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In 1976 Me and Rex Bogue visited Frank at the record Plant in LA. We were showing off the custom guitars, electronics, etc. Frank was impressed, but skeptical. He walks us over to a beat up guitar case and says; "if you can put this sucker back together, we'll talk".
He opened it up and it's a burned up broken Fender stratocaster, the one Jimi Hendrix gave to Frank after the Miami Pop festival in 1967. The neck was broken off, the headstock missing at the nut. The sunbust body was fractured in 3 places, the pickguard burned off.
We glued it back together, replaced the neck, added piezo pickups in the headstock running the wires down the side of the neck. We added binding to cover the leads. I put a treble/bass EQ preamp insides and we drove it back to the Record Plant the next week.
Frank was very impressed as the guitar played well and sounded great. Then he walks us over to the pile-o-guitars and says, "which one do you want to work on first?" We took back a couple of SG's first, the plain one and that special one with the redwood inlays on the body top. Eventually all were done up. That Hendrix strat ended up on the cover of Guitar Player magazine, Dweezle has it now.
Later in the 80's I hooked up with Frank again. Then I did up Ray White's Tele, ( I still have the original bridge and pickups on one of my Tele's) Ike Willis's Explorer, etc. I didn't do Scott Thune's bass as he was anal about it even though Frank wanted it and agreed to pay for all of this work. Once I did up a Strat for Frank, I used Bartolini strat pickups and a 2 band sweep frequency onboard EQ.
He told me it was "too clean". I told him that was one of the best compliments he ever gave me. Then I got that look again...
Jim Williams
Audio Upgrades
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