This Barney Kessel Custom ’burst is in exceptional condition, with a body that practically gleams. The only mod is one exchanged tuner and patches of old screw holes on the headstock.
From the sparse, smoky ballads of Julie London to the hard bop of Sonny Rollins, Barney Kessel could back up just about anybody. The bandleader, session great, Wrecking Crew member, and sideman was one of the most accomplished guitarists of his era. His chordal complexity not only got him steady work and accolades, but also a collection of signature guitar models bearing his name.
This 1968 Gibson Barney Kessel Custom is a top-of-the-line example. It’s the higher-end counterpart to the Barney Kessel Regular, both built from 1961 until 1974. They followed a trio of Barney Kessel signatures that Kay sold between 1957 and 1960.
Barney Kessels often became parts donors, with their hardware, tuners, and pickups (original PAFs, Pat. No., and T-Tops, depending on the year) being stripped and sold separately.
Each Gibson model has a hulking 17"-wide and nearly 3"-deep body, with two humbuckers, a Tune-o-matic bridge, and a bound rosewood fretboard. The attractive Barney Kessel tailpiece is also common to both, while the controls will be familiar to any Gibson player: two volume pots, two tone knobs, and a 3-way selector switch. The dual Florentine cutaways—a design first seen in these Barney Kessels and later used in Gibson’s Trini Lopez signature—cut a striking silhouette.
Of the two Gibson Kessels, the Custom alone is dressed to the nines, swapping in gold-plated hardware for the Regular’s nickel, and bowtie inlays for the Regular’s fretboard parallelograms. There’s also a 3-piece maple neck with two pinstripe-thin mahogany strips taking over for the Regular’s solid mahogany. And the Custom tops off its outfit with a pearl headstock inlay in the shape of a musical note.
Such features were a huge upgrade to the art-deco stylings and Kleenex-box pickups of Kay’s Kessel signatures, which Kessel snubbed, reportedly saying, “I don’t play that Kay. It’s a terrible guitar!” Interestingly, he often chose not to play these Gibson signatures, either, instead typically using his favorite 1940s ES-350.
When they were introduced, Gibson’s Barney Kessel Custom model had a list price of $599, while the Regular’s was $399. Both sold in respectable if not incredible numbers, with sales peaking in 1968. However, the following decades were not particularly kind to the guitars. As the vintage market took off for Les Pauls, SGs, and other classic Gibsons, Barney Kessels often became parts donors, with their hardware, tuners, and pickups (original PAFs, Pat. No., and T-Tops, depending on the year) being stripped and sold separately. You can still find Barney Kessel husks on the market—project guitars looking for a new owner to rebuild them. And many of the complete Barney Kessels you’ll find for sale have been rebuilt.
A rear view indicates this Kessel was not heavily played. There’s no belt rash, finish wear, or other marks, and the new-guitar tags typically indicate that the previous owner or owners had a collector’s sensibility.
That’s what makes the particular Barney Kessel Custom featured here so special. It’s nearly all original, with Patent pickups intact and even its Custom-stamped hang tags. The only modification is one replaced tuner (along with a couple patched screw holes from a previous replacement). The cherry in its cherry sunburst finish is one of the most vibrant we’ve ever seen, and the condition of the finish overall is in impeccable vintage shape.
This Custom model is classic Gibson, with its 4-knob control array, 3-way toggle, and Pat. No. pickups. Unique flourishes include the special Barney Kessel tailpiece and bow-tie fretboard inlays.
Because of the wide array of Barney Kessel Customs on the used market—many with non-original parts—you can find them across the price spectrum, from about $3,000 on the low-end to $12,000 or more on the high. This Custom, listed on Reverb now by Nationwide Guitars, fittingly lands on the higher end, with an asking price of $8,999.
Sources for this article include Gruhn’s Guide to Vintage Guitars by George Gruhn and Walter Carter, American Guitars: An Illustrated History by Tom Wheeler, Reverb’s “Player Profile: The Hard-Swinging Barney Kessel” by Greg Cooper, Premier Guitar’s “Gibson and Barney Kessel” by Jim Bastian, and Reverb listings from Retrofret Vintage Guitars and Vintage Correct Parts.
- 'Reunion!' Bruce Forman's Love Affair with Barney Kessel's Guitar ... ›
- A Burst From a Different Golden Era - Premier Guitar ›
- 1967 Gibson Trini Lopez Deluxe and 1968 Gibson Barney Kessel ... ›
Stevie Van Zandt with “Number One,” the ’80s reissue Stratocaster—with custom paisley pickguard from luthier Dave Petillo—that he’s been playing for the last quarter century or so.
