JEFF CALVIN

 

Guitars I Have Known

My first decent electric guitar was a Fender Mustang, which I purchased with money I made working in a plastic bottle factory in the summer of 1978. I immediately returned it, recognizing even as a beginner that it was a piece of crap. The salesman at the Drome Sound music store in Albany, NY agreed, and I swapped it out for what is now known as a "Lawsuit" Ibanez Tele; these were such meticulous copies of Fenders that these models were sued out of existence. It was just gorgeous; white with a maple neck, and it played like a dream. It was stolen; I'd left it in a friend's basement where we rehearsed, and when said friend couldn't make the rent, the landlord put everything out on the street. Heartbreaking.

Many guitars have come and gone; a '74 Tele Thinline, a late 70's Strat that weighed several tons, both of which I sold and wish I hadn't; an 80s Squire Strat that was stolen from a friend's trailer after he'd borrowed it (good riddance). A 70's Jaguar, also stolen. I have managed to hold on to a couple.

My main guitar for the past 23 years has been a 1987 Fender '57 Reissue Mary Kaye model, which I purchased new at Chuck Levin's Washington Music Center in Wheaton, MD. Mary Kaye was a guitarist in the '50s who posed for the ad for this particular guitar. I've replaced the stock pickups with Seymour Duncan single-coil stacks, which were put in backwards and upside down in tribute to Jimi Hendrix (I didn't ask for this, the guy who installed them for me took the initiative. Whatever.) Recently I pulled out that bridge pickup and installed a Lindy Fralin Blues Special...didn't notice a huge difference in tone. Tuning heads have been replaced with locking models because I'm quite lazy when it comes to string changes.

Only about 1000 of these models were made; they have a very distinctive look: a thin, white nitrocellulose paint job over an ash body, letting the grain show through, with gold hardware. At least, that's how it looked starting out for me. For fun, let's compare a mint version of this guitar, as shown here, with mine after a couple decades of hard gigging. Before pictures on the left:

 

Yes, mine looked like that, once. But it's still an amazing sounding axe. Of course, now they sell them looking like this new, and charge a premium for it. No, seriously.

OK, want to see a really nice piece? Click here.