar. I didn’t have a backup of any kind at that time. At that moment, none of the shops in Boston had a Jazzmaster that I could afford. Central Sales did have a metallic red Jaguar, which I bought on impulse. I thought it would be the same, and it totally wasn’t. I guess I didn’t realize that Jaguars have a short-scale neck until I’d been playing it for a while wondering WTF was wrong. It weren’t no kind of guitar for a man! Also it was pointlessly heavy. There was unnecessary metal shit all over the top of the body. And the pickups were just atrocious - ice-picky, shrill, gutless, ear-stabbing. I got rid of it in short order. I think I must have traded it directly for the white MIJ reissue Jazzmaster that ultimately became The Creamsicle, because that white guitar was the one I had when I left the Least Coast in 1997.

BTW, I just traded the neck from that second Jazzmaster to Pete Weiss of Zippah/Verdant/Weisstronauts fame. So Pete, when you see the Central Sales Music sticker on the back of the headstock, now you know why.

To this day, I do not understand the Fender Jaguar. Why the fuck would you have a Jaguar when you could have a Jazzmaster? Seriously!

Yellow Mosrite 12-String

This guitar was the first in a string of nonsensical, searchy purchases. And my treatment of it may comprise the zenith of my adult life guitar abuse.

One day in what must have been 1994 I walked into Cambridge Music Center in Porter Square, Cambridge. I used to go in there a lot, because I lived nearby. They often had cool, rare guitars, and for reasonable prices. Hal Pecher the amp guy had his shop just upstairs. Anyway, this one day they had a vintage yellow Mosrite. It was a 12-string with Mosrite’s own version of a Bigsby whammy bar on it. Weird and impossible! I had to try it. It sounded cool, and played pretty well.

I was sitting there noodling around on this thing, just making stuff up in a very Dickey way, when this dodgy young guy came in. He watched me play for a while, which made me feel uncomfortable. I looked up at him and he said, “That sounds good. That sounds sorta like this tape I’ve been listening to. But that’s weird because it’s just a cassette demo by this band called Pie that I pulled out of the trash at ______ (insert shitty old Cambridge rock club name).” I couldn’t believe someone had recognized my playing because I hadn’t even been playing a song. I just let his comment hang in the air for a bit before I said, “Well, I play in Pie.” That guy called himself Dave King, and right then & there he became a good friend of mine. He was an extremely talented guitarist, singer & songwriter in his own right, but with an unfortunate shy streak. He ended up recording the Pie album “upside the d-lux bee chamber” on the 4track 1/4-inch reel to reel in his basement, and we hung out until I left Boston. Because I knew right then that it was such a momentous moment, I bought the guitar with my poor little credit card.

For most of my life I haven’t given a shit about vintage correctness or veneration. I still have no idea when that pale yellow Mosrite was made or how rare it might have been. I’ve never seen another, so it must have been rare indeed. And I balk now at researching that, mainly because of what I ended up doing to the guitar. It became my backup guitar, because with the addition of it, I then had two guitars. We were making lots of first-take live 4track recordings, and playing lots of shows. I had no use for a second guitar that could not double for the Jazzmaster when a string broke. The Mosrite looked unbelievably cool but had screechy microphonic pickups, and, well, it was a 12-string with a whammy bar - it didn’t stay in tune much. So I pulled the Mosrite pickups out and butchered in a couple Seymour Duncan Jazzmaster pickups. The 12-string headstock felt heavy and unbalanced, so I CUT PART OF THE HEADSTOCK OFF and strung the thing as a 6 string. Hmm, yes. I used it live on a certain songs, and whenever I broke a string on the Jazzmaster. I gave the guitar to Dave King when I left Boston. I don’t know what happened to it or to him. I haven’t heard of either since.

Before I fucked up that guitar, I did manage to make one recording with it in its original state. There is a 12-string part at the end of the Pie tune The Lost Expedition from Strictly Seance. The Mosrite comes in at 3:29. I think it’s also all over the Simp tape “World Wheat Hands,” which is lost.

Here’s the only picture I can find of the (then already formerly 12-string) yellow Mosrite, in the hands of Vinnie Scorziello. Notice the modified headstock. Oww.

