The late Heartbreakers legend shouldn't have deterred me from "hippie" Rickenbackers any more than Hendrix should've turned his nose up at a "surf" guitar.
It's always a kick in the gut when seminal musicians pass on to the great beyond. It's natural to reflect upon their lives and appreciate their contribution to the world as well as one's own life. But when Tom Petty died, it hit me harder than I thought it could.
I empathized with the people who adored him and his music. I felt worse for his family and fellow Heartbreakers. I felt robbed of what had become a steady beacon in my musical life—the constant distillation of vague thoughts in my head being coalesced into simple, understandable phrases. The guitars were great, too.
When the Heartbreakers first hit the national scene, I recognized Petty as a talent to be dealt with, but I was not what you'd call a fan. It wasn't really my main kind of music, but it displayed serious craft and just enough edge to keep me interested. “Great little tunes," I'd say to myself. I may have bought Damn the Torpedoes. Going to a Heartbreakers concert wasn't on the agenda, but I noted Petty's exploits in the magazines of the day. I read about how he'd thrown a temper tantrum in the recording studio over something the record company had done to raise his ire. The article painted a picture of a bullheaded young man breaking his hand by punching a hole in the studio wall. As much as I admired his passion for his art, I thought it was a pretty stupid move. Somehow, that's the image of Petty that hovered in my mind whenever I heard his songs. I'd pigeonholed him in a way that I would have resented, myself.
A couple of issues ago, I explored the idea of getting to know a guitar before passing judgement on it [“What Really Makes an Instrument a Best Friend?" January 2021], but we can take that a step further. What about the gear you dismiss out of hand just because of the associations you've formed in your mind? Many of us are guilty of labeling, rating, and ranking the people and things in our life. It makes it easy to understand the world around us. In our imaginations we might be metal or funk, but not Americana. We can be a Les Paul person, but not an Ibanez sort of dude. There are myriad ways to create our own personal Venn-diagram tribal map from the associations we attach to music and guitars. Within this framework, we search for like-minded souls and compatible memes to fulfill a sense of identity and belonging. In doing so, we shut out opportunity. It's like living in a world where there's no color blue, green, or gray—only black and white. Sometimes, you can't even remember why you formed your opinion in the first place.
When I examine my own prejudice, I realize that sometimes my opinions are based on long-held associations as much as experience. I've always favored early 1960s P basses, especially the sunburst version, and trace this back to my youth when I idolized P-bass icon James Jamerson. On the other hand, I was never a big Grateful Dead fan, so any guitar with a half-dozen different laminations of natural body wood was noted as a “hippie" guitar (or bass), and only worthy of derision. Likewise, guitars with upside-down headstocks were strictly for guitarists who played a zillion notes and wore makeup. In retrospect, I can see how these associations were made, but it wasn't fair or productive to ignore perfectly good guitars because of them.
History is overflowing with guitarists who upset the status quo of instrument compartmentalization. Jimi Hendrix bent the rules of rock using a surf guitar. Tiny Grimes played some of the most rocking jazz on a tenor electric. The Cult's Billy Duffy created a swirling vortex of post-punk goth rock on a hollow Gretsch that's mostly associated with country music. Today, you can see flame-topped collectibles onstage alongside pawn-shop throwaways from the 1960s playing some decidedly un-corporate music. Personally, I'd like to see Chris Stapleton rocking a Dean ML. The fact is that although an artist might be associated with a particular instrument, that instrument shouldn't be strictly associated with his or her style of music.
Eventually, I came around to thinking of Tom Petty as a much more three-dimensional person than my younger self did. I'm not sure if that made his songs more personal to me, or the other way around. There's no shortage of tunnel vision in the way we think, but if you remove your filters, there's lots of great stuff to discover. So, give that hollowbody a shot, even if you're playing metal. Maybe that star-shaped axe with the reverse headstock has some great jazz tones worth exploring, but … stay away from hippie guitars. And if you think Tom Petty isn't your beer, give him a second chance.
