Which electric guitar for rhythm in the early years?

[RUSSET]

Cover pic from the first guitar LP I ever bought.

My brother bought that LP a few years ago from a market record dealer for a couple of quid, & I remember buying their first EP over here (with the Black & White sleeve) when it was first released. They don't do great poses like that on covers anymore, do they ?

Tony.

[JimN]

Did I recall reading somewhere that the black Vega that Bruce used may have once been Hank's? Either way, it was a rare US model, I think the great early electric jazz guitarist Charlie Christian played that model as well as his Gibsons, someone posted a photo some time ago. I would guess there was an interesting story about how that particular guitar got to the UK back then- probably brought over by an American ? ...

Hi, John,

Yes - the USA-made Vega guitar was Hank's before it was Bruce's. In the BBC radio programme "It Was In Tune When I Bought It" (broadcast on August Bank Holiday Monday, 31/08/1980), Hank was interviewed and revealed that the guitar belonged to a Newcastle band-mate (pre-Railroaders) called Eddie Silver. The swap of the guitar from Hank to Bruce seems to have taken place around the time that Hank bought the Antoria guitar he used on the Drifters' first recordings.Only today (Sunday 22nd November 2009), I have discovered that the guitar was a Vega Electrolux (introduced in 1936 and obviously a very cool name for a guitar - or was it "Electrovox"?). Isn't the internet wonderful?

http://tinyurl.com/yknm9an

And yes - there is an extant picture of the great Charlie Christian with exactly the same model (who knows... perhaps that exact example) around 1939/1940, as well as a Vega amplifier*. Vega were best known at the time for their banjos; guitars were something of a sideline and they appear to have built their first electrics using Rickenbacker pickups sourced from that company (that's certainly the pickup on Bruce's guitar until it was later removed by the Burns company and replaced with a more conventional two-pickup layout). I suppose it's possible that Charlie C had the Vega as his first electric and swapped to the more famous Gibson ES-150 (and Gibson ES-250) when he had a bit more money coming in from his work with the Benny Goodman Sextet/Septet and Orchestra.

Let's see if we can locate that picture...

Here:

http://home.roadrunner.com/~valdes/PhotoAlbum/photo_61.jpg

Here's a picture of a later example of the model with a different pickup:

http://beta.gbase.com/gear/vega-early-archtop-electric-1938-figured-mapl#

HTH,

JN

[* I found the picture (and the website) during a visit to Roberto Pistolesi's house some years ago. We were both keen for it to be shared with posters at the MSN site (as it then was).]

[cockroach]

Thanks for that Jim, it's interesting to see those pictures again!

I've seen a few pictures of early Vega, Gibson and Epiphone archtop electrics with the single pickup in the bridge rather than the neck position which was usually the rule back then...

The fact that Charlie used that Vega for jazz makes me think that the great UK jazz guitar player/promoter Ivor Mairants was right when someone asked him if you had to have a big archtop neck pickup job to play jazz...he said , no, any electric guitar would do!

(Talking of jazz guitar, I sat in with some top local jazz players a couple of years ago at a pre-death wake for an ailing jazz player/jazzclub owner, the father of our lady vocalist at the time. The guy was in a wheelchair(terminal cancer) but wanted to have a few drinks and hear his old mates play before he signed off!

These guys actually let me sit on on bass (my wife's Fender electric bass guitar) and also on guitar (a Fiesta Red Squier Strat)- but they didn't judge me on what type of guitar I had, but whether I could cut it or not...I sweated a bit keeping up with the changes, and they even let me take some solos on guitar and bass...so I guessed I passed the audition, as John Lennon said...)