Rickresource Rickenbacker Forum

I was thinking about some of the stupid things I did as a teenager and thought I would share one of them.

In about 1970 I traded an off brand pawn shop bass for a Guild Starfire 2. It was used but in great condition, so it probably wasn't very old. But, it was a big clunky semi hollow body, and not very cool. So, 2 years later I traded for a brand new '72 Tele Bass. With it's one piece ash body, maple neck and huge humbucker...this was cool. A year later I sold it to a friend and bought a Gibson EB3-L. About a year after that I decided to take up guitar so I traded the EB3 for an SG. A year later, I was back to playing bass.

If I ever get the bugs worked out of the time machine, I am going back to retrieve all three of those great basses. I sure wish my brain had been in working order back in those days. (of course I am assuming that it is in working order today)

As a teenaged bass player in the 70s I wanted a Hofner, but I couldn't find one I could afford, so I bought a look-alike bass - a Klira violin bass. Kliras are a little bigger than Hofners but get a similar sound (and both were made in Germany). I played and recorded with it for a few years until I sold it to buy a new 3/4 scale Ibanez. I only paid around $100 for the Klira at the time, but now they are hard to find and collectors have driven the prices up to several hundred dollars for a bass like the one I had. And I'll never find exact one I played all those years ago - I really regret selling that bass.

I also regret selling the 70's Sunburst Strat that I bought new for $500.

My first bass - Gibson Ripper, got it used for $125. By gosh, that ****** old ambered finish simply had to be redone. Might as well smooth out some of those sharper corners as well. How about making it fretless just for the hell of it?

Dumb kid.

qwezirider wrote:My first bass - Gibson Ripper, got it used for $125. By gosh, that ****** old ambered finish simply had to be redone. Might as well smooth out some of those sharper corners as well. How about making it fretless just for the hell of it?

Dumb kid.

Hey, maybe if I did those things to the one I had briefly in '77 I would have liked it more.

Oh, I still don't like the thing even after all that. But to think what I paid for it and what an untouched one is worth these days.......

qwezirider wrote:what an untouched one is worth these days...

...because of stupid teenagers...same with LP Juniors and (to a lesser extent) Duo-Sonics and Musicmasters...

jingle_jangle wrote:

qwezirider wrote:what an untouched one is worth these days...

...because of stupid teenagers...same with LP Juniors and (to a lesser extent) Duo-Sonics and Musicmasters...

Oh yeah, no kidding.

OF course strats and teles have had some butchery too, but if you scour the duosonic/MM/Mustang/bronco ebay pages long enough...you see the most bizarre butchery ever committed. Makes humbucker routings seem like nothing. My personal faves are when people make it more "metal" back in the early 80s, by chopping off body horns etc......kinda like Fender did with the Swinger/Musiclander back in '69



Though nothing, absolutely nothing.....tops this little gem: Yep, that would have been a $300,000 1959 Les Paul. Who the %$# chops a 'Burst up? I hope the guy feels sheepish at least...

how about superglueing new frets on an otherwise all original 66 car jazz bass (w/matching car headstock)? i didn't actually do that,but it was done to my bass,so i put flatwound pyramid strings on it so there wouldn't be any need to ever refret it again.....then didn't like the way it sounded,so i sold it for $300.......about what i had into it at the time......

Wow, now I don't feel so badly. The worst thing I ever did to my guitars in my teens was to let go of them. A sixties' Gretsch, a Combo 950, a '72 Gibson SG, a Dan Armstrong lucite, a Gibson Ripper, some other nice ones. I also lost a '63 Fiesta Red Strat, but that wasn't my choice - it was burgled.

Actually, it's nowadays that you have to watch out for me, what with senile dementia creeping up and all. JD's already taken away all the power tools from me so all my crazy concepts will remain just exactly that. and we will have some nice clean ricks to hand down to posterity.

I guess that is what I was saying. I never ruined any of the basses back then. My stupidity was selling them. To find any like models in the same condition would be nearly impossible today. So.......back to the time machine!

'74 Les Paul Sunburst. Found it in a pawn shop in '81 for $300.

Put stickers on it, took the pickups apart to see how they worked, generally dragged it around the earth without a case. Looked like it too.
Foolish, foolish young man.

Didn't do any stupid guitar stuff when I was a kid, but I did build a set of the hugest speaker columns on the planet when I was 16. They sounded OK, but nobody wanted to haul them. Believe it or not, they were curved in both side and front view...they looked like 4' tall bananas, except that they were covered in burgundy Tolex. I wonder what happened to them?

Did do something incredibly dumb at age 18, though...my first car was a '55 Chevy Nomad. (I've had five more Nomads since then.) Knowing nothing about the rarity of parts, I ripped off the front fenders and hood, threw out the ultra-rare front fender and headlight "eyebrow" trim, and discarded the rare cargo-area linoleum in favor of cherry wood. Then I installed a fiberglass flip front end. I was the coolest dumb kid on the block, or so I thought...

Man! That Nomad sounds great!!