The Beatles, the Byrds, the Who: How they fell for the same guitars
The Rickenbacker was the axe of choice for John Lennon, Pete Townshend and Roger McGuinn. Will Hodgkinson tells why.
WThere were only 14 Rickenbackers in Germany and John Lennon just happened to chance upon one of them.
ithout wishing to suggest that crime pays, if John Lennon had been a more honest individual, the history of rock’n’roll would have been very different. In November 1960 a 20-year-old Lennon was with the Beatles in Hamburg doing six-hour sets on cheap guitars in clubs along the Reeperbahn. One afternoon, he wandered into a music shop and saw a Rickenbacker 325 Capri, a beautifully crafted electric guitar that he recognised from the cover of an album by the jazz pianist George Shearing. He convinced the owner of Hamburg’s Musik-Rotthof to sell it to him on hire purchase – in the knowledge that he would probably never pay for it in full.
‘‘We only had beat-up, crummy guitars at that stage,’’ George Harrison told the Radio One presenter Mark Radcliffe in 1988. ‘‘He got that Rickenbacker . . . what they call ‘on the knocker’, you know? Money down and the rest when they catch you.’’ Four years later, Lennon played his yet-to-be-paid-for Rickenbacker on three February 1964 editions of The Ed Sullivan Show and young life was changed for ever.
‘‘It is difficult for us to quantify just how important the Beatles’ appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show was,’’ says Martin Kelly, who alongside his brother Paul has poured his obsession with the company into Rickenbacker Guitars, a lavish coffeetable book offering the definitive overview on the subject.
‘‘It was a watershed moment in popular music and it transformed the guitar companies overnight. Before the Beatles you either had a singer with a backing band, like Elvis, or a band without a singer, like the Ventures and the Shadows. Then a band with multiple singers comes along and all of a sudden every kid in America wants a guitar . . . ideally like the one John Lennon was playing.’’
Rickenbacker is not the world’s biggest guitar company. That is Fender, which took off in 1950 when Leo Fender invented the solid-bodied Telecaster, the tool on which the rock’n’roll revolution was forged: something that could be amplified, distorted, thrown around, played behind your back and, if needed, whacked over the head of an overzealous fan. It is not the most famous – Jimmy Page, Neil Young and countless lesser guitar gods have turned the Gibson Les Paul into the ultimate rock icon – but it might be the most beautiful, in sound and design.
The company was founded in 1931 by Adolf Rickenbacker, a former electrical engineer for Hotpoint who helped to build the world’s first electric guitar, a Hawaiian model nicknamed the Frying Pan, but it only really got going in December 1953. That’s when Rickenbacker sold out to FC Hall, a former partner at Fender who wanted to set up his own guitar brand after falling out with its one-eyed inventor founder, Leo.
Rickenbacker was not one of the leading players in the early years, remaining a niche concern rarely available outside of America. It was only after 1960, when that hollow bodied Rickenbacker 325 Capri caught Lennon’s eye, that the company’s fortunes were made. And it was a fluke that Lennon found it. ‘‘There were only 14 Rickenbackers in Germany and John Lennon just happened to chance upon one of them,’’ Kelly says. ‘‘John was the first Beatle to have an American guitar, which was a big deal in 1960 because there had been an import ban on US made musical instruments in an attempt to boost the economy after the war. That fanned the flames for British music fans because they knew about electric guitars, but they couldn’t buy them. It created an obsession.’’
While Lennon transformed Rickenbacker’s fortunes, the guitarist who really brought to it a signature sound was Roger McGuinn of the Byrds. The jingle-jangle tones of Byrds classics such as Mr Tambourine Man and Eight Miles High, which gave birth to the folkrock genre, is a product of McGuinn playing arpeggiated chords on a Rickenbacker 12-string, which he bought after the Byrds went on a group outing to see A Hard Day’s Night and saw Harrison playing one.
