sloop_john_b wrote:wilmingtonian wrote:
Last line of article will not please all here!
For all the worship bestowed on the Harrison guitars, Mr. Campbell said his own encounters with the quiet Beatle suggested he was not especially precious about them.
“I was talking to him about how much I loved the guitar sounds on their early records, the Gretsches and the Rickenbackers,” Mr. Campbell recalled. “And he went: ‘Oh, yeah. They were kind of clunky and hard to play. If we had Fenders, we could have been really good.’ ”
Bwahaha!
Before you get too chucklefussy, JB, consider that this statement was filtered through at least two levels before being put onto the page of the NYT. Harrison is on record as much preferring his Fender Strat to the Gretsches, at least for sound. That's obviously his personal taste, but I can't imagine some of the earlier Gretsch stuff without that juicy hollowbodied-Gretsch midrange. Additionally, a Country Gent reminds me of a double-cutaway sewer cover, size-wise. "Clunky" would be apt.
I don't think it applies to the "Rickenbacker" part of the statement. A properly-set-up Fender EXII and a Rick XII are equally easy to fret, but the Fender is a bit neck-heavy and has a longer reach than either Gretsch or Rickenbacker. The Rick has, of course, a much narrower fretboard than the Fender.
Additionally, the Fender EXII was not an option in early days, as it didn't come onto the market until the bloom was nearly off the 12-string rose, in very late 1965 (NAMM) with production actually beginning in 1966.
The only other Rick he could have been referring to was John's series of 325s. They are about as "clunky" as a potato chip.
