Q: If you could pick one singer from any era to back up in concert, who would it be? What guitars would you haul onstage?
Leah Wellbaum — Guest Picker (Slothrust)
A: If I could back up one singer on guitar, it would be Janis Joplin. Her voice and performance energy are transcendent. When she sings, I can feel how present she is. There is a playfulness about her live recordings that really excites me. I think we would have a deeply groovy time. I’d bring my Tom Anderson Raven Superbird, as well as my Aztec gold Fender Jazzmaster with Curtis Novak pickups, to this gig. If Janis was open to doing a couple acoustic numbers, I’d bring my Martin 000C (it has an oval soundhole, unique and terrific) as well as a D’Angelico with the internal Fishman system.
Current obsession: My current musical obsession is clairaudience. I’ve heard music in my head since I was a child. Specifically, I used to hear big-band music when I would start to fall asleep. In my adult life, I hear a wide range of music, and turn them into songs and instrumental pieces. I recently joined a psychic development circle so I can begin to further hone in on these musical messages and develop them in this realm. Be it a folk song or an orchestral piece, I’m very focused tuning into other-worldly melodies and bringing them to fruition.
Adam Beck — Reader of the Month
A: Tom Waits in the early ’80s with a Kay acoustic (with a DeArmond soundhole pickup), a Sam Ash fuzz, and a wall of Gorilla amps chained together. I chose Waits because he’s a great and unusual artist with a voice that sometimes overshadows his talent. An acquired taste I suppose.
Current obsession: My current obsession is lo-fi equipment such as Valco amps and Kay archtops. Anything primitive.
Andy Ellis — Senior Editor
A: Janis Joplin. I saw Big Brother & the Holding Company in Boston when I was 17. “Please let me be your wingman,” I wanted to shout to Janis. “I can play in tune!” (That was an issue with Big Brother at the time.) Gear? My ’68 goldtop Les Paul into a Fender Super Reverb. Red coil cord, of course. While we’re dreaming: Levon Helm and Rick Danko on drums, bass, and backing vocals.
Current obsession: Sitarist Shahid Parvez Khan. The way he bends notes to coax shimmering overtones from his sitar’s sympathetic strings is breathtaking. When I saw him perform at Nashville’s Sri Ganesha Hindu Temple, he opened my eyes (and ears) to sonic realms I didn’t know existed.
Shawn Hammond — Chief Content Officer
A: I could rattle off a list of my favorite vocalists, but the simple fact is my cover-learning days are so many decades behind me that I’d just embarrass myself trying to back any of them. A more productive fantasy universe would be one where I cloned myself so my originals guitar-and-drums duo could expand to a trio in which the Shawns are able to focus 100 percent on singing and guitar duties, respectively.
Current obsession: Finding a good deal on a silverface Fender Vibrolux Reverb.
The Rickenbacker 481’s body style was based on the 4001 bass, popularly played by Paul McCartney. Even with that, the guitar was too experimental to reach its full potential.
By the early 1970s, the great interest the lads had sparked in 6- and 12-string Ricks had waned. But thankfully for the company, there was still high demand for yet another Beatles-played instrument: the 4001 bass.
Paul McCartney was gifted a 4001 by Rickenbacker in 1965, which he then used prominently throughout the group’s late-’60s recordings and while leading Wings all through the ’70s. Other rising stars of rock also donned 4000 series models, like Yes’Chris Squire, Pink Floyd’sRoger Waters, the Bee Gees’ Maurice Gibb, Creedence Clearwater Revival’s Stu Cook, and more.
And like that, a new star was born.
So, what’s a guitar company to do when its basses are selling better than its guitars? Voilà: The Rickenbacker 480. Introduced in 1972, it took the 4000-series body shape and created a standard 6-string out of it, using a bolt-on neck for the first time in the brand’s history.
The 481’s slanted frets predate the modern multi-scale phenomenon by decades. The eight-degree tilt of the frets is matched by an eight-degree tilt of the nut, pickups, and bridge.
“It was like a yo-yo at Rickenbacker sometimes,” factory manager Dick Burke says in Rickenbacker Guitars: Out of the Frying Pan Into the Fireglo. “We got quiet in the late ’60s, but when the bass started taking off in the ’70s, we got real busy again, so making a 6-string version of that was logical, I guess.”
The gambit worked, for a time. Sales of the 480 were strong enough at first that, in 1973, a deluxe model was introduced—the 481—and it’s one of these deluxe versions that we’re showcasing here.
“The 481 features slant frets—pointing ever-so-slightly toward the body of the guitar—and the eight-degree tilt of the frets is matched by an eight-degree tilt of the nut, pickups, and bridge.”
Take a close look and you’ll notice that the body shape isn’t the only remarkable feature. The 481 was Rickenbacker’s first production run to feature humbucker pickups. Here, you can see each humbucker’s 12 pole pieces dotting through the chrome cover, a variant casing only available from 1975 to 1976. (Interestingly enough, the pickups had first been developed for the 490, a prototype that never made it to public release, which would’ve allowed players to substitute different pickups by swapping loaded pickguards in and out of the body.)
The new pickups were also treated with novel electronics. The standard 3-way pickup-selector switch is here, but so is a second small switch that reverses the pickups’ phase when engaged.
The inventive minds at Rickenbacker didn’t stop there: The 481 features slant frets—pointing ever-so-slightly toward the body of the guitar—and the eight-degree tilt of the frets is matched by an eight-degree tilt of the nut, pickups, and bridge.
Long before the fanned fret phenomenon caught on in the modern, progressive guitar landscape, Rickenbacker had been toying around with the slant-fret concept. Originally available from 1970 forward as a custom order on other models, slant frets were all but standard on the 481 (only a small minority of straight-fret 481s were built).
The 481 was the deluxe version of the 480, which preceded it and marked the first time the company used a bolt-on neck.
Dick Burke, speaking separately to writer Tony Bacon in an interview published on Reverb, only half-recalls the genesis and doesn’t remember them selling particularly well: “Some musicians said that’s the way when you hold the neck in your left hand—your hand is slanted. So, we put the slanted frets in a few guitars. I don’t know how many, maybe a hundred or two—I don’t recall.”
Even proponents of the 481 do not necessarily sing the praises of the slanted fretboard. Kasabian’s Serge Pizzorno, a 481 superfan, told Rickenbacker Guitars author Martin Kelly, “I don’t just love the 481, it’s part of me.... The 481’s slanted frets have made my fingers crooked for life, but I don’t care, I’ll take that for it’s given me riff after riff after riff."
Initial 480-series sales were promising, but the models never really took off. Though they were built as late as 1984, the slant-fret experiment of the 481 was called off by 1979. And these slanted models have not, in the minds of most players or collectors, become anywhere near as sought-after as the classic 330s and 360s, or, for that matter, the 4001s.
For that reason, 481s—despite their novelty and their lists of firsts for Rickenbacker—can still be found for relatively cheap. Our Vintage Vault pick, which is being sold by the Leicester, England-based Jordan Guitars Ltd, has an asking price of 3,350 British pounds (or about 4,300 U.S. dollars), which is still well under half the going-rate of early 360s, 660s, and other more famous Ricks. Some lucky buyers have even found 481s on Reverb for less than $2,000, which is unheard of for other vintage models.
With its idiosyncratic charms, the 481 remains more within reach than many other guitars of a similar vintage.
Sources: Martin Kelly’s Rickenbacker Guitars: Out of the Frying Pan Into the Fireglo, Tony Bacon’s"Interview: Dick Burke on the Creation of the Rickenbacker 12-String | Bacon’s Archive" on Reverb, Reverb Price Guide sales data.