‘‘We came out of the Pix Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard and David Crosby was so excited, he was swinging around a lamppost like Gene Kelly in Singin’ in the Rain,’’ McGuinn says of his Byrds cofounder. He is speaking from his house in Orange County, Florida, where three Rickenbackers, including his signature ‘‘RG’’ 12-string, are on the wall behind him. ‘‘I went out and got one right away.’’
It makes you wonder about something guitarists have been arguing over since time immemorial: whether a particular model of guitar is really the best, or just the most appealing through its associations with cool people such as, say, George Harrison. ‘‘I think it is the hollow body design of the Rickenbacker that gives it such a rich sound,’’ McGuinn says. ‘‘Eight Miles High is [played] on a Rickenbacker. I wanted to emulate John Coltrane’s saxophone. We did a US tour in late 1965 and I had a cassette recorder with Coltrane on one side and Ravi Shankar on the other, which was the only thing we listened to for a month. We were listening to it when we pulled up at a railroad crossing and there was a coal train going by. I thought, ‘Oh, man, coal train. This is cosmic.’ ‘‘
The Rickenbacker also features in an episode of Beatles/Byrds lore. In August 1965, both bands were hanging out at the actress Zsa Zsa Gabor’s house in the Hollywood hills. ‘‘We had all taken acid, and there were security guys and police everywhere so we went into the bathroom to get away from them,’’ McGuinn says. ‘‘We were passing around this guitar when Peter Fonda, who Crosby had brought with him, said, ‘I know what it’s like to be dead, man.’ John started freaking out, saying, ‘I don’t want to hear that now.’ and told Crosby to get rid of Fonda.’’ She Said She Said, the Beatles’ first foray into psychedelia, was inspired by that night.
Incredibly, FC Hall’s 15-year-old son John was also at the house, which had been besieged by Beatles fans after a local radio DJ leaked the address. He was there to give Paul McCartney a Rickenbacker bass and ended up asking McGuinn what it was like to be a rock’n’roll star.
‘‘John Hall thinks that’s where [the Byrds’ song] So You Want to Be a Rock’n’Roll Star? comes from,’’ McGuinn says. ‘‘Actually, Chris Hillman and I were thumbing through a teen magazine, wondering what happened to all the one-hit wonders, when we thought it would be fun to write a satirical song about it.’’
Plenty of other musicians have made the Rickenbacker their own. ‘‘Pete Townshend hammered the Rickenbacker. He abused it, which is a very British way of playing,’’ Kelly says. ‘‘He came up with a lot of those heavy guitar parts in Who songs on a Rickenbacker 12-string.’’ There is also John Fogerty of Creedence Clearwater Revival, who played a six stringed 325 on classic rockers such as Proud Mary and Fortunate Son; Susanna Hoffs of the Bangles, who played a 1960s vintage 325 on the band’s Eighties No 1 hits Walk Like an Egyptian and Eternal Flame; and Johnny Marr, whose signature style with the Smiths . . . was forged on a black Rickenbacker he bought in 1983 with his first royalty cheque.
‘‘It would be the best guitar to avoid writing anything too rocky or blues based,’’ Marr says when asked why he adopted the Rickenbacker, which he played extensively before switching to the Fender Jaguar in 2005.
Paul and Martin Kelly’s 336-page homage to the Rickenbacker is born of a lifelong obsession with guitars that began in childhood after their RAF squadron leader father died in a plane crash in 1976. They channelled their feelings first into punk rock, then 1960s guitar bands.
But can guitars can survive in an age when anyone can make music on a computer.
‘‘Elton John said he was jealous of guitarists because they could bend notes, push the sound, roll around, lie on the floor . . . It’s the instrument to which the human soul connects most efficiently, which has been proven time and again,’’ Martin Kelly says. ‘‘They said guitar music was dead just before the Beatles. Everyone said guitars were over during acid house in the late 1980s. Then the Stone Roses came along.’’ And the bass guitar played by Gary ‘‘Mani’’ Mounfield of the Stone Roses was a Rickenbacker. Thank heavens Lennon nicked one from that Hamburg music shop, way back in 1960.