There’s a life-size cameo of a go-go dancer in banana yellow; she’s frozen in mid hip shimmy. One wall displays rock posters and B-movie key art, anchored by a 3D rendering of Cream’s Disraeli Gearsalbum cover that swishes and undulates as you walk past it. Van Zandt’s shelves are stuffed with countless DVDs, from Louis Prima to the J. Geils Band performing on the German TV concert seriesRockpalast. There are three copies ofIggy and the Stooges: Live in Detroit. Videos of the great ’60s-music TV showcases, from Hullabaloo to Dean Martin’s The Hollywood Palace, sit here. Hundreds of books about rock ’n’ roll, from Greil Marcus’s entire output to Nicholas Schaffner’s seminal tome, The Beatles Forever, form a library in the next room.
But I haven’t seen this yet because the elevator is dead, and I am in it. Our trap is tiny, about 5' by 5'. A dolly filled with television production equipment is beside me. There’s a production assistant whom I’ve never met until this morning and another person who’s brand new to me, too, Geoff Sanoff. It turns out that he’s Van Zandt’s engineer—the guy who runs this studio. And as I’ll discover shortly, he’s also one of the several sentinels who watch over Stevie Van Zandt’s guitars.
There’s nothing to do now but wait for the NYFD, so Sanoff and I get acquainted. We discover we’re both from D.C. and know some of the same people in Washington’s music scene. We talk about gear. We talk about this television project. I’m here today assisting an old pal, director Erik Nelson, best known for producing Werner Herzog’s most popular documentaries, like Grizzly Man and Cave of Forgotten Dreams. Van Zandt has agreed to participate in a television pilot about the British Invasion. After about half an hour, the elevator doors suddenly slide open, and we’re rescued, standing face-to-face with three New York City firefighters.
As our camera team sets up the gear, Sanoff beckons me to a closet off the studio’s control room. I get the sense I am about to get a consolation prize for standing trapped in an elevator for the last 30 minutes. He pulls a guitar case off the shelf—it’s stenciled in paint with the words “Little Steven” on its top—snaps open the latches, and instantly I am face to face with Van Zandt’s well-worn 1957 Stratocaster. Sanoff hands it to me, and I’m suddenly holding what may as well be the thunderbolt of Zeus for an E Street Band fan. My jaw drops when he lets me plug it in so he can get some levels on his board, and the clean, snappy quack of the nearly 70-year-old pickups fills the studio. For decades, Springsteen nuts have enjoyed a legendary 1978 filmed performance of “Rosalita” from Phoenix, Arizona, that now lives on YouTube. This is the Stratocaster Van Zandt had slung over his shoulder that night. It’s the same guitar he wields in the famous No Nukes concert film shot at Madison Square Garden a year later, in 1979. My mind races. The British Invasion is all well and essential. But now I’m thinking about Van Zandt’s relationship with his guitars.
Stevie Van Zandt's Gear
Van Zandt’s guitar concierge Andy Babiuk helped him plunge deeper down the Rickenbacker rabbit hole. Currently, Van Zandt has six Rickenbackers backstage: two 6-strings and four 12-strings.
Guitars
- 1957 Fender Stratocaster (studio only)
- ’80s Fender ’57 Stratocaster reissue “Number One”
- Gretsch Tennessean
- 1955 Gibson Les Paul Custom “Black Beauty” (studio only)
- Rickenbacker Fab Gear 2024 Limited Edition ’60s Style 360 Model (candy apple green)
- Rickenbacker Fab Gear 2023 Limited Edition ’60s Style 360 Model (snowglo)
- Rickenbacker 2018 Limited Edition ’60s Style 360 Fab Gear (jetglo)
- Two Rickenbacker 1993Plus 12-strings (candy apple purple and SVZ blue)
- Rickenbacker 360/12C63 12-string (fireglo)
- Vox Teardrop (owned by Andy Babiuk)
Amps
- Two Vox AC30s
- Two Vox 2x12 cabinets
Effects
- Boss Space Echo
- Boss Tremolo
- Boss Rotary Ensemble
- Durham Electronics Sex Drive
- Durham Electronics Mucho Busto
- Durham Electronics Zia Drive
- Electro-Harmonix Satisfaction
- Ibanez Tube Screamer
- Voodoo Labs Ground Control Pro switcher
Strings and Picks
- D’Addario (.095–.44)
- D’Andrea Heavy
Van Zandt has reached a stage of reflection in his career. Besides the Grammy-nominated HBO film, Stevie Van Zandt: Disciple, which came out in 2024, he recently wrote and published his autobiography, Unrequited Infatuations (2021), a rollicking read in which he pulls no punches and makes clear he still strives to do meaningful things in music and life.
