Summer Tour

My good friend Rich scored a tour this summer as a guitarist for the Psychedelic Furs. I went through these two guitars with a fine-toothed comb to make them road ready. He was worried about a previously badly-broken headstock on the Flying V, whether or not his amateur road repair will hold up to the rigors of a long tour. Upon close examination, his road repair was structurally as good or better than many we see coming from professionals. Rock hard this summer, Rich!

Broken headstock

The truss rod cover is the only thing holding this headstock to the neck. Suddenly I feel like playing Pac-Man.

Finish Chemistry

Putting a nice finish on an instrument often takes as long as all of the preceding steps combined. But, at least for the moment, I'm determined to defy the nice finish conventions of the high-gloss ideal and experiment until I get a satisfactory lower-gloss, non-grain filled finish that is still protective and attractive. It may be a pipe dream, but if there's any possible hope of putting function before vanity and immense amounts of time, this is how it will happen. Currently my recipe, though highly classified, includes dyed shellac and paste wax.

Working on Jennifer Batten's axe. Not only can Batten play all of Eddie Van Halen's solos in her sleep (which earned her 10 years of Michael Jackson tours) but her own abstract shredding is downright mind-blowing. She's also really into pieces of flair on the headstock. Her own invention is the patented fold-down string damper which mutes the open strings for two-hand tapping with a minimum of extraneous noise.

Rajneeshee Strat

There's nothing like working on the very guitar used in the Rajneeshee ceremonies and wondering if I should be wearing a gas mask. In the mid 80's, up the river a couple hours from Portland, the Bhagwan Shri Rajneesh and his followers engineered strains of Salmonella in an attempt to poison the local voting constituents, to send their own candidate to the county court. They poisoned the water supply and 11 local restaurants, but ultimately failed in their aims. Anyway, I swapped out the guitar's black pickguard for a white one (perhaps diminishing its cult power), thoroughly cleaned the guitar and its electronics, and set it up. Notice the awesome finish checking which runs almost perfectly perpendicular to the top, and my dust mask next to the old pickguard. So far, I haven't noticed any ill effects, spiritual or otherwise.