"I feel like a wet, wild seed, in the hot, blind earth"
—Robert Penn Warren
The triple lindy was quite the finale. Performed in 1986 by Rodney Dangerfield at the end of the cheesy yet amusing movie "Back to School," it saved the day. And yes, the crowd went wild. What was it? A dive from three different diving boards where he does a series of cartwheels and somersaults bouncing from one board to the other, eventually soaring through the skies down into the pool gracefully. If Rodney played guitar, he would most likely have rocked a sparkle red Korina Flying V. As for us, we are gonzo for Stratocasters but somehow have been dreaming of using our tried-and-true ToneQuest recipe of a huge neck with lightweight nitro bodies and the finest parts anyone can get, to make a couple Telecasters that set the world on fire. So, we did it.
Blue. He is a sonic blue body that is almost see-through — that's how perfect the Mark Jenny MJT paint job is. For the neck, we have been dreaming of getting the crème de la crème Allparts TMNF-50U-RF Roasted Flame Maple Tele Neck for a long while, so after a few emails to Dean Herman, he agreed to let us come by, and we got to cherry-pick the greatest neck in the entire stash. Go ahead and put that TMNF-50U-RF into a Google search and prepare to spend the next 20 minutes of your life staring at the mesmerizing flame. It has a magically full-bodied and wide-glide profile with 21 tall frets, a vintage 7.25 radius, vintage heel truss rod, a beautiful walnut truss rod stripe on the back, and a smooth tinted nitro finish. With that secured, we went to Joe Glaser to order up a bridge and his Music City Bridge Groovemaster saddles, as well as sourced vintage nickel screws, U.S.A.-made switches, nickel barrel knobs, a Bakelite top hat, and a Callaham neck plate with cold-rolled steel bolts, vintage cloth wiring, a .47μF capacitor from Callaham he personally loves, and also the vintage-style tuners, all of which we hand-aged in the kitchen and backyard over the course of a few days with a secret special sauce of muriatic acid, that even found us wearing a headlamp at 5:00 in the morning, out there checking on everything while the smoke poured out of the glass containers with our neckplate simmering away, ahahaha. Mad guitar scientists. The yuppie neighbors love us.
With that all taken care of, we set about securing a trio of pickups from some amazing builders: Jason Lollar, Pete Flynn, and Ron Ellis. With those guys as friends, what more do you need in life? Our goal was to listen and celebrate them in both Telecasters. They each do their own thing; we can promise you that. For Blue, knowing that a P90 in the neck of a Tele is a world beater, we had to figure out how to proceed because it has a body neck space already pre-cut for a full-size humbucker. Enter Pete Flynn again, since he has spent thousands of dollars in R&D and tooling creating his patented P90 with 'bucker-sized bobbins that fits perfectly into his aged pure-nickel humbucker covers. Pete hand-wound one for us, as well as a bridge single-coil that had a bit more wind to it, to balance out the P90. Once our luthier wizard, Clancey Compton, in the back room at Rockin' Robin's Houston Guitar Shop drilled all the holes and expertly put everything together, we got to listen to both Flynns, and they were glorious, as is Blue. Then, for fun, because we just had to, we threw in a Lollar Special, knowing it, too, would balance out well with the guitar, and it was absolutely big, warm, midrangey, and fried chicken at a summer picnic on a vintage thunderbird blanket, baby.
Over the next two weeks, we would listen to both in the back of the shop and were often unable to get much work done because everyone who came in wanted to see the Allparts flame neck — it was all anyone could talk about, let alone how killer Blue is. What to do now that we have a pair of pickups that both sound fantastic in a guitar? Well, we just simply swap them back and forth with a quick solder when we feel like it. If one is in, the other is wrapped in brown butcher paper from a local barbecue joint waiting in the new tweed case we bought for Blue. Why choose? Depending on our mood, if we want vintage, we go with the Flynn, and if we want barfight ass-whoop, we go with the 8.26 ohm Lollar Special. And yes, we want both. We want it all. Blue is alive and kicking and breaking hearts all over town. And just so you know, if we were ever going to put an actual full-sized humbucker in a Telecaster, our only choice would be the Ron Ellis Bill Frisell humbucker, which you have heard us sing the praises of many times. It was somehow huge single-coil goodness from a 'bucker, but more full-bodied, so keep that in mind if you ever roll your own. For Blue, we wanted the P90 vibes. P90s rule. We will admit. Blue is with us on the couch day in and day out just so we can see that flame neck and soft gorgeous sonic blue in the Texas sunlight streaming in from the 1910 bungalow windows.
