Home Page Music Writings Links Photo Gallery About Me Jackie Hall Jesse Tomiano
In the fine years of 1985, 1986, and a few weeks in 1987, I worked at a
music store located in Encinitas known as Blue Ridge Music, sister
store to the Blue Guitar (which at the time was located on Garnet
Avenue in Pacific Beach).
It was my first full-time job and my first job out of high
school. The
years between 1985 and 1990 were to prove especially tumultuous for me
- I had
this job, in January of 1987 I joined my band, Prime Suspect (great
name, eh?)
and played with them for a year and a half, while also finishing two
years worth of
community college in one - the net result was that I had graduated from
UC Santa Cruz by June of 1990.
Our sister store had an incredible reputation at the time for being THE
place to go for vintage acoustic instruments, quality work (especially
refrets) and cool stuff in general. We automatically started off with
the same reputation, but with one major difference - our emphasis was
on vintage and quality electric instruments, although we had some
pretty cool acoustic stuff in there as well (it was the first, but not
the last place I was to see the infamous and much-desired "pre-war"
Martin guitars).
And, for your viewing pleasure, here's a photo of it:
Just like the one Woody Guthrie played; an all mahogany Martin OOO-15, pre-war, with original, real tortoiseshell pickguard.
The experience I garnered there gave me such an incredible "leg-up" on
my contemporaries that, in a sense, I never recovered from it. In later
years, I ended up managing almost every music store I worked in within
a matter of weeks, and could speak and move in the vintage
and high-end guitar worlds with the very best of them. At Blue Ridge,
I'd worked with almost every big-name manufacturer (I did quite a bit
of the ordering for the store) and most of
these companies' sales personnel and management came to know me by
name, which was to help quite a bit in my subsequent "career" in
musical instrument design and manufacturing. It was quite an experience
for a 19-year-old to live through. The academic equivalent would be
getting into graduate school at Stanford straight out of high school.
The year 1985 was a very interesting one for the music industry in many
ways, and financially an explosively profitable year for the Japanese
manufacturers, particularly Roland. This was due to the confluence of
two factors - an incredibly skewed exchange rate (the yen was
unbelievably cheap) and, most important of all, an almost demented
obsession
on the part of the Japanese manufacturers with making the highest
quality products.
And those products were of the highest quality. All that stuff
is still around and working, and in many cases fetching far more than
its original selling price, to this day.
This, sadly, was not the experience of the American manufacturers of
the period. Martin had come within 48 hours of having their factory
padlocked and sold off in 1985, after years of declining sales and
quality.
As an example of how bad it got for Martin, here's a neat way to date
any Martin
made between the middle 1960s and 1985 - look at how rounded over the
corners of the headstock are.
Martin never replaced or maintained the tooling, so the corners just
kept
getting bigger and bigger as the tooling wore out.
Gibson was suffering from a slew of quality issues (bad binding, bad
paint,
inconsistent pickups, and especially warped necks) and declining sales.
And Fender, makers of the quintessential American guitar, had been on a
long, slow downhill slide in quality since the late
sixties.
There was not one American guitar company in 1985 that was doing well,
and most
were teetering on the verge of bankruptcy. Foreign competition,
inefficient processes, bad management, lazy employees and poor
attention to
detail and quality were rapidly destroying a once-great industry.
And by the 1980s, Fender had a crisis. People wouldn't buy their
guitars anymore, plain and simple. For good reason. The instruments
were of horrific quality ("three-bolt neck", anyone?) and far too
expensive to boot.
Fender also had an additional problem. Their low-priced budget line of
guitars that were being made in Japan
(and the Fender copies being made by companies like Tokai and others)
were being snapped up like mad by anyone who could lay their hands on
one - this in spite of them only being available in Japan and Europe
for the first few years of their manufacture. The reasons? Well, they
were cheap (although if you were an American who had managed to get
one, it wasn't any cheaper than a Fender by the time you'd gotten it in
another country and shipped here) but, most
embarrassingly of all, they were much better than anything coming out
of the Fullerton plant.
In 1982, most Fender production was shut down, but guitars kept
trickling out until the Fullerton plant was closed for good in late
1984. As a result, for almost all of 1985, the only Fender instruments
that anyone could buy were Japanese.
And this was my first year of working at a Fender dealer! The
customers,
sales staff and industry didn't know what to make of it. Rumors
were
flying about that Fender was going to shut down U.S. production for
good.
This
turned out not to be the case; by September 1985, the American factory
had
finished their move to Corona, California and started making high-end
"Vintage Reissue" Stratocasters. The reason I know this date is that we
got the very first one.
We had to send it back for an unrepairable neck problem.
The second one, and all the subsequent ones, were great.
But back to my point; we were a major Fender dealer, and it was 1985,
and all we were getting were Japanese-made instruments. And because we
were a major dealer,
in addition to Stratocasters:
And the occasional Telecaster:
And the obligatory Jazz Basses (we sold no Precisions, oddly enough - they just weren't popular that year):
We got some pretty weird stuff. One of the
weirdest being the "Performer" series of guitars.
