jingle_jangle wrote:The straight-edged pickguard, is IMO, a touch of genius that was perhaps unintended. This might have been a naive solution to making something distinctive. By "naive" I mean that somebody thought it would "look cool", so they did it.
It moves the shape out of the '60s idiom of "offset waist" styling, and into a sort of post-punk, or even retro, design vocabulary, nearly a decade before we got hit with all the other "retro" stuff, a lot of which is wishy-washy, bland stuff anyway.
Speaking of bland--that's how this would look with a guard whose silhouette followed the body's outer edge, again IMO.
I tend to agree with that, as contouring it would take it into fakey Fender territory, IMO. While the design appears abrupt, it really works for me in the sense of it trying to be it's own deal, rather than something that looks half Rick half Fender.