Aqua Mosrite

This was one of the most valuable guitars I have ever owned. And I didn’t own it for long. It was a perfect vintage Ventures model, just gorgeous. The finish was something to behold. The paint was so deep and dimensional, it felt like you were looking down into the ocean. God, it was a beautiful guitar. It was another impulse credit card buy from Cambridge Music, and I really couldn’t afford it. It cost me $1,200. Nevermind that they’re worth well over $5K now.. I probably couldn’t afford $200 at the time, so I gave it back to the store after a couple months.

And apparently, the same day I dropped it back off, Peter Svensson of The Cardigans came in and offered good money for it, so I didn’t end up owing the shop anything. He’s a great player, so that’s doubly awesome. I hope he still has it.

I didn’t record anything with it, but I did take one picture that I still have. Here is the Aqua Mosrite with two others that got away, the Mustang and the Jaguar..

It’s funny that I owned a couple Mosrites… well, not if you think of it from the surf guitar angle, because they are associated with the Jazzmaster via surf music. But I don’t think they actually sound very good. And they don’t play or hang on you as nicely as a Fender does. They’re wonky and weird. But they do have this high-quality, over-engineered aura to them, and by God they look fabulous. 

Mustang

This guitar is the only vintage Fender guitar I’ve ever owned. It was from the 60s, with metallic red paint and double yellow racing stripes. I’m sad to say that I did not come by it entirely honestly, and that the moment it entered my realm, it began to exact a heavy karmic toll. It was a cool guitar, though, with a really great grindy Fendery sound. Too bad Mustangs are short-scale guitars and generally so small.. otherwise this one might have become my main guitar. 

I have one recording of it - Failure Of My Imagination. And then there’s a funny phone message left by our record guy Chris deStefano, the second in a heated exchange of voicemails concerning this guitar. I think I’d traded it to him for Pie T-shirts or something. I added that track to our homespun final album Pie @ The Electric Spa, as if it were a song called Outta Control. That was a trendy thing to do then.

Vintage Kawai Winston Hollow-Body Teardrop

I don’t think I ever took my own picture of this guitar. So here’s a pic I found on the interweb..

It looks 60s to me, and it’s the only natural finish hollow-bodied teardrop I’ve ever seen. I got it cheaply, for maybe $150, from either Cambridge Music or Mr. Music. I only owned it for a couple months before I put my foot through it while in a rage over dumb personal shit. What a waste. It was really cool, if not particularly versatile. It had a clanky, microphonic, hollow sound. I actually recorded a few tracks with it - most of the tracks on Pie’s The Dustbowl EP. Here’s an example - Ocasek. That’s my dog Puck barking because he didn’t like the guiro.

Silvertone Electric

I bought this guitar because it was cheap and cool and owned it for a little while. I don’t remember where I got it, but it must have been in Boston somewhere, because I had it during the Pie days. I used it to record Plastic Vistas. It definitely would have looked cool on stage, but it was way too microphonic to play through my Marshall that was always on 11. I have no recollection of how we parted company. I probably hocked it when I was broke, just before I left Boston.

Silvertone Acoustic

This was my first guitar. It belonged to my mom, and probably came from Sears. Somewhere there’s a picture of her in her college dorm room with it hanging on the wall behind her. I’ll post that pic here if I ever find it.

My mom didn’t play guitar. Neither did my dad. I must have started playing at age 6 or 7. But I didn’t take a lesson until I was 19 or 20, so I’m 90% self-taught. I didn’t even know how to tune the guitar until I was 12. I learned on this Silvertone. It started out with 6 strings, undoubtedly. I remember a long period when it only had 3 strings, then 2. When it got down to 1 string, I bought another acoustic guitar from a neighbor for $5.

I have a wonderful memory of discovering harmonics on the old Silvertone and incorporating them into a song. I remember thinking maybe when I touch the twelfth fret here, this could be the way that Tom Scholz and Buck Dharma change notes into endless 8va sustaining feedback (I didn’t know the full scope & uses of The Giant Amp at that time). That nano-focus that a young musician gets into - just you and the instrument for hours and days and weeks and EONS, in the Summer with nothing else to do or think about. Lots of people never know the dreamy, meditative intimacy of that kind of experience. It’s a treasure for me. I can just look at this guitar now and instantly go there.

