Guitar Player

Rock N Roll Relics Starfighte­r

Billy Rowe’s Rock N Roll Relics look, play and sound like much-loved and well-traveled treasures.

- BY RICHARD BIENSTOCK

ASK BILLY ROWE when his love for building guitars began and he’ll take you all the way back to his San Francisco high school in 1980. “I was a big Van Halen fan,” Rowe explains. “And Eddie was the guy of my generation who took guitars and reconfigur­ed them to what he wanted or what he thought was cool. So I was always into tinkering with guitars, ever since I started playing.

“Then, in woodshop class, I decided to make one. I bought a block of wood at a hardwood shop in the East Bay, cut it, did the whole nine yards. I built a star guitar out of swamp ash. And that’s where it started.”

Still, it took many years before Rowe became a guitar builder. First he had to become a rock star. In the early ’80s, he co-founded Jetboy, who relocated from the Bay Area to L.A. and quickly establishe­d themselves as one of the leading acts of the Sunset Strip’s mid-decade glam-rock explosion, alongside up-and-coming peers like Poison, Faster Pussycat and, most significan­tly, Guns N’ Roses. Over-the-top looks and attitude were the calling cards of the day, and that extended to guitars as well. “I painted my Strat hot pink during the band’s super-early glam era, put a mirrored pickguard on it and scratched it up,” Rowe recalls. “It looked like Paul Stanley’s cracked-glass Ibanez.”

Jetboy eventually signed a major-label deal and released a well-received, if not exactly chart-conquering, 1988 debut, Feel the Shake. One more record, Damned Nation, followed in 1990 before the band called it quits. “After the second record, we toured for a little bit, got dropped by our label, and then we all ended up moving back home and kind of went our own ways,” Rowe says. He worked a day job but ultimately found his way back to his first love. “I built a couple guitars for myself, and then, you know, the internet started,” he says. “I sold a guitar on eBay. I thought, Maybe I’ll start a website. It just happened kind of organicall­y.”

Thus was born Rock N Roll Relics, which today is one of the more prominent boutique builders of high-end, stylish and, as the name obviously implies, age-finished electric guitars. And in keeping with the other part of the company’s moniker, the guitars are undeniably rock and roll in sound, look and vibe. They include a Tele-like model named the Richards (as in Keith) and an LP Junior-style design christened the Thunders (that would be Johnny).

“I’ve always loved classic rock and roll and late ’70s and early ’80s punk,” Rowe says. “The dirtiness of it. It’s the same way that I’ve always liked beat-up Converse instead of squeaky-clean white ones. The aging just gives it more character.”

Rowe began building guitars out of the garage of a family home in San Francisco that had once belonged to his great-grandmothe­r. Initially, he was working entirely on his own. “I was doing bolt-on stuff, mainly Teles,” he says. “I was basically going after the Keith Richards/Joe Strummer type of thing, and then taking the classic Fender colors and just kind of aging them. There were tools on the wall, and it was something I was into. And there were only a handful of guys doing the relic thing then. Bill Nash was one. He was just selling stuff on eBay. It goes that far back.”

Rowe officially launched Rock N Roll Relics in 2005 and began to build a loyal and influentia­l customer base through word of mouth as well as connection­s from his Jetboy days. Glen Campbell commission­ed a blue-finished Strat-style model, while Cheap Trick’s Rick Nielsen picked out a double-cut, set-neck Thunders. Other customers have included former Kiss and current Grand Funk Railroad guitarist Bruce Kulick, Metallica producer Bob Rock and former Guns N’ Roses guitarist Gilby Clarke.

But the musician perhaps most responsibl­e for helping to put Rock N Roll Relics on the map is Green Day’s Billie Joe

Armstrong, who gave a Thunders model equipped with a single dog-earred P-90 pickup and a Black Flag finish pride of place on his band’s 2016–2017 Revolution Radio tour. “That’s where things really turned a corner for me, because Billie used that guitar for almost the whole set for those shows,” Rowe says. “And the Green Day fans are rabid and follow every crumb that they drop. So it definitely took the company to another level.”

As the company’s reputation has grown, so have its offerings. These days, Rowe is focusing on three newer shapes: the offset Revenge, the semi-hollow Lightning and the carved-top Starfighte­r. He’s been using all three, as well as a Rock N Roll Relics Blackheart model, onstage in his current gig as the co-guitarist in Buckcherry. “I’m pimp daddying them all,” he says with a laugh.

Rowe has also added to his in-house staff at Rock N Roll Relics, though he still handles the majority of the aging work himself. As for his approach, “There are so many different processes when it comes to aging,” he says. “A lot of it is just little tricks of the trade that you learn through trial and error. And a lot of those mistakes become cool stuff.”

Over the years, he continues, “the aging thing has gone to such a different level. I tell people that I don’t even really try to make something look like it’s old. I just want to make it look cool and artsy and give it a vibe.”

To be sure, the Rock N Roll Relics model we spent some time with — a light-to

“I JUST WANT TO MAKE IT LOOK COOL AND ARTSY AND GIVE IT A VIBE”

medium-aged, Paisley-finished Starfighte­r — has vibe for days. The inspiratio­n for the body shape, Rowe says, was the double-cut Gretsch Jet closely associated with one of his favorite players, AC/DC’s Malcolm Young — “the god of rhythm guitar,” he says. But while Malcolm’s no-nonsense axe and famed “clean-dirty sound,” as Rowe characteri­zes it, served as something of a template, the Starfighte­r is its own six-string beast. The African mahogany body boasts an elegant carve and is accented by single-ply binding, and the ’60s-profile African mahogany set neck is topped with a fast-playing Macassar ebony fingerboar­d outfitted with Jescar medium-jumbo frets, pearl block inlays and cream binding. Pickups, meanwhile, are a pair of Mojo Tone Mojo’Tron Filter’Trons (Rowe says he became a fan of the original Filter’Tron sound back in the Jetboy days) controlled by two volume knobs, one tone knob and a three-way toggle. Appointmen­ts are rounded out by an Advanced Plating locking ABR bridge, Kluson tuners and a floating pickguard.

With its chambered body, the Starfighte­r was remarkably resonant, even when strummed unplugged. Hooked into a Fender Deluxe Reverb and cranked to barely acceptable residentia­l-street volumes, it unleashed that classic Malcolm “clean-dirty” roar without sacrificin­g articulati­on, fullness or dynamics. If anything, the Starfighte­r took things a step further tonally, evincing an open and airy midrange spread on chords and some pleasant warmth and softness around the edges of single-note lines.

That “clean-dirty” ideal could be extended to the Starfighte­r’s impressive looks as well, with the grit of the lightly checked finish, back-of-the-body buckle wear and oxidized hardware pitted against the gentle swirl of the pink Paisley pattern and cloud-like Aged White colorway. The result is, true to Rowe’s intentions, a guitar that is cool, artsy and vibey — and 100 percent rock and roll.

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 ??  ?? Rowe works on a Paisleyfin­ished Starfighte­r.
Rowe works on a Paisleyfin­ished Starfighte­r.
 ??  ?? The Paisley finish extends to the headstock’s back.
The Paisley finish extends to the headstock’s back.
 ??  ?? The double-cut Gretsch Jet inspired the Starfighte­r’s body.
The double-cut Gretsch Jet inspired the Starfighte­r’s body.
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