I still remember the first Ric I ever saw in person – I was 15 or so and visiting my uncle in Jacksonville, FL, and it was in a guitar shop there, a Walnut 360. It was high enough on the wall and I was naïve enough that I was too intimidated to ask someone if I could play it.
Over the next couple of years I picked up a couple of Rics and began scouring the local papers for used ones, and eventually found a similar guitar advertised in Bargain Trader, a local magazine which also had classifieds for guns, boats, cars, and sheds. But this was a 12-string!
My dad and I went to check it out – my 18th birthday was coming up – and there it was, a 1981 370/12 Walnut Byrd. Yep, a Byrd model. Two toggles, a master volume, and one volume for each pickup. (I digress: The seller was a big Bryds fan, and said his brother was the drummer for Pure Prairie League and that he and PPL’s Craig Fuller bought two of these at the same time.) It came home with us – I still have the clipped ad someplace.
I found the Byrd wiring pretty unusable, kind of like the double switches on a Gretsch. Most sounds were muddy, the treble tones too quiet. So, I got a regular 360 pickguard and had a shop called The Guitar Closet in Oldsmar, FL re-wire the guitar to standard Ric specs. After that, it was easier to dial in, but somehow it sounded crisper than my other Rics, not in a good way, kind of brash. More on that later.
Anyway, being in my late teens and not being too concerned with taking care of my gear, I thrashed this thing around and played the begeezus out of it steadily for the next thirteen years. Weather checking set in, and the clear coat started peeling off the heel of the guitar. The frets were hammered, the binding yellowed, and I didn’t care. It played great, and it was the only one like it anywhere. I used it for countless gigs, and it features prominently on my first four CDs.
Then, in a fit of poverty, I sold it on eBay on 2001. Why?
Well, mostly because I thought I ruined it by putting a certain brand of flatwound strings on it, which pulled the neck waaaay out of whack. I had no idea at the time of how to adjust the old style truss rods, and so simply tightening the rods only made one of these new (and expensive) strings break. Anyhow, I immediately took the strings off, put some regular roundwounds back on, and sold it on eBay.
After a couple of years – especially after learning that said strings were known for pulling necks, and how to adjust the old rods in the event of neck bow – I realized that I really missed my old guitar. I went digging through my PayPal account, and found the buyer’s info. I contacted him and asked if he still had it, and he said he too had flipped it on eBay a while back, and had no other information, except that it went to somebody in Texas.
So I put out feelers, nothing. I put a posting on the Rick Resource Forum in 2007, nothing. I continued to bump the thread, just in case.
Then, in June, Dr. Gary Clauson found a 370/12 Walnut on Craigslist Austin, an ’81, with the same lovely shade of brown. The ad’s pictures were blurry, but I recognized it right away. One email to the seller to confirm the serial number and it was found!!!
It took a couple of weeks of emails, phone calls, juggling funds (the seller wanted a LOT for it, especially considering its condition), and arranging for a middle-man, as the seller wouldn’t ship it. Sean “Phlemmy” Weingartner picked it up and got it to me; it arrived here in Southern California on Thursday, 6/25.
I unpacked it, and…well...it's still a beaut, it's still my old friend, it's gonna be cool...but the action was lame, really high, along with a badly bowed neck; the whole thing was in need of a very serious tune-up, as if it had been put in a closet (tuned up to pitch) back in ’01 and left there ‘till now. It was filthy too.
Right away, I had to replace the nut, because somewhere along the way someone put the strings in backwards (octave/root rather than root/octave). The octave string slots were so deep and stretched out that some strings buzzed in open position, which explains why the action was so high, it was to compensate for the worn out nut slots. Also, the "R" tailpiece had a big crack in it, so now I needed to exchange that for a new one before it snapped.
Also, remember how I said that the guitar sounded painfully bright after its rewiring back in the ‘80s? Suspecting as much, I popped the hood and yep, the pots were changed (back then) to 500k. Also, it had two mono jacks rather than R.O.S.! So I replaced all the wiring with all new stuff, including a push-pull “vintage switch” like on current 4003 basses.
After some serious pushing on the neck to get it straightened out – it looked like a bow-and-arrow – the only thing left seriously wrong with the guitar is a high fret (the 22nd or 23rd), which I’ve experienced on older Rics before. I have a luthier pal who has helped me with such before, so after wrapping that up, we’ll be 100% in business.
It's very weird opening the case of a guitar one used to own and seeing every scratch, ding and nuance. Takes ya back.
Thank you to Gary and Sean for helping making it happen!!!