I don’t still own that first Silvertone, but I did find another at Thin Man Music Company (a great shop!) in Alameda a few years ago. Here it is..

So where did the original Silvertone end up? Maybe now you’d guess that I smashed it. And sadly, yes I did. See, I was making a tape recording with my best friend Chris Mays. I was playing the Silvertone guitar while he was supposed to be making feedback with walkie-talkies, but he couldn’t figure out how to hold the buttons correctly. The tape was rolling when I got pissed off and hit him over the head with a huge phone book. I wish I still had this tape! But I do remember it well. You could hear the big book come down on his poor little 10 year old pate - boomph! As part of that sound you could even hear his teeth clack together from the impact. I then laugh a taunting laugh. Then the fucker starts whipping me with the long metal walkie talkie antennas! You could hear this whrr whrr whzz whrr whap whap thing happening, with some swearing. I remember he split my thumbnail open and blood flew all around. I raised the stakes by smashing the guitar over his leg with a couple huge swats, thereby ending its useful life. It was loud too. You could hear my mom yell from downstairs at that point, “What’s going on up there?!” Chris and I said, Oh shit! And we made up instantly. Man, I wish I still had that tape!

Goya Strat

I have no recollection of buying or selling this thing, but I had it at the end of high school and part way through college. It was a hardtail strat copy and I loved it. Somehow it escaped modification. Look at that cool maple neck!

Turning ye olde pro reverb up to 11

Telemaster

This is a post about The Best Guitar In The World - my Telemaster.

My Telemaster in a rare state of rest.

My Telecaster Jones

For years I jonesed for a Telecaster. I still do, actually. Guitars are so expensive that normally, when I get a new jones for a certain guitar, I make myself wait and wait and wait in a protracted state of excruciating anticipation before actually buying the thing. This could last for months or years, during which I torture myself by thinking & dreaming about the object of my desire, and I even write songs with it in my head before I even have it. The worst is looking at Ebay auctions, where I just dangle myself over the precipice of buying the thing. It’s times like these when I often think to myself, ”If only I were rich, I could just get this fuckin thing RIGHT NOW!”

But there are a couple benefits to the wait. First of all, when I finally do execute, I have that awesome feeling of hard-earned entitlement. Yeah, it was expensive and yeah it’s probably a frivolous thing, but dammit I earned it! And there’s another benefit - circumspection does actually help one to make better decisions sometimes. Imagine that! Well, that was how it worked in this case. Because yes I do wish that I owned a Telecaster. But my Telemaster is even better than a Telecaster, I say, and it took a couple years of fiending to discover that the thing even existed.

Anyway, yeah I was jonesing real bad for an ur-vintage style Telecaster. The purity and simplicity of that design, the killer gritty sound. The guitar is so ubiquitous that it’s absurd to name-drop Tele players, but I do have my own faves. Enjoy some neck-bendin’ goodness from Will Seargent on Echo & The Bunnymen’s All That Jazz, and the completely bezerk tone that Jimmy Page gets on this old version of Communication Breakdown. And I couldn’t leave out pal Ted Nesseth, or how cool Keith Richards, Joe Strummer and Bruce Springstein look wearing theirs. At a certain point, these guitarists and Tele-ness in general just started driving me wild. I even grafted a Tele pickup and deluxe-style Tele bridge onto my Univox strat to try to at least get somewhere Tele-ish without spending much money. See my ”Guitars Come Apart” post about that guitar. 

MJT Built My Hot Rod

I’m pretty sure that I first saw a picture of a Telemaster in a google search, one of the images on the Telecaster Forum. So I saw that image and immediately I knew, this is the guitar for me. I love the Jazzmaster/Jaguar body shape, of course. After years of Jazzmastery, it just feels like home to me. I think it also looks killer, and of course it’s bigger than a Tele or Strat - there’s more wood there and you can even be a little fat and still play one. ha ha!

When I started looking for a Telemaster to buy, I couldn’t find any whole guitars, or anything that was actually a real Fender. Now I know that they’re out there, but there aren’t very many and they don’t come up for sale very often. Apparently, the Fender custom shop did make a few of these, or was at least rumored to have made them. Some ex-Ibanez people called Malden have built the Malden Mozak, which to my eye looks fruity, skewed & wrong. Someone out there also says that Fender was at one time gearing up to produce the Telemaster as an official limited-run model. None of that helped me actually get a guitar, though.