Boutique luthier Jol Dantzig (cofounder of Hamer Guitars) examines the potential perils of different headstock angles and the balance between performance and ease of construction.
When we think of world-champion guitar breakers, Jimi Hendrix and Kurt Cobain come to mind. But even Pete Townshend can’t hold a candle to the infamous creation known as the guitar stand. Quite possibly responsible for the net worth of 10,000 guitar-repair techs, this venerable device has decapitated even more guitars than UPS and United Airlines combined. So, why are guitars so delicate?
Guitarists blame cords. Or drummers. Critics are swift to point to extreme headstock angles or weaker materials, like mahogany. After all, Leo Fender and company put that quarrel to justice long ago by constructing an industrial-grade, fretted Excalibur from rock maple—with no headstock pitch to boot. Known for durability in combat, the bolt-on maple neck stands as de facto judge and jury for less-robust designs. You’d think guitar makers would have gotten the message by now. I can imagine the advertising bullet points:
· Won’t break when you toss it and miss the couch.
· Strong enough to survive a gig bag.
· Stands up to toppling stands.
· What could be better? Airbags?
Pitched (angled) headstocks can be traced back 15 centuries to the medieval oud and its younger cousin the lute. These had long, thin headstocks raked back at nearly 90 degrees—possibly to facilitate easy reach to their tuning pegs. The guitar as we now know it developed from the Spanish guitar (which evolved from the lute), with the headstock pitch reduced to somewhere between 7 and 17 degrees—or, in the case of Fender, zero. Guitar builders of the last four or five centuries have struck a balance between performance and ease of construction, with Fender taking the prize for the latter.
Let’s take a look at how headstocks are constructed. Part of it is tradition born out of functional design. Head pitch keeps strings in the nut by diverting pressure downward on the nut. The slighter the angle, the less pressure, so each designer must choose how steep to go. The downside of more of an angle is friction that can affect string stretching during tuning, bending, and tremolo use. The benefit is greater transmission of vibration at the nut and reduced dissipation of energy to the headstock. Headstock vibration can also be argued, but that discussion is for another day.
The ways to achieve the pitched angle seen on modern guitars fall into two camps. The first is the scarf joint, seen on traditional classical and flamenco guitars. This is simply cutting the flat neck board on an angle and gluing a flat headstock onto that. The pitch is determined by the cut angle. One variation of this type of headstock—sometimes seen on vintage Martins and other acoustics—uses a “bird’s beak” joint to strengthen things up. The side effect is an attractive diamond-shaped affair on the back of the headstock.
The second type is the fully constructed neck, as seen on instruments like Gibson’s and Gretsch’s. This requires a lot more material that’s cut from expensive, thick boards. The result is a nice, clean look, but it unfortunately provides a shortcut for breakage along the grain line, right at the instrument’s most vulnerable point, where neck and head meet. The cutout channel for a head-end truss-rod adjustment weakens this area even more. Some builders attempt to increase strength by creating a bump (called a volute) at the back of the headstock where it meets the neck shaft, but, in reality, the added material falls below the line of most breaks. The truth is that the volute was a manufacturing shortcut, at least until CNC machining made handblending unnecessary.
The Fender example uses string trees on the higher strings to create the downward angle that the zero-pitch headstock does not. This sometimes results in friction-related tuning issues. For the most part, it’s an inexpensive, slightly inelegant solution. In the win column, the zero-pitch head is a three-birds-with-one-stone example of Fender’s design philosophy. The absence of pitch allows a neck to be made of a single, 1"-thick piece of ordinary and plain (aka cheap) maple, while it dispenses with all the pesky woodworking needed to fashion an angled headstock. The bonus is that the grain of the wood is continuous, which helps prevent breakage. Although not as fancy looking as something like a D’Angelico, I still love it, as does most of the guitar universe.
