FEATURE
I was thirteen in 1977 when I got my first
Gibson Les Paul Custom. It was my dream
guitar ever since I’d seen it in the hands
of many of my favorite guitar players, like
Ace Frehley and Peter Frampton. A year
into it, I started having problems trying to
make it sound a particular way. I took it to
a local music store to ask how to go about
making it sustain more, and the guy behind
the counter introduced me to replacement
parts. He showed me a heavy-mass stop bar
tailpiece and a high-output pickup. Thus
began my journey into the world of hot-rodding the electric guitar. As time went on,
I started adding other parts to it, and each
time I put something new on it, it was like
having a new guitar all over again. By the
time it was all over, nothing on that guitar
was stock except the wood.
In the thirty years since then, much has gone
on in the guitar world. Basically, there have
been two approaches in play: modifying an
existing guitar, or building a guitar to meet
high-performance needs. It also always
came down to two kinds of guitars: Fenders
and Gibsons. What Fenders lacked was the
output and full-bodied tone of the Gibsons;
what Gibsons lacked was the comfortable
playability of the Fender neck and body.
The Hot Rod Revolution: The Early Days
In 1978, the year after I got that Les Paul, a
revolution erupted, and a movement started
that continues today. With the release of
the first Van Halen album, rock guitarists
were exposed to the unthinkable: putting a
Gibson-style humbucker pickup in a Strat-shaped guitar. It was like two worlds collid-ing… the guts of a Gibson in a Fender-style
body. By today’s standards, it’s not uncommon, but thirty years ago it was unheard of.
My other guitar buddies and I stared at that
album cover, looking at Eddie’s picture on
the front, asking, “What the hell is that?”
Hot-rodding a guitar was something that
was done out of necessity. You either had to
modify an existing guitar to give it features
it wasn’t originally intended to have—from
www.premierguitar.com
www.premierguitar.com
changing the electronics to replacing bodies
and necks. Or, if there wasn’t anything out
there that suited your needs, you just built a
guitar that featured everything you wanted,
including the way it looked. Historically,
the whole idea of the electric guitar was to
amplify the sound of the instrument. Hot-rodding it meant amplifying everything, from
refashioning the electronics to giving it one
hell of a graphic paint job. Taking it to the
extremes is what hot-rodding is all about.
For us hot-rodders, the fifties through the sixties might be considered the dark ages of the
electric guitar: the instrument was still young,
and the companies at the forefront were still
tinkering. Early hot-rodding was evidenced
by John Lennon and George Harrison scraping the finish off of their guitars to get better
tone. Gibson was coming out with things like
the Vari Tone switch, which gave the player
several preset tones. Fender developed the
Slimline Telecaster in the seventies—
surprisingly, it had a dual coil humbucker-style
pickup in the neck position. So, it was evident
that the spark had already been ignited. But
it was only when a custom shop opened up in
Azusa, California that some really crazy stuff
was about to go down.
The Ground Zero of Hot Rod Guitar
Wayne Charvel was a guitar player in the
L.A. area who started a business in guitar
repair, including refinish work for Fender
under contract in the mid-seventies. Some of
his work included routing humbucker cavities
in Strats. He started doing customizations
that no one had ever done before, and also
developed aftermarket parts, including hardware made of aluminum, brass and stainless
steel. While doing basic guitar repair and
contract work for Fender, he was also making customized guitars that eventually developed into original designs. Soon, he was
building custom-made guitars to order and
was the only true custom shop on the block.
It was in this shop that a kid named Eddie
Van Halen would sit on the floor and tinker
with guitars while Charvel did his work.
Charvel would eventually offer replacement
bodies and necks made by his friend, Lynn
Ellsworth. Ellsworth began making Strat
bodies and necks under Charvel’s tutelage,
and then started Boogie Bodies Guitars, a
replacement guitar parts company. Charvel
sold them at the repair shop. In the late
seventies, Ellsworth would partner with Ken
Warmoth to create Warmoth Guitar Parts.
It was also during this time that Charvel did
some work with Dave Schecter, who had
begun to make aftermarket guitar parts.
Together, they built necks and bodies to be
sold through Charvel’s mail order service.
Later, Schecter would go on to form Schecter
Guitar Research, and would design high-end
superstrats for discerning players. Eventually,
Charvel began making bodies and necks on
his own, as Ellsworth and Schecter took what
they had learned from him and begin their
own luctrative businesses.
Wayne Charvel’s guitar repair workshop in
Azusa seemed to be the birthplace of the
modern hot rod guitar. Eventually, it would
become Charvel Manufacturing in San
Dimas, California—and would grow into the
flagship of the revolution, producing some
of the most influential guitar designs to
appear on production models to this day.
With his staff, he created some of the most
original guitar body designs anyone had
seen, and had them painted with everything
from hot rod flames to asymmetrical stripes
and highly detailed graphic artwork. To a
guy like me, San Dimas is hallowed ground.
One employee of Charvel became legendary in his own right. Karl Sandoval was a
luthier at the Charvel shop and later became
known to local L.A. area guitarists as a radical guitar builder. He understood the needs
of the working musician as well as the rock-star mentality. His clients included Eddie
Van Halen and George Lynch, but Sandoval
made more of a statement with his work for
Randy Rhoads: the famed polka dot Flying V.
Like Ellsworth and Schecter before him, Karl
Sandoval had Charvel as a launching pad to
elevate his stature in the hot rod community.