Whoah, it turns out this store in Chicago will make them for you!

I did learn that what you can get all the time are pieces of the guitar - bodies, necks, electronics and hardware that you can put together. So I bought my guitar on Ebay, in pieces, from MJT Aged Finishes. I completed a buy now sale and they contacted me with a checklist of my desired details. MJT specialize in relic finishes, which I’m not interested in myself. So I had them do a “closet classic” treatment for mine. It took quite a while but the timeframe was at the outside edge of what they’d said it was going to be, so that’s fine. My guitar has a light swamp ash body. Now that I have an ash guitar, I can’t believe that I’ve ever mucked around with other woods. Where have you been all of my life, Swamp Ash?? Holy shit, it sounds good - very rich, complex, sparkly and springy.

As part of the MJT deal, I was able to choose my own neck from the allparts catalog. For someone accustomed to the high-end Fender “vintage hot rod” necks, that was a big mistake. The allparts build & finish quality were really terrible. The neck was also extremely fat - like, surreal fat - and ruined the tone of the guitar, making it overly bright & harsh. So I bit the bullet and bought a vintage hot rod tele neck from my favorite Ebay seller The Stratosphere. That’s a big bullet to bite, as these things go for around $700 just for a new parted-out neck! But I can’t say enough good things about them. The soft-V strat necks on my Creamsicle Jazzmaster and EJ Strat are sheer buttery glory and really make those guitars rad. The Tele neck is C-shaped and right in line with the quality of the strat necks. Adding that neck rounded out the tone and made for extremely fabulous playability. Anyone wanna buy a big, fat, shitty allparts neck? I still have it.

MJT did a wonderful job finishing the guitar and pulling it together. I love all the options they gave me - little things like did I want a matte or gloss finish? I chose matte. Did I want a checking effect on the nitro finish or not? I chose yes. And they aged the hardware nicely too. Definitely very cool guys with very cool stuff.

My Telemaster, begging to be played again.

I just wanna say something about 1-piece maple necks - they’re the best. As I’ve said before, following a series of disappointments, I have resolved to NEVER put a rosewood neck on a Fender again. I know it’s a bit extreme, but when I see Fender guitars with rosewood necks, they look bastardized and corrupted to me. Like a bit of Gibson crossover. Extreme, I know. But still.

Electronics by Spock

If you think the foregoing describes an obsessive, geeked-out tedious fucking mindset, then you ain’t seen nothin yet. Because I did go Spock on the electronics. First, I wanted to make sure that I got excellent vintage style pickups. Know now that I am not at all interested in putting any pickups besides Tele pickups in a Tele-style guitar. I know they have their limitations, but to me those pickups are 90% of the guitar’s sonic character right there.

For years I’ve played Seymour Duncan pickups, which are consistently great. But I’ve had a Seymour Five-Two bridge pickup in the Univox Strat and I think it’s just ok. It definitely sounds Tele-ish, but it doesn’t have Godhead Factor. It’s a bit opaque and sterile, if that makes sense. It’s as if the sound is obscured by a thin layer of vagueness. There are other premium pickup makes and a number of boutique makers out there. For some reason, the moss-covered dwarvery of Lollar bums me out. Fralin is too strat-steeped. I’m sure these guys make nice pickups, but.. meh.

So I read around in the Telecaster Forum and saw nothing but raves about the Fred Stuart pickups. I think Fred used to make Tele pickups for Fender? He’s in Orange County and hand-winds the occasional batch of “black guard” Tele pickups. I found him here on Virtual Vintage Guitars and ordered a set, with reverse-wind on the neck pickup. They are not wax-potted. I had to wait a while, but I was waiting for the guitar anyway. They are amazing, just wonderful. They’re really open-sounding, super complex and multi-dimensional. And the output is just right. I’ve been playing the guitar mainly though a VOX-AC30 50th anniversary head. Here is a recorded example - See-Thru Kowboy. There’s some Fender Twin in there too, pretty obvious from the harder, reverby sound. And the metal part at the end was played through my crummy little transistor Vox practice amp.