His laurels would weigh him down if they were actually wrapped around his neck. In the E Street Band, Van Zandt has participated in arguably the most incredible live group in rock ’n’ roll history. And don’t forget Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes or Little Steven and the Disciples of Soul. He created both the Underground Garage and Outlaw Country radio channels on Sirius/XM. He started a music curriculum program called TeachRock that provides no-cost resources and other programs to schools across the country. Then there’s the politics. Via his 1985 record, Sun City, Van Zandt is credited with blasting many of the load-bearing bricks that brought the walls of South African apartheid tumbling into dust. He also acted in arguably the greatest television drama in American history, with his turn as Silvio Dante in The Sopranos.
Puzzlingly, Van Zandt’s autobiography lacks any detail on his relationship with the electric guitar. And Sanoff warns me that Van Zandt is “not a gearhead.” Instead he has an organization in place to keep his guitar life spinning like plates on the end of pointed sticks. Besides Sanoff, there are three others: Ben Newberry has been Van Zandt’s guitar tech since the beginning of 1982. Andy Babiuk, owner of Rochester, New York, guitar shop Fab Gear and author of essential collector reference books Beatles Gear and Rolling Stones Gear (the latter co-authored by Greg Prevost) functions as Van Zandt’s guitar concierge. Lastly, luthier Dave Petillo, based in Asbury Park, New Jersey, oversees all the maintenance and customization on Van Zandt’s axes.
“I took one lesson, and they start to teach you the notes. I don’t care about the notes.” —Stevie Van Zandt
I crawl onto Zoom with Van Zandt for a marathon session and come away from our 90 minutes with the sense that he is a man of dichotomies. Sure, he’s a guitar slinger, but he considers his biggest strengths to be as an arranger, producer, and songwriter. “I don’t feel that being a guitar player is my identity,” he tells me. “For 40 years, ever since I made my first solo record, I just have not felt that I express myself as a guitar player. I still enjoy it when I do it; I’m not ambivalent. When I play a solo, I am in all the way, and I play a solo like I would like to hear if I were in the audience. But the guitar part is really part of the song’s arrangement. And a great solo is a composed solo. Great solos are ones you can sing, like Jimi Hendrix’s solo in ‘All Along the Watchtower.’”
In his autobiography, Van Zandt mentions that his first guitar was an acoustic belonging to his grandfather. “I took one lesson, and they start to teach you the notes. I don’t care about the notes,” Van Zandt tells me. “The teacher said I had natural ability. I’m thinking, if I got natural ability, then what the fuck do I need you for? So I never went back. After that, I got my first electric, an Epiphone. It was about slowing down the records to figure out with my ear what they were doing. It was seeing live bands and standing in front of that guitar player and watching what they were doing. It was praying when a band went on TV that the cameraman would occasionally go to the right place and show what the guitar player was doing instead of putting the camera on the lead singer all the time. And I’m sure it was the same for everybody. There was no concept of rock ’n’ roll lessons. School of Rock wouldn’t exist for another 30 years. So, you had to go to school yourself.”
By the end of the 1960s, Van Zandt tells me he had made a conscious decision about what kind of player he wanted to be. “I realized that I really wasn’t that interested in becoming a virtuoso guitar player, per se. I was more interested in making sure I could play the guitar solo that would complement the song. I got more into the songs than the nature of musicianship.”
After the Beatles and the Stones broke the British Invasion wide open, bands like Cream and the Yardbirds most influenced him. “George Harrison would have that perfect 22-second guitar solo,” Van Zandt remembers. “Keith Richards. Dave Davies. Then, the harder stuff started coming. Jeff Beck in the Yardbirds. Eric Clapton with things like ‘White Room.’ But the songs stayed in a pop configuration, three minutes each or so. You’d have this cool guitar-based song with a 15-second, really amazing Jeff Beck solo in it. That’s what I liked. Later, the jam bands came, but I was not into that. My attention deficit disorder was not working for the longer solos,” he jokes. Watch a YouTube video of any recent E Street Band performance where Van Zandt solos, and the punch and impact of his approach and attack are apparent. At Nationals Park in Washington, D.C., last year, his solo on “Rosalita” was 13 powerful seconds.
Van Zandt and Bruce Springsteen’s relationship goes back to their earliest days on the Jersey shore. “Everybody had a different guitar; your guitar was your identity,” recalls Van Zandt. “At some point, a couple of years later, I remember Bruce calling me and asking me for my permission to switch to Telecaster. At that point, I was ready to switch to Stratocaster.”
Photo by Pamela Springsteen
Van Zandt left his Epiphone behind for his first Fender. “I started to notice that the guitar superstars at the time were playing Telecasters. Mike Bloomfield. Jeff Beck. Even Eric Clapton played one for a while,” he tells me. “I went down to Jack’s Music Shop in Red Bank, New Jersey, because he had the first Telecaster in our area and couldn’t sell it; it was just sitting there. I bought it for 90 bucks.”
