Not every guitar player
recognizes Rick Turner’s
name, but one could argue that
every guitar player
should know it.
Many consider him the father of
boutique guitar building because
of the Model 1 guitar he built
for Fleetwood Mac’s Lindsey
Buckingham in the mid ’70s.
Although he’s also known for his
time at Alembic Inc., the brief period
he spent at Gibson (before he
“ran afoul of corporate politics”),
and the three boutique guitar companies
he runs today—Renaissance
Guitars, Compass Rose Guitars,
and Rick Turner Guitars—Turner’s
Model 1 is what started it all.
Although some of its features
are fairly commonplace on
modern electrics, the Model 1’s
advanced EQ, custom rotating
humbucker (which had fewer
windings and a wider frequency
response than most pickups of
the day), and onboard preamp
blazed a trail that led the way to
countless advances we take for
granted today. Let’s take a look at
the journey that led Turner to his
place at the head of the boutiqueguitar
family tree.
Turner’s Musical
Beginnings
Turner moved with his beloved
Martin D-28 and Epiphone
Howard Roberts from
Massachusetts to New York City
in 1966. He started playing coffeehouses
in Greenwich Village and
in Boston with Lowell “Banana”
Levinger and Jerry Corbitt (who,
with Jesse Colin Young, went on
to form the Youngbloods). He had
already spent time touring with
the folk duo Ian and Sylvia, and
had also worked with musicianturned-
producer Felix Pappalardi
(often referred to as “the fourth
member of Cream”). Turner’s
musical interests continued to
evolve, and by the end of the
decade he was in the psychedelic
band Autosalvage. They opened
for Zappa’s Mothers of Invention,
and their album got great reviews
in
Rolling Stone and
Crawdaddy.
Not that it mattered.
“We quit before we got those
reviews!” Turner laughs. “We
were way ahead of Spinal Tap,
man. And the best gig we ever
did was with a band called the
Children of Paradise that had
Artie Traum and Happy Traum in
it. It was at a mental institution
on Halloween!”
At the same time, Turner was
also earning a little cash doing
guitar repair. “I apprenticed in ’63
for a couple of guys in Boston.
Rick Turner says his famous Model 1 design is “basically an [1820s] Stauffer
with a cutaway and slight modifications.” This Johann Georg Stauffer “terz”
guitar was made sometime in the 1820s at the Stauffer factory in Vienna,
Austria—the same factory where C.F. Martin Sr. apprenticed before moving
to America. Terz models had a shorter string length and were intended
to be tuned a minor-third above standard pitch. This Luigi Legnani model
is named after the Stauffer endorsee, who also happened to be the most
famous guitarist of the period. Photo courtesy of C.F. Martin Archives |
One of them, Stan Stansky, had
been a cabinetmaker and didn’t
know much about guitars, but
he had good woodworking skills.
And the other guy, Don Gadbois,
was a really good jazz guitar player
who knew a lot about guitars but
didn’t have much in the woodworking
department.
“I learned luthiery primitive
from these guys,” Turner continues.
“When I look back at the way we
did things, I’m in shock. I mean, it
was just
horrendous. Those were the
dark ages of American small-shop
luthiery and guitar repair. Nobody
knew anything outside of the factories—
nobody knew Jack Diddley
squat. A few classical builders were
starting to do things, and I knew
a few people just starting to try
to build acoustic guitars. We who
got into it in the early to mid ’60s
were really on our own in terms of
‘How do you do this?’ and ‘How
do you do that?’ Some of the repair
techniques were utterly brutal. We
didn’t know about steaming necks
off for doing neck resets, we just
slammed them out!”
Despite the fact that
Autosalvage broke up, the band
still played a role in Turner’s guitar-
building future. “This guy who
was a fan of our band brought
me these pieces—an SG neck, a
completely smashed SG body, and
the pickup harness—and said,
‘Here, you want this? Seventy-five
bucks,’” Turner recalls. “I said,
‘sure.’ So I had the neck and the
wrecked body. I did this body
shape that made it symmetrical
and took the design to this cabinet
shop on Broadway and Bleecker.
They cut it out for me in mahogany,
and I took it home and hacked
away and veneered the back of it
with walnut. Jerry Garcia wound
up buying that guitar and used it
on the Grateful Dead’s “Skull and
Roses” album. That’s
the guitar—
and it has disappeared. Nobody
knows where it is.”
Asked what inspired him to buy
75 bucks’ worth of broken guitar,
Turner answers simply, “I wanted to
build my own guitar, you know? By
that time I had been doing guitar
repair for four years or so, so I had
the chops. In fact, in New York,
when I was broke and needed to
pick up a few bucks, I would go
down to Dan Armstrong’s shop and
say, ‘Dan, you got anything for me
to do?’ And he would always toss
me a fret job or have me glue a
bridge on a Martin and pick up 10
or 15 bucks.”
Turner ended up moving to
Marin County, just north of San
Francisco, and more or less joined
the Grateful Dead family. He did
an inlay job on one of Phil Lesh’s
basses and made a few custom
pickups for the band. “In 1968 or
’69, where did you buy pickups?
You could get DeArmonds and
that was about it. You couldn’t
buy Gibson pickups or Fender
pickups. Dan Armstrong started
making pickups under the tutelage
of Bill Lawrence, and I
thought, ‘Well, this is just a little
cord with a little wire and some
magnets—duh!’ And so I started
literally handwinding my own
pickups, counting the windings
by hand. I brought them out to
the Dead’s warehouse and showed
Ron Wickersham, who had figured
out how to measure the frequency
response in the pickups. This was
when nobody knew anything about
what was really going on. The stuff
that we take for granted now, we
had to invent and figure out.”