I was worried that the unwaxed Fred Stuart pickups would be too microphonic, but I actually dig the incidental sounds I get from them. Just like hearing fingers sliding on the strings of an acoustic guitar, hearing a heavy pick click & clack over pickup covers, pickguard and bridge gives the listener a really cool impression of tactility and humanity.  Neither pickup ever squeals, and both get totally bitchin harmonic overtones and cooperative, sustaining feedback. Especially through the AC30. Here’s another track where I alternate between neck & bridge pickups a bit - Throw Them To The Wind.

Telemasters all over the place.

Because I was creating the guitar from scratch, and because I had the time, I researched and thought through all the components. I ended up buying an NOS Carling 3-way pickup selector switch. For the rest, I ended up emailing with a guy named Dirk in Germany (his website is singlecoil.com) who seemed to have some good stuff and some hyper-informed opinions about tone capacitors. I bought silver teflon wire, some military grade pots and a couple different tone capacitors from him. I still have his recommended tone cap in the guitar, though the value isn’t high enough for me and I’m going to change it. It’s a special ceramic cap that he found, and it does sound mighty good. I think it contributes a subtle flutey thing. Dirk describes it as being slightly leaky, in a way that favors some musical harmonics. I agree!  I also have a Sprague orange drop from him that’s probably worth trying. But overall, I need a higher value in order to get the occasional darker tone.

You can get really insane about tone caps, it turns out. They really do affect the sound of the guitar, even when your tone pot is turned all the way up. Check out this psycho’s videos to see what I’m talking about. I’ve used Angela paper in oil caps on my other guitars, with pretty high values. I’m re-thinking all of that nowadays. It’s a nichey little frontier.

Ain’t No Jazzmaster Replacement

So yeah, that’s the deal with my kickass Telemaster. It’s the best guitar I’ve ever owned and I love it. By now, the finish has pretty much stopped out-gassing and I’m doing my best to break it in - playing obsessively, every spare minute. The body has a few nicks and that’s just fine, but I’ll baby the neck as much as I can. Besides putting strings on it and trying another tone cap or two, I don’t plan to do anything to it.

I do like it better than my Creamsicle Jazzmaster. The overall quality is just better, and it’s made of swamp ash as opposed to alder or basswood or whatever the Creamsicle is. The black & tortoise shell Jazzmaster I used to have - an American vintage ‘62 - was almost as nice as the Telemaster. But of course that guitar is gone. I do realize that, as great as the Telemaster is, it can never replace a Jazzmaster. That’s because the Jazzmaster has a certain very unique sound and because it has the whammy bar. Maybe my next jones will be for a custom ash Jazzmaster. Hmmmm, yes… but I have no emotional space for that right now. I’m in love.

****

Ahh, one more thing is that, by happy accident, this guitar actually looks from certain angles a bit like Captain Sensible’s old Gibson Firebird. That Firebird was one of my aborted joneses. I loved this particular photo (below), totally pictured myself playing one, could obviously hear how good it sounded in Captain’s hands, loved how it was different from the Firebird II, all that. But when I tried a real one, man was I disappointed. Gibson had it all wrong. The thing looked cool, but it played like hell. It was totally anti-ergonomic. Worse, for a new replica they wanted $2,500. And the thing had obvious manufacturing flaws. Fuck that. Anyway, now I feel like I’ve captured a bit of the Firebird feeling, for way better playability, sounds, etc…

Coffee Talk

You look at it and I bet the first thing you think is, “That’s one of those ridiculous heavy metal guitars from the 80s.” I bet most of y’all think it was designed by metalheads for metalheads too, right? Well, guess what - you’re fuckin wrong. Gibson designed this thing in 1958! This is Don Draper shit, not Dimebag Darrell shit. The design is totally mid-century modern, maybe even googie. Look at it again now. See that reachy angular shit? If this thing were a house, Jackie Treehorn would live in it.