In those days, and around those parts, players only had one guitar. Van Zandt recalls, “Everybody had a different guitar; your guitar was your identity. At some point, a couple of years later, I remember Bruce calling me and asking me for my permission to switch to Telecaster. At that point, I was ready to switch to Stratocaster, because Jimi Hendrix had come in and Jeff Beck had switched to a Strat. They all kind of went from Telecaster to Les Pauls. And then some of them went on to the Stratocaster. For me, the Les Paul was just too out of reach. It was too expensive, and it was just too heavy. So I said, I’m going to switch to a Stratocaster. It felt a little bit more versatile.”
Van Zandt still employs Stratocasters, and besides the 1957 I strummed, he was seen with several throughout the ’80s and ’90s. But for the last 20 or 25 years, Van Zandt has mainly wielded a black Fender ’57 Strat reissue from the ’80s with a maple fretboard and a gray pearloid pickguard. He still uses that Strat—dubbed “Number One”—but the pickguard has been switched to one sporting a purple paisley pattern that was custom-made by Dave Petillo.
Petillo comes from New Jersey luthier royalty and followed in the footsteps of his late father, Phil Petillo. At a young age, the elder Petillo became an apprentice to legendary New York builder John D’Angelico. Later, he sold Bruce Springsteen the iconic Fender Esquire that’s seen on the Born to Run album cover and maintained and modified that guitar and all of Bruce’s other axes until he passed away in 2010. Phil worked out of a studio in the basement of their home, not far from Asbury Park. Artists dropped in, and Petillo has childhood memories of playing pick-up basketball games in his backyard with members of the E Street Band. (He also recalls showing his Lincoln Logs to Johnny Cash and once mistaking Jerry Garcia for Santa Claus.)
“I was more interested in making sure I could play the guitar solo that would complement the song. I got more into the songs than the nature of musicianship.” —Stevie Van Zandt
“I’ve known Stevie Van Zandt my whole life,” says Petillo. “My dad used to work on his 1957 Strat. That guitar today has updated tuners, a bone nut, new string trees, and a refret that was done by Dad long ago. I think one volume pot may have been changed. But it still has the original pickups.” Petillo is responsible for a lot of the aesthetic flair seen on Van Zandt’s instruments. He continues, “Stevie is so much fun to work with. I love incorporating colors into things, and Stevie gets that. When you talk to a traditional Telecaster or Strat player, and you say, ‘I want to do a tulip paisley pickguard in neon blue-green,’ they’re like, ‘Holy cow, that’s too much!’ But for Stevie, it’s just natural. So I always text him with pickguard designs, asking him, ‘Which one do you like?’ And he calls me a wild man; he says, ‘I don’t have that many Strats to put them on!’ But I’ll go to Ben Newberry and say, ‘Ben, I made these pickguards; let’s get them on the guitar. And I’ll go backstage, and we’ll put them on. I just love that relationship; Stevie is down for it.”
Petillo takes care of the electronics on Van Zandt’s guitars. Almost all of the Strats are modified with an internal Alembic Stratoblaster preamp circuit, which Van Zandt can physically toggle on and off using a switch housed just above the input jack. Van Zandt tells me, “That came because I got annoyed with the whole pedal thing. I’m a performer onstage, and I’m integrated with the audience and I like the freedom to move. And if I’m across the stage and all of a sudden Bruce nods to me to take a solo, or there’s a bit in the song that requires a little bit of distortion, it’s just easier to have that; sometimes, I’ll need that extra little boost for a part I’m throwing in, and it’s convenient.”
In recent times, Van Zandt has branched out from the Stratocaster, which has a lot to do with Andy Babiuk's influence. The two met 20 years ago, and Babiuk’s band, the Chesterfield Kings, is on Van Zandt’s Wicked Cool Records. “He’d call me up and ask me things like, ‘What’s Brian Jones using on this song?’” explains Babiuk. “When I’d ask him why, he’d tell me, ‘Because I want to have that guitar.’ It’s a common thing for me to get calls and texts from him like that. And there’s something many people overlook that Stevie doesn’t advertise: He’s a ripping guitar player. People think of him as playing chords and singing backup for Bruce, but the guy rips. And not just on guitar, on multiple instruments.”
Van Zandt tells me he wanted to bring more 12-string to the E Street Band this tour, “just to kind of differentiate the tone.” He explains, “Nils is doing his thing, and Bruce is doing his thing, and I wanted to do more 12-string.” He laughs, “I went full Paul Kantner!” Babiuk helped Van Zandt plunge deeper down the Rickenbacker rabbit hole. Currently, Van Zandt has six Rickenbackers backstage: two 6-strings and four 12-strings. Each 12-string has a modified nut made by Petillo from ancient woolly mammoth tusk, and the D, A, and low E strings are inverted with their octave.