All said, guitars are not alone in their fragility. Classical instruments like the cello and French horn are vulnerable to damage when mishandled. A 4-foot drop wouldn’t do much for an accordion, either. Playing guitar has become a contact sport, which is probably why the question of outsized durability is discussed at all. To me, it seems slightly comical to expect a multi-thousand-dollar guitar to be toddler-proof. My question isn’t why headstocks break. … It’s why we expect them not to.
The difference between a good guitar and a great guitar is subjective, but it goes way beyond tone and aesthetics.
I used to hate Stratocasters. Okay, that’s not exactly the full truth, but as much as I admired their straightforward design, signature sound, and robust construction, they never gave me gooseflesh like, say, a blonde dot-neck 335. My happy place was that buttery smooth 24 3/4" feel and the fat, fat, fat, singing sustain of a humbucker-shod, glued-neck guitar. That’s not to say I haven’t owned a slew of Fender products over the years. I treasured the 1950s maple-necked Strats and Teles that passed through my hands, but I never really bonded with them. I didn’t feel like they were my friends.
Fatal attraction. No doubt about it: Visuals are a powerful thing. Whether it’s walking into a store or browsing online, your eyes are your gear radar. And once locked onto the target, a lot of potential turn-offs can be rationalized into the background. I’m as guilty as the next person of being seduced by a lovely shape. I’ve owned at least three of the same-model electric 12-string just because they were so fetching visually. Inevitably, their narrow and crowded necks rendered them almost unplayable to me, so each time I quickly gave up on them.
If the shoe fits. A comfortable neck is a great selling point that has lured many a guitarist into playing certain instruments. Easy is good, right? One of the reasons I didn’t get on with Stratocasters was that everything seemed harder to play on them. I interpreted the long-scale stiffness as an impediment, and quickly lost interest no matter how good they sounded. Once, however, I found myself in a situation where for a couple months my only guitar at home was a Strat. After being held hostage for a few weeks, I realized that a little fight was good for me, and the skirmish became the point. Once I acknowledged this, wringing the neck into submission became a joy instead of a struggle. I also became aware that easy can be lazy, and the Strat pushed me to do better. Amazingly, it also made playing more comfortable guitars better, too.
The quest for tone. At the heart of most guitar safaris is the belief that if we had the right tone, we’d be inspired to play more—and better. This is where things get a little misguided. Some guitarists talk about searching for a sound they hear in their heads, which might not be as useful as finding the sounds already buried in the guitars they own. When you examine the breadth of tones that different artists get from the exact same guitar, you realize that sometimes it’s the archer, not the arrow.
The argument for exploration. When I was first starting out, I didn’t know how to mine for gold in any given guitar. But being broke and relegated to a cheap beginner’s instrument, I was forced to explore what it could do. Luckily, I was so fascinated with the damn thing that I tried all sorts of stuff. I experimented with where I picked the strings and noted how that position sounded on all the notes up and down the neck—and how it changed with the different pickups. I turned the controls constantly in conjunction with the amp settings and made mental notes of what happened. I played too loud, and then softly. I leaned the headstock against the speaker and banged on the body. Everything was fair game, and I built up a catalog of knowledge. I’m not a great player, but I know a lot about what guitars can do and why. Along the way, I’ve discovered that building a friendship over time is sometimes better than a first impression might imply.
Quality time. What makes an instrument become a soul mate? First impressions are important, but sometimes misleading. We all have stories about guitars that catch our eye from across the room. Their beauty beckons us closer and invites our touch, but living with them becomes a letdown. Then there are the sleepers that just make you feel at home. I think that sometimes it comes down to spending quality time with each other. My favorite guitars are the ones that push me to try a little harder and reward me when I do. I don’t feel judged if I try something a little beyond my reach, and they don’t complain if I tell the same old story for the hundredth time. Your guitar should bring out your best, and catch you when you fall without judgment. Sometimes that trust just takes a while.