But so as I was saying, I did not want one of these. A few years ago I was in another music store phase. That’s the kind of phase in which, for whatever reason, once a week or so I go into retail music stores and fondle the gear, chat the creatures up, things like that. I didn’t even have any kind of aim to buy anything at that time. But one day at Music Unlimited in San Leandro, I looked up at the wall and saw this natural finish Explorer and thought “ha ha metal guitar - I have to play it.” Like it was going to be funny. Well, I wasn’t laughing when my fingers touched the thing and four new songs came flying out! It sounded fantastic. It felt fantastic. And it wasn’t even a Gibson - it was an Epiphone (Gibson’s made-somewhere-un-American downmarket brand). I’m not a Gibson guy, so with Gibson-like guitars I’m not susceptible to the same kind of snobismo I have about Fender-like guitars. Still, I don’t ever just buy a guitar on a whim, because all guitars are expensive. So I kept coming back and playing the thing, looking at it online, watching the video of “11 o’clock tick tock.” Until a couple months had gone by and I’d satisfied myself that it wasn’t just a whim, went down there and slapped the money down.

Even though I don’t play it a ton, I have not regretted buying this guitar at all. I didn’t really like the pickups it came with, which are some kind of really dark-sounding retro Gibson PAFs. This all-Korina guitar is actually pretty bright, and those pickups weren’t doing it justice at all. So I put a Seymour Duncan pearly gates in the bridge and a Jazz Model SH-2 in the neck. I had to get gold pickup covers and fit them to keep the look the same. I fucked up the hole that the volume pot sticks through by overdrilling it. Oh well. Anyway, here is an example of The Coffee Table in action with the original pickups - in the luxuriously / self-indulgently long second solo (starts at 2:24) in The Bruises Of Unknown Origin’s runaway hit Charles Glympse.

XOXO

~Chuck G 

Creamsicles Are For Licking

Guitars Come Apart

I discovered at an early age that electric guitars can be taken apart.  Over its short and brutal life, my first electric guitar, a sunburst Les Paul copy from the Sears catalog, suffered all manner of disassembly, reassembly, experimentation, and ultimately, destruction.  In fact, in its final configuration that poor guitar consisted solely of a neck joined to a splintered, hewn-down scrap of wood slathered in white boat paint.  I had also nailed a DiMarzio Super Distortion II pickup to the wood and had emblazoned “Zerstörung!” (that’s German for destruction) in red model paint where the pickguard should have been.

Ever since that time, I have owned very few guitars that I’ve left alone - only my beloved Goya strat copy, a vintage Mosrite Ventures model, and a vintage Fender Mustang have I left stock.  It’s worth noting, I suppose, that I only owned the latter two for a couple months.  I’ve tweaked almost all my guitars, mostly inexpertly.  But they do what they need to do and it’s all sorts of fun.  Since I’ve been doing a lot of guitar tweaking lately, I thought it would be fun to write about the current stable of mutants.

Creamsicle Jazzmaster

One night in 1993 I had a dream of a gorgeous vintage pale yellow Fender Jazzmaster that gave me “that sound,” and with which, in the dream, I regaled thousands of screaming fans.  After that dream I became obsessed with Jazzmasters.  Fast forward to 2010 and by now I’ve owned 3 of them.  The first was a sunburst Made In Japan (MIJ) Fender ‘62 reissue which I ended up destroying at a Pie show at Boston University in 1996.  The destruction was an accident, at first - I loved that guitar.  I ended up replacing that one with another MIJ reissue, this one curiously light & snappy.  It would become The Creamsicle Jazzmaster.

The Creamsicle Jazzmaster began life with a white finish and red tortoiseshell pickguard.  Not my first choice, but it played so well I had to have it.  As far as I know, Fender has never made a Jazzmaster exactly like the one in my dream - pale yellow with a dark brown tortoise-shell pickguard.  And I’m not careful & patient enough to have duplicated such a finish myself.  When I saw The Flaming Lips play The Rat in Boston in 1996, Wayne played an orange Jazzmaster.  Remembering that show, I decided to sand off the white finish and, with orange spray paint, to approximate the radness of Wayne’s guitar.  I got hold of a white pickguard to complete the look.

And thus The Creamsicle Jazzmaster was born.  Somehow, the goopy, toxic spray paint has not ruined the sound of this guitar.  The body is made of either a really light alder or maybe basswood.  It’s the best-feeling guitar I’ve ever worn - the balance of it.  And being light, it has a great snappy sound and instant jang-jang keening response.  I put Seymour Duncan “Hot For Jazzmaster” pickups in it, like I always do with Jazzmasters.  That’s MY pickup, so I can’t help it.