Blondie. With the Pine Burst Strat we built and you read about here months ago (which was unreal), we decided to source another pine body from MJT, and it was aged pretty hard. We got it to Texas from Missouri and proceeded to order the same great Callaham and Music City Bridge parts, age them in the kitchen and backyard again, and add in a ton of actual vintage flathead screws for the whole build found in Louisiana.
The neck was from Massachusetts, another Fender-licensed Allparts boatneck-profile beauty that someone had nitro finished and aged. The seller had it on three different Telecasters, not wanting to part with it, until we got it from him. We did our due diligence, getting numerous photos from them, as well as having him answer many questions over a week with five different emails. Once Clancey had everything together over the course of a few hours (we even stopped for spicy banh mi sandwiches ordered into the guitar shop), Blondie was ready. We put the Pete Flynn single-coil neck pickup in it, and since we had already heard this in Jonn Del Toro Richardson's Tele he gigs with all over the country, we were hoping for the best. Pete delivered. We are here to tell you this is the best modern single-coil Tele neck pickup we have ever heard. It is like a big Strat in there. So good, woody, chunky, sweet, and usable. Geezus. We called Pete and let him know that we are now believers, and funny enough, he said he had just received the same phone call from Joe Bonamassa about the Flynn neck pickup. Why does this not surprise us? The Flynn traditional Broadcaster bridge is also fantastic, and definitely sounds awesome. We also threw in the Ron Ellis 50/60B. Does it sound old to us? Nope. It just sounds killer. Ron has always told us he is not winding everything to satisfy the purists; he is winding many things to satisfy the fantastic sounds he hears in his head, which is what this is. Both the Flynn and Ellis are absurdly magical, dear gawd. We even put in vintage Centralab 250k volume and tone pots from Mr. Valco that he hand selected for us and changed the splines so we could screw the Telecaster barrel knobs on. Blondie looks and sounds like Jeff Beck threw it all over the stage in the 1960s: it is a train-kept-a-rollin' pine beast of a gal.
Sunny. Okay, as much as we said we were done building Stratocasters, we couldn't resist when we saw a wicked nitro sunburst body weighing 3 pounds 11 ounces on the MJT website that popped up the day we looked.
It was aged really heavily, but that doesn't bother us. We emailed him some questions and got it shipped straight to Texas. You know us: we just go for it. When the smoke settles, we figure it out from there. The only problem is, we didn't have a neck. We found an aged Allparts nitro-sprayed boatneck on eBay, ordered it up, but unfortunately, the seller still has not communicated or shipped it two weeks later. We put in a claim with eBay, and when they dragged their feet, we put in a claim with PayPal. Hearing that, of course eBay promptly closed our case to let PayPal handle it, which started the whole inquiry process all over again, and as of this writing, we are still waiting for a refund, which may take anywhere from two weeks more to 90 days. Oh, how comforting some dingus has our 350 bucks for months. Is this what they mean when they say they have our backs? Well, we shall see how this works out, but just know if you file claims with both parties, one of them will dump you and let the chips fall where they may. Start with eBay first and hang tight. Lesson learned on our part. Yes, it does appear it will get handled, and we appreciate that, but this timeframe is hogwash. They can all do better and should do better. Sunny deserves better.