You can still find them occasionally cropping up on EBay, but rarely.
They look like a guitar designed for the "Flintstones" cartoons:
These were 24 fret instruments, with active-looking passive electronics
and the inevitable horrible period
tremolo (with the dumbest locking nut design I've ever seen to this
day,
close-up shown below):
Yikes.
Here's a good overview of the body and the tremolo of horror:
We also received one of these; the bass version, done in the famous Fender Japan salmon pink. This is the photo that started this whole story, that of a Fender Performer bass in my old store in Encinitas:
Now, when I started this fun journey into the weirdness that was Fender
in 1985,
my whole point in writing this piece was to emphasize that I've never
seen another one of these, either being played or for
sale (I thought for many years we might have received the only
prototype of this
instrument), but of course (to prove me wrong) on Ebay today there are
not one but
two of these basses for sale! I've never seen one on
EBay before. I'm not planning on buying one (my specialty are
Steinbergers) but I always thought they were cool in a really weird
sort of way.
And one of these folks selling their prized possession had the decency
to upload some very nice pics showing some of the details of these
instruments. This bass is in really good shape for its age:
The bass in its case. This is the other classic Fender Japan color,
metallic green.
Here you get a good look at the body and pickups, which look like they
ought to be active but are not. Note the gold-plated bridge. While you
would assume it's not stock, it is. The Fender Elite Series Precision
basses (American-made), released the subsequent year, shared the same
pickup style as this bass as well as its odd combination of gold-plated
bridge and chrome tuners.
Here's a good look at a 22-year old Fender headstock, complete with
mismatched string, a
headstock design shared with the Fender Katana series of instruments.
This headstock was the recipient of a lot of unkind,
unrepeatable comments by most of our staff.
Here's the wildest detail on the instrument, and one that I'd forgotten
about. Look at this Fender logo!
Then contrast it with the traditional, 1950's style Fender logo:
Quite
a difference, eh? You have to give the guys at Fender some
credit; what
they had been doing wasn't working so they decided to take some
risks.
Fairly major ones.
And here the is the original case. This surprises me - while the cases
themselves were pretty bulletproof, the hinges and latches frequently
broke. Also, note that the case is marked "Fender USA" (I'd love to
know who the original equipment manufacturer (OEM) was for these cases)
instead of "Fender Japan". As I recall the cases were, in fact, US
made, but not by Fender directly.
I mentioned a little bit up the page that the Performer headstock was
taken from the Fender Katana line of instruments, another one of the
wacky 1985 Japanese Fenders that we were getting in.
These didn't sell very well, in all honesty. Part of the problem being
that the Katana, as you'll see here, is a guitar made for heavy metal
and Fender, at the time, was not known for making instruments suitable
for heavy metal. It also didn't help that the instrument did not have a
locking
tremolo, a mandatory accessory at the time for the aspiring metalhead.
We also hated stocking them because you could not put them on a guitar
stand - they had to be hung from the wall.
I personally loathed them because these, as with any of the "flying V"
type instruments, balance horribly. You're always having to hold the
headstock end up as it just wants to flop over.
This is the cheaper "Squier" version pictured. I was surprised to find
one for sale.
And I was also surprised to find one of these on sale - its mate, the
Katana bass. At least this picture is a little better:
None of these weird instruments lasted; in fact, by 1986 they were out of the catalog and out of the stores. But Fender's gamble had paid off nicely - we were doing an incredible business selling the cheap Japanese "Squier" series of guitars, which looked just like the regular Fender guitars but had a different name on the headstock, a strategy that Fender pursues today - the main difference being, of course, that today they're made in China. And they still cost about $199, the same price that they were going for in 1985.
A Japanese-built guitar today would cost far more than its American-made counterpart, thanks to the savage beating that the yen took in the early 1990s.
And we were selling American Fenders again as well, and they were decent moneymakers, both for us and for Fender. After the first year of making the "Vintage Replica" series of instruments, for a few brief years Fender made both the replicas and the wonderful "American Standard" series of guitars at the Corona, California plant and later, the plant in Scottsdale, Arizona. The high-end custom "Vintage Replica" series of guitars (starting around $2000 and going up to around $6000) are still being made at the custom shop in Corona and the also rather expensive American Standard (starting around $1000) series are being made in Arizona.
Regular, standard Fenders (starting around $400) are being made at the giant plant in Ensenada, Mexico. Fender is one of the more profitable companies in the music industry today.
I learned something from watching what happened to all the old American guitar companies in the 1980s - the folks who took risks and abandoned their old way of doing business stayed in business. The folks who clung to the old ways and old methods of doing things, without fail, were either assimilated or, more frequently, wiped out. The lesson? Keep changing and don't be afraid to ditch what's not working out - or be destroyed.
I'm trying to keep that one in mind.
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