incredible playground,” says Parker. “I was
a sponge. It was just thrilling to me. I
had dropped out of college, because I
was studying philosophy and physics
and I didn’t know what I was going
to do with that. But I sure knew
I liked to build things. I used my
brain, my imagination, my body,
my coordination, my balance, my
eyes—all that stuff. It seemed so rich
an endeavor—I just loved it.”
Parker also did serious repair work
as a guitar tech in those early years. One
of the first and most troubling things he
learned on that job was the appalling state
of fretwork on even guitars right off the
shelf. “It’s better now than it was 30
years ago. I was doing refrets on
brand-new, made-in-America
guitars that were unplayable.
I was offended. I felt that
those companies weren’t
taking musicians and
their needs seriously,
and it really both-
That eventually
led to the now-
legendary stainless-
steel fretwork on
the Parker Fly. “I
had done thou-
sands of fret jobs
by the time I started
that company. And
one of the original
design goals I told my
partner, Larry Fishman,
was “If I can’t build a guitar
that doesn’t need fretwork, I
don’t want to do it.”
This Brownie model features a red spruce top, curly mahogany veneers (on the back, sides, and neck), and a European spruce neck core.
Evolution of a Revolutionary
Parker got serious about playing jazz guitar
when he was 22, and he took group lessons
with a teacher named Dick Longale. One of
the most important things that happened in
those lessons was that they gave him his first
exposure to a good archtop—Longale’s Gibson
L12. “It was beautifully balanced, rich sound-
ing, complex . . . We were all trying to turn
the knobs on our guitars to try and sound like
Dick, but we couldn’t. So I was intrigued.”
The other significant development was
Parker’s realization that he wasn’t going
to be a player. “No matter how much I
practiced, I was still struggling after two or
three hours a night. So I said, ‘Well, maybe
I’ll just try and make one of these things.’
That was in 1974.”
Parker’s Brief Archtop Primer
Being in the New York area was a boon for
Parker and his aspiration, because it offered
him many opportunities to get his hands on
archtops. He quickly became an avid student.
“The archtop guitar is one of the very few
instruments on our planet that was not the
product of an intensive period of competition by competent builders. You can count
on one hand the number of people who
built archtop guitars by hand before 1975.
And that’s just weird. The pianoforte came
from these little carry-around-in-a-suitcase
instruments, and it took 300 years to develop. The violin went through a huge period