Van Zandt explains this to me: “I find that the strings ring better when the high ones are on top. I’m not sure if that’s how Roger McGuinn did it, but it works for me. I’m also playing a wider neck.”
Babiuk tells me about a unique Rick in Van Zandt’s rack of axes: “I know the guys at Rickenbacker well, and they did a run of 30 basses in candy apple purple for my shop. I showed one to Stevie, and purple is his color; he loves it. He asked me to get him a 12-string in the same color, and I told him, ‘They don’t do one-offs; they don’t have a custom shop,’ but it’s hard to say no to the guy! So I called Rickenbacker and talked them into it. I explained, ‘He’ll play it a lot on this upcoming tour.’ They made him a beautiful one with his OM logo.”
The purple one-off is a 1993Plus model and sports a 1 3/4" wide neck—1/8" wider than a normal Rickenbacker. Van Zandt loved it so much that he had Babiuk wrestle with Rickenbacker again to build another one in baby blue. Petillo has since outfitted them with paisley-festooned custom pickguards. When guitar tech Newberry shows me these unique axes backstage, I can see the input jack on the purple guitar is labeled with serial number 01001.
“Some of my drive is based on gratitude,” says Van Zandt, “feeling like we are the luckiest guys in the luckiest generation ever.”
Photo by Rob DeMartin
Van Zandt also currently plays a white Vox Teardrop. That guitar is a prototype owned by Babiuk. “Stevie wanted a Teardrop,” Babiuk tells me, “but I explained that the vintage ones are hit and miss—the ones made in the U.K. were often better than the ones manufactured in Italy. Korg now owns Vox, and I have a new Teardrop prototype from them in my personal collection. When I showed it to him, he loved it and asked me to get him one. I had to tell him, ‘I can’t; it’s a prototype, there’s only one,’ and he asked me to sell him mine,” he chuckles. “I told him, ‘It’s my fucking personal guitar, it’s not for sale!’ So I ended up lending it to him for this tour, and I told him, ‘Remember, this is my guitar; don’t get too happy with it, okay?’
“He asked me why that particular guitar sounds and feels so good. Besides being a prototype built by only one guy, the single-coil pickups’ output is abnormally hot, and the neck feels like a nice ’60s Fender neck. Stevie’s obviously a dear friend of mine, and he can hold onto it for as long as he wants. I’m glad it’s getting played. It was just hanging in my office.”
Van Zandt tells me how Babiuk’s Vox Teardrop sums up everything he wants from his tone, and says, “It’s got a wonderfully clean, powerful sound. Like Brian Jones got on ‘The Last Time.’ That’s my whole thing; that’s the trick—trying to get the power without too much distortion. Bruce and Nils get plenty of distortion; I am trying to be the clean rhythm guitar all the time.”
If Van Zandt has a consigliere like Tony Soprano had Silvio Dante, that’s Newberry. Newberry has tech’d nearly every gig with Van Zandt since 1982. “Bruce shows move fast,” he tells me. “So when there’s a guitar change for Stevie, and there are many of them, I’m at the top of the stairs, and we switch quickly. There’s maybe one or two seconds, and if he needs to tell me something, I hear it. He’s Bruce’s musical director, so he may say something like, ‘Remind me tomorrow to go over the background vocals on “Ghosts,”’ or something like that. And I take notes during the show.”
“Everybody had a different guitar; your guitar was your identity. At some point, a couple of years later, I remember Bruce calling me and asking me for my permission to switch to a Telecaster.” —Stevie Van Zandt
When I ask Newberry how he defines Van Zandt’s relationship to the guitar, he doesn’t hesitate, snapping back, “It’s all in his head. His playing is encyclopedic, whether it’s Bruce or anything else. He may show up at soundcheck and start playing the Byrds, but it’s not ‘Tambourine Man,’ it’s something obscure like ‘Bells of Rhymney.’ People may not get it, but I’ve known him long enough to know what’s happening. He’s got everything already under his fingers. Everything.”
As such, Van Zandt says he never practices. “The only time I touch a guitar between tours is if I’m writing something or maybe arranging backing vocal harmonies on a production,” he tells me.
Before we say goodbye, I tell Van Zandt about my time stuck in his elevator, and his broad grin signals that I may not be the only one to have suffered that particular purgatory. When I ask him about the 1957 Stratocaster I got to play upon my release, he recalls: “Bruce Springsteen gave me that guitar. I’ve only ever had one guitar stolen in my life, and it was in the very early days of my joining the E Street Band. I only joined temporarily for what I thought would be about seven gigs, and in those two weeks or so, my Stratocaster was stolen. It was a 1957 or 1958. Bruce felt bad about that and replaced that lost guitar with this one. So I’ve had it a long, long time. Once that first one was stolen, I decided I would resist having a personal relationship with any one guitar. But that one being a gift from Bruce makes it special. I will never take it back on the road.”
