A 1986 Kramer Kline Ghoul which featured the exclusive Floyd Rose
double-locking tremolo with a two-point floating pivot.
way. These discerning players chose the modifying route.
Replacement parts saw a boom in sales during this time
period. It began with the pickup.
The pickup I put in my Les Paul was a Gibson Dirty
Fingers humbucker. It was a gnarly pickup that put a lot
of sizzle into my tone. The salesman who showed me my
options put a wide variety in front of me. DiMarzios filled
the display case, along with a bunch of other replacement parts. DiMarzio was one of the first companies to
offer such a wide variety of replacement parts—that also
included necks, bodies and hardware. But their main
product was their headspinning array of pickups. Seymour
Duncan would later arrive on the scene as major competition, making even more tonal options available.
As the years went by, a huge assortment of other parts
companies appeared, making it possible for any guitarist
to hot-rod to their heart’s delight. There were electronic
gadgets available to make your guitar scream, provide
endless amounts of sustain, and even shoot out lasers.
Of the more outstanding parts companies was Warmoth
from Puyallup, Washington. As mentioned earlier, it was
a company born out of the Charvel legacy. Lynn Ellsworth
and Ken Warmoth put together a company that made a
whole host of Strat-compatible necks and bodies using
premium and exotic woods. They did everything in-house
and built a large enough market for guitarists to begin
doing their own customization on a massive scale. Other
similar companies, like Mighty Mite, Chandler and Zolla,
were very good and affordable, too. All of them gave guitarists the ability to hot-rod guitars at home or have their
local guitar repair guy slap something together for them.
In 1987, I decided to take a stab at building a guitar. How
hard could it be? I had a Charvel and a Kramer, but at that
point I wanted to see if I could make one just as good or
better than what I had. I ordered a Warmoth neck and
body; I collected other hardware—from screws to bolts
and wiring; and got a humbucking Seymour Duncan pickup to make this dang thing. Once I had gotten a Floyd
Rose tremolo, I went at it, using the Charvel and the
Kramer as my cheat sheet. From building this guitar,
Terry Boling’s Kramer
Compulsion
“The single thing that made Kramer guitars more desirable
to me over the competition was that Eddie Van Halen was
playing their products,” says Terry Boling of Easley, South
Carolina. He is one of the premier Kramer collectors in the
US, having owned hundreds of Kramer guitars over the past
twenty years. Boling has often been referred to as “The
Godfather of Kramer,” having written the most definitive story
of the Kramer guitar company. Also a motorcycle enthusiast,
Boling began collecting Kramer guitars in 1984. He believes
the popularity of the Kramers was due to two factors: “With
the endorsement of Eddie Van Halen and being the sole distributors of the Floyd Rose tremolos, Kramer was difficult for
anyone to overthrow.”
Of the Kramer guitars Boling currently owns, his white Baretta
model is his favorite. “It’s an original 1985 Baretta,” he says,
“with the R5 Floyd Rose nut width, and it’s loaded with an aftermarket EMG 81 pickup. The radius of the fretboard is really flat,
and the neck thickness is fairly thin and feels absolutely terrific
to me. I’ve played it somewhere in the neighborhood of six to
seven thousand hours in the twenty-one years I’ve owned it.”
Kramer closed up shop in June of 1990, but Boling
continued his crusade to honor the company by launching
kramerkrazy.com. He also contributed a lengthy, six-part
research report on the company for Vintage Guitar Magazine
in 1998, which was well-received by guitar fans. It contained
many unknown facts about the company, including the
involvement of ESP Guitars and other companies in Kramer’s
product manufacturing.
“ESP helped fulfill the needs of Kramer for guitar bodies and
necks,” says Boling, “along with other wood suppliers like
LaSiDo (a Canadian guitar company) and Sports (a wood supplier from Connecticut). By 1986, ESP was the sole supplier of
bodies and necks.”
In 1995, Gibson bought the Kramer name and began
importing guitars from Korea under the Kramer brand
name, using the same model names from previous years.
Boling was displeased, saying, “They were importing guitars under the names ‘Pacer’ and ‘Baretta’ that had no
similarities to the original guitars of the eighties. I felt this
was a hard slap in the face of the original company, its
founders, and the fans of their products.”
But with the pressure of the Kramer fans in online forums, the
newly formed Kramer company restructured their production
and is finally recreating the original models in the US. In some
cases, they’re even better than the original versions. Boling
recently bought a new 1985 reissue Kramer Baretta. “The fit,
finish and overall quality meets or exceeds many of the original ’ 84 – ’ 85 Barettas I have owned over the years,” he says.
For more information about the original, legendary Kramer
guitars and Terry Boling’s history of the Kramer company,
visit: vintagekramer.com.