With that excitement out of the way and being out hundreds of bucks, we happened to catch up with a longtime friend of ours who let us know he has an absolute mint, actual November 2nd, 1963, Fender rosewood Stratocaster neck that was originally on a black 1963 body like David Gilmour's famous Strat (which was a 1969, by the way). The body was signed by Stevie Ray when they crossed paths, and the neck was pulled. It had been in a case for years. We know, and you know, the value of such a vintage neck is well beyond our means, but as Joe Cocker more or less howled, we get by with some big-time help from our friends. We traded something very cool to our friend, and the 1963 neck came home to the bungalow for Sunny. Here's to cherished amigos who have been in our lives for years, always there for us to crank guitars and share meals at the table together, who, even when you tell them no, that the neck is far too valuable for us to have here, gifts it to us anyway, letting us know they are happy to see us happy. "Take the win and enjoy," he told us. We love ya, RP. Sunny is thrilled, baby.
Clancey was just as happy for us, for he loves working on great projects. We spent an entire Saturday there birthing Sunny, like we always do, shooting the breeze and helping screw some things together, using our multimeter to measure each of the three potentiometers and once we knew the numbers, deciding what would go in the volume and two tone sections, when Clancey wasn't hand-crafting the unbleached bone nut and more for Sunny. 249k volume pot, 268k neck tone pot, and 262k bridge tone pot. And yes, Clancey had high praise for our aging of parts. Maybe there is a future for us? Riverhorse Vintage Backyard Pure Nickel Goodness Co.?
We could spend hours, fry our cerebral firepower by whiffing muriatic acid forever, and even make a few measly bucks a year! Nope, no thanks, we will stick to canoeing the earth, flyfishing, and writing, playing music, and saving the rivers and oceans. By the time you read this, our book of 32 adventures, Water Lines, A Life on Rivers and Seas and In the Rain, may even be out. You can order it on all the big book company websites, as well as from Patagonia Books, if you want to take a ride with us and see where we are when not home in Texas, out chasing dreams and running wild. It does feel good to do things our way when we do get a wild hair with pure-nickel parts aged just how we want them to match up to a body and to craft special guitars.
We got everything together, and what a rad feeling it was to bolt on the 1963 neck that SRV had once even played for a while. We even looked at the old cell phone photo of a photo of SRV playing that neck for inspiration, just to make note of the mojo in it. You can feel it when you hold the neck. We put in a set of Pete Flynn's that he wound for us with aged covers, because when we found out Pete has nine Strats of his own — some vintage — we knew he would be winding some nice ones and we needed to see what all the fuss was about. Back home with the blonde Super Reverb and Sunny sitting on the red leather couch Big Tex had once given us when we traded him a baritone guitar for it years ago, we let the amp warm up and made a fresh triple espresso with almond milk in the kitchen. The 1963 neck is also a 7.25" radius, has original frets, that, while not small, feel small to us and make us work, but we enjoy feeling that old rosewood under our hands. The neck is 1.625" at the nut, so a good width. But again, these vintage necks aren't the chunkiest, typically — but they feel good for sure.
Sunny delivered the heartbreaking beauty we have always wished for in our Strats. Something about that 68-year-old Fullerton neck has such a rich and glassy yet freight train tone. This is the most SRV-sounding of all. The Flynns are great: warm cleans that sparkle but seem strong and out front, and the bridge pickup especially is lovely with our vintage 1972 Uni-Vibe and 1970 Roger Mayer spaceship Octavia. We bounced from .011s to .010s a couple times just to hear them both, and settled on the .011s, tuning a half-step down for a richer wallop. We did deck the tremolo bridge flat to the sunburst body but can report that lately we are starting to really enjoy leaving the claw and springs of the tremolo at a spot where the bridge is just floating off the body a wee bit, which seems to give us more harmonically complex and shimmering Fender beauty, compared to the fatter low end we get when we deck it. Both are great, and if you have tuning issues, you have to deck it, but something about that shimmer — oh, yes, we are understanding this is what we also love, more and more. Sunny is an old soul we are endlessly proud of to have in our lives, and yes, we have spent night after night with it in such awe of what is pouring from our hands into the skies.
And now, raise a beer and enjoy this clip of the Triple Lindy, sure to bring a smile to your face. TQ—Riverhorse
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4VDry9fy8UE