After 50 years of rock ’n’ roll, if there is one word to sum up Stevie Van Zandt, it may be “restless”—an adjective you sense from reading his autobiography. He gets serious and tells me, “I’m always trying to catch up. The beginning of accomplishing something came quite late to me. I feel like I haven’t done nearly enough. What are we on this planet trying to do?” he asks rhetorically. “We’re trying to realize our potential and maybe leave this place one percent better for the next guy. And some of my drive is based on gratitude, feeling like we are the luckiest guys in the luckiest generation ever. That’s what I’m doing: I want to give something back. I feel an obligation.”
YouTube It
“Rosalita” is a perennial E Street Band showstopper. Here’s a close-up video from Philadelphia’s Citizens Bank Park last summer. Van Zandt’s brief but commanding guitar spotlight shines just past the 4:30 mark.
Lloyd Baggs has reemerged from the shadows of guitar design, for the first time since the late ’80s, with his innovative AEG-1 instrument.
“I had intended at some point to retire and head off into the sunset as a photographer,” Baggs tells me over a Zoom call, concluding that he’s become content with the other paths down which life has taken him. “Being out doing landscape photography helps me think and organize my thoughts for the business, and I get lots of inspiration while I’m out letting my imagination soar, thinking about anything but guitars. If you cut me, I’ll probably be bleeding ‘photographer’ before anything else.”
That approach has yielded not only a successful business, but one of the best in its league. And, on November 1, L.R. Baggs debuted the AEG-1—the acoustic pickup manufacturer’s first ever guitar—a high-quality acoustic-electric whose body is made of plywood. Ask anyone you know in the industry, and they’ll tell you it sounds amazing—and not just for a guitar that’s made of plywood.
Not only is its sound impressive, but, appearing alone on the roster in the year of its company’s 50th anniversary, it seems to have come out of nowhere. We know L.R. Baggs’ status within the acoustic pickup industry, yet suddenly, they’re spelling out a new name for themselves for acoustic-electric guitars. Why now?
Baggs in the workshop, sanding the side of one of his AEG-1 models.
Baggs admits that he’s not a very good guitar player. He tried learning in college before he got into building, but what really started his career in music was cello, which he began playing in fourth grade. “I wouldn’t consider myself a prodigy, but I was close to one. By the time I was in high school, I was fourth chair in the UCLA Symphony,” he says. “My teacher was Joseph DiTullio, who was then the chief cellist with 20th Century Fox, but was the concert master of the L.A. [Philharmonic] before that. He said he was going to start subbing me on dates that he couldn’t take with 20th Century.”
Outside of his early accomplishments as a cellist, Baggs was a distracted student, more interested in surfing and working on cars than school. Despite his average grades, he ended up being accepted into Occidental College in Los Angeles on the invitation to join their budding cello department. Unfortunately, that plan had an untimely expiration date.
“Within about three months of being in college, I got in a fist fight with the halfback on the football team,” says Baggs, “and I broke my left hand very badly—to the point where I couldn’t even make a fist for almost a year.”
He shifted his studies to fine art and photography, and, after graduating in 1970, began working as a fine-art printmaker in the area. “I worked in a place that did Warhol, Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns, Sam Francis, [Frank] Stella, [Ellsworth]Kelly—all the big New York artists. At the time, one print would sell for $1,000.”
Baggs crafted this custom–built guitar in 1977, for the great Ry Cooder. When Baggs showed Cooder his first polished instrument, the roots-music master said, “I think it’s fantastic. Will you build me one?”
A couple years later, he accepted a master printer position at Editions Press in San Francisco, and would commute there from his place in Berkeley. It was in 1974 that he started building guitars as a hobby, beginning, rather unconventionally, with a copy of a ’30s Washburn archtop with an oval soundhole, thanks to his love for cello and jazz. Around that time—through his connections in the art world—he befriended Ry Cooder.
“Being out doing landscape photography helps me think and organize my thoughts for the business … letting my imagination soar, thinking about anything but guitars.”
“I brought [my first guitar] down to Ry,” Baggs shares, “and just said, ‘Hey, what do you think, man?’ ’Cause he was playing carved-tops and all kinds of crazy stuff. And Ry said, ‘I think it’s fantastic. Will you build me one?’ That launched my career.”
Not long after, Baggs was offered another, more-attractive printmaking job with a prestigious shop in L.A., and moved back, while also building a loft workshop in an old fire station downtown to continue developing his guitar business. After making about seven or eight models, he transitioned to flattops, and his clientele expanded to include Jackson Browne, Graham Nash, Janis Ian, and “a bunch of the jazz-heads and flamenco players around L.A. I was getting $3,000 dollars for my guitar, just unadorned, and I had a waiting list of a year or two,” he says.