The only crummy thing about this guitar is the neck.  The first one warped badly, which is why I played a black US-made reissue as my main guitar for quite a while.  I replaced that neck with another MIJ neck a couple years ago and guess what.. it just warped again.  I can’t believe it.  Anyway, this lovely guitar is currently taken apart, because its neck is messed up.  And the pickups have been donated to my Custom Strat.

From L to R:  Squiremaster, Creamsicle Jazzmaster, Custom Eric Johnson Strat (phase 2).

Custom Eric Johnson Strat
This is my main guitar, my best guitar at the moment.  I made it for myself after my US-made Jazzmaster was stolen.  It’s an Eric Johnson alder body with THE BEST GUITAR NECK EVER MADE - a Fender hot rod soft-v vintage strat neck.  I bought the body and neck from the Stratosphere on Ebay, then put it together with a custom pickguard from Pickguardian, and various Seymour Duncan pups in a couple different configurations:

• Phase 1:  Seymour Duncan surf pickups neck regular, no middle, bridge angled.
• Phase 2:  With the same Seymours, but both angled, as pictured.  That was the prettiest look for this guitar.  Like a Fender Lead II or Mustang.
• Phase 3:  Now the Seymour Duncan “hot for Jazzmaster” pickups from the Creamsicle are in the Strat.  Well, the bridge pickup is.  Seems that in the process of trying to add the SD hot pup to the neck position, I fried it.  Oh well.  Instead I added the US reissue stock neck pup, and it sounds great - a little brighter and bouncier than the hot one.

Here is the Custom Eric Johnson strat today, with Jazzmaster pickups crammed into a mutilated pickguard.

Squiremaster
Right after my black US-made Jazzmaster got ripped off, while I was quite contrite over the circumstances thereof, and just before I’d resolved to put together a really nice guitar, I decided to do what I could with a real cheapo guitar I had that I actually really liked.  Just to see if a cheapo guitar could become my main squeeze.  Well, the experiment ultimately failed.  It’s not my main guitar.  But it is fun and interesting.  After much violent routing and such, I fitted a Jazzmaster bridge and tailpiece/vibrato into a Squier strat.  No mean feat.  No graceful one either, but if you squint at it, it looks pretty cool.  See the first pic above, first on the left.

Because the Squiremaster is so light and because it has a Jazzmaster bridge & tailpiece, it has a really great & unique sound.  Here is a Bruises Of Unknown Origin track recorded with this guitar, back when it had a Seymour Duncan twang banger Tele imitation bridge pickup for a strat.  Now it has a JB Jr.  Anyway, check out screw me to hear it go.

Univox Strat
When he retired, my excellent neighbor John moved to Costa Rica and left me a bunch of guitars.  The Squire that became the Squiremaster was one of them, and also a Cameo Mosrite copy bass.  But the best was this Univox Strat.  It had been seriously modified and damaged before I laid paws on it.  The wood was so fried that there was no way to resurrect it with a whammy bar.

Still, it’s always been super fun to play and has lots of songs in it.  The very first time I plugged it in, the Richard Bitch song Sit In The Sun came flying out of it (that recording features the black US Jazzmaster, though).

I messed with a few different pickups on this one, and it sat around for a couple years taken apart.  A couple months ago I started lusting after a Tele, and having a Tele pickup and bridge around, I decided to graft them onto the Univox.  So I chopped into a strat pickguard and added some other SD pickups I had, and here we go..

The Univox Strat with tele bridge pickup.  Sounds fab.

Cameo Mosrite Copy Bass
Well, here it is.  It has a US reissue Jazzmaster bridge guitar pickup in it.  With total frankenstein hardware on this thing, I can’t quite get the intonation right, but it’s really light and fun to play.  It’s very clean & bright with the Jazm pickup, but still has enough output to make amps bristle.  A caveman job for sure, but super fun.  Listen to this track by The Bronson to hear it in action:  Eskimoes

Yep, so that’s the mutilated stable at the moment.  I’m sure in a year from now most of them will have different pickups and the Creamsicle will be back in action.  Maybe it will even have become my dream guitar by then.

Out,
Jxxxx