Meanwhile, Baggs and Cooder had been collaborating on finding the best way to amplify the acoustic Baggs had built for the guitarist. “We’d put all kinds of crazy stuff in there—we mostly landed on a magnetic pickup and a microphone. And hehad this refrigerator-rack-sized gear that he used to swear at and try to make it all work together. I mean, it was brutal! Then, in 1978, he calls me and says, ‘Hey Lloyd, I’m working on an album down at Warner Brothers; you want to come down? There’s something I want you to hear.’”
Here’s a close-up of the simple but highly effective control set on the Baggs AEG-1.
When Baggs made it to the studio, Cooder, who was recording his 1979 album, Bop Till You Drop, surprised Baggs with an acoustic-electric guitar equipped with the best-sounding pickup either of them had heard at the time. The only issue was, the instrument was a Takamine that the Japanese company had designed to mimic Baggs’ exact model, from headstock to strap button.
“I thanked him for showing it to me, left, and I sat out in my car on the street for about a half an hour alternately fuming and excited,” Baggs says, “and that was the moment at which I said to myself, ‘This is where I need to be. This is the future of acoustic guitars.’”
“I still shudder to think about this: I’m driving down the freeway from Santa Monica, in this beat-to-crap old ’59 Chevy pickup truck that I had, with Ry—a national treasure!—sittin’ in the passenger seat; no seatbelts,” Baggs reflects. The two were on the way to NAMM to meet with Mass Hirade, Takamine’s president at the time, to discuss the copy of Baggs’ model.
“I broke my left hand very badly—to the point where I couldn’t even make a fist for almost a year.”
“I complimented him on the guitar,” Baggs says, describing the meeting, “and said, ‘You know, you’ve done a really nice job. But I’m kinda hurt that you didn’t involve me in this in some way, and it does feel like you’ve taken something from me. Don’t you feel like you owe me something?’ And he lowers his head and says, ‘Yeah, we do. What do you want?’
“I said, ‘Well, I build 10 guitars a year. I need to amplify my guitars; will you sell me 10 systems a year? And he said, ‘“Sell” you? Ten systems a year—that’s all you want?’ I said, ‘Yep, that’s what I want. I know you don’t sell that system to anybody, but I’d like to be the guy.’”
A photo of the guitar’s inside reveals its key structural component: a piece of poplar plywood made up of a circular frame of the soundhole, suspended slightly under it by one top section that attaches to the neck joint and two diagonal sidebars that extend to the sides at the guitar’s waist.
Hirade accepted the agreement and, shortly after, sent Baggs two of the Takamine pickup systems to start. With earnest curiosity, Baggs immediately set about reverse-engineering it, approaching the task with his knowledge of car mechanics but with no background in electronics. What he found inspired him to develop something a bit savvier, and soon the LB6 unitary saddle pickup was born.
Baggs’ pickup, which, rather than an undersaddle design, also functions as the saddle, caught on quickly. Several country artists, along with Leo Kottke, were early adopters; Baggs jokes that they could tell where Kottke was on tour by which stores they would hear from when he was visiting. Then, one day, Baggs received a call from guitar manufacturer Robert Godin, who asked if he could use the LB6 in his models. Baggs had to develop a preamp first—at the time, he didn’t know what that was—and his next step was to design a new guitar.
Baggs elaborates, “I was trying to figure out how to sell more pickups, and I thought, ‘I’ll just make an acoustic-electric guitar and put a pickup in it.’ So I bought a Telecaster body from a kit, hollowed the body out on my barbecue with a router, and put an acoustic top on it.”
He also installed some kalimba-like metal rods inside, which, tuned to the main resonating frequencies of a Martin dreadnought, worked with the LB6 to simulate a heightened acoustic quality. The build—Baggs’ second ever acoustic-electric—became Godin’s Acousticaster.
L.R. Baggs AEG-1 Demo
Zach Wish demos the LR Baggs AEG-1. He explores its sonic options and talks about his experience with the guitar on the road with Seal.
But, back to the topic of the AEG-1, and the question posed at the beginning of this article: Why now?
“The word ‘should’ is a very interesting word,” says Baggs, threatening to wax philosophical. “On one hand, ‘should’ should be a four-letter word. Because, it sort of denies reality, and people say, ‘Oh, you should be this,’ or ‘You should be that.’ That’s bullshit. But on the other hand, ‘should’ has this beautiful potential.
“Over the years since the Acousticaster, I’ve kept building,” he continues. “Not building guitars for commercial absorption, but about every couple of years, I would build another acoustic-electric, trying to figure out how to make it sound like a nice guitar.”
It would take a very thorough, deep dive down the rabbit hole to explain everything behind Baggs’ approach to building guitars, but, in short, he’s a devoted fanatic of acoustic physics. “When I built my first guitar, there was one book on building guitars, and the chapter on tone was three paragraphs long,” he prefaces, laughing. In time, he took inspiration from his life as a cellist to pursue what has become a lifelong source of intrigue: studying violin Chladni patterns. His goal has been to harness the information from the symmetrical patterns, which show how a rigid surface vibrates, fluidly, when it's resonating, to improve acoustic guitar resonance. “I would say it’s a fair statement that I was the first builder to start looking into Chladni patterns on a steel-string acoustic guitar,” says Baggs. Now, builders like Andy Powers, Bryan Galloup, Giuliano Nicoletti, and others from around the world attend conferences on the subject, and acoustic physics in general.
The three variations on the AEG-1 in Baggs’ catalog.
Since, Baggs says, “I’ve continued to investigate guitar physics, I’ve continued to investigate Chladni patterns. I’ve gotten more scientific equipment on this thing now [holds up iPhone] than I had when I started looking at building.So, I’ve been trying to figure out how to make an acoustic-electric guitar that sounds really nice acoustically to begin with [before adding a pickup].”
When Covid hit, Baggs found himself with ample free time, and was encouraged by his staff to try building another guitar—for the first time since the late ’80s. His first attempt was to make somewhat of a redo of the Acousticaster, but the results were subpar—at least by his own standards. Thinking the problem might be the air volume inside the shallower body, he took an old acoustic-electric, cut a big hole in the back of the body, and epoxied a “big ol’ kitchen pot” to add air volume. “Didn’t change the sound at all,” he says.
To figure out where to go from there, Baggs drew inspiration from his earlier years as a builder. “I had this conversation with José Ramírez III in Germany in around 1990,” he explains. “He told me that on his top models, he made his sides a quarter-inch thick, like the rim of a drum. He said the more rigid your sides are, the better the guitar’s gonna sound.” Baggs states that’s because of one key fact: An acoustic guitar’s back is an anchor for the neck, holding it straight in place. When the sides are more rigid, the back is freer to resonate.
He decided to experiment with that idea on “a little old China-made 000 guitar,” reducing its depth by cutting it in half, adding wood around the inside of the rim “to make the edges totally rigid,” and gluing it back together. “And son of a gun, if it didn’t sound really good! That’s what led to this guitar.”
A rear view of this natural finish AEG-1 reveals its bolt-on neck base and access panel.
On the AEG-1 product page on the L.R. Baggs website, a photo of the guitar’s inside reveals its key structural component: a piece of poplar plywood made up of a circular frame of the soundhole, suspended slightly under it by one top section that attaches to the neck joint and two diagonal sidebars that extend to the sides at the guitar’s waist. “It’s all cut on a CNC machine; it’s machined out like a bicycle part,” Baggs explains. “So, the neck is actually anchored to the sides of the guitar.” (If you were wondering, that’s why it doesn’t matter that it’s made of plywood. Poplar plywood for the structural component was also chosen for sustainability reasons.)
“You know the second skin on the kick drum, the one that has the hole?” Baggs continues. “It’s very important how you tune that. And we discovered that most people like to tune the kick slightly below that of the main head, so it enhances the low frequencies.
“Then, ‘aha!’ Because the back wasn’t holding the neck anymore, we could do whatever we wanted with it. It was no longer a structural part of the guitar. It was the second skin on a kick drum. So, we just went nuts. That was it.”
I tell Baggs, towards the end of our conversation, that his career trajectory reminds me a lot of the concept of divergent thinking: essentially, about drawing connections between ideas that seem disparate to other people. He says he relates to that idea.
“And that was the moment at which I said to myself, ‘This is where I need to be. This is the future of acoustic guitars.’”
“If it hasn’t been by inspiration, we just simply won’t do it,” he says, “because it has no power; it has no meaning; it has no heart. If it’s just something to fill out a line item in the business … it does not have any authenticity because it doesn’t have any need. And I think that one of the reasons our company’s done so well is that we’ve surrounded ourselves with really talented people. Honestly, I feel a lot like the village idiot most of the time,” he says, laughing.
“I had one of the guys from my L.A. posse visit me yesterday,” he shares. “We were talking about creativity, and I remember saying to him that just about anything that anybody does that’s great doesn’t make any sense. It’s not contrived for a purpose like making money. It’s just something you have to do … like absorbing oxygen in your body. People that paint, people who do music—we’re kind of freaks! People say, ‘Oh, you’re so courageous to have started the business.’ Nah-ah,” he says, emphatically. “I was not cut out for anything else! I would suffocate in a suit!”
