...Eddie Van Halen’s "Frankenstein"

Seldom if ever in the history of rock - in the history of guitar playing, period, for that matter - can monumental change be attributed to one person; to a single guitarist whose own individual contributions amount to nothing short of an astounding re-imagining of the instrument's possibilities & whose playing abilities & innovations are so dazzling as to be considered truly revolutionary. No one since Leo Fender...

But such is the case with Eddie Van Halen.

NOBODY had ever seen or heard anything like Eddie. Nobody had ever heard or seen the strange guitar he worked his magic with. (In the beginning, he often played with his back to the audience so no one would steal his new creation of playing style.) With his striking (orig.) black & white striped guitar (later striped over a red paint job) he dazzingly swooped, dived, screamed, hammered, & blazed his way through one of the most original & most famous debut albums in history. No overdubs. No huge pedal boards. No fancy & expensive custom gear. A lucky few knew what was coming because they'd watched & listened - awestruck - in the early days as Eddie routinely reduced the Sunset Strip nightclubs to smoldering piles of rubble with his guitar. A lot of established guitar slingers laughed at his duct-taped, home-made stage setup when Van Halen opened for them, but they weren't laughing when the show was over and Eddie had rocked the audience into total shock. The writer & performerof hit after hit: 'Jamie's Crying', 'You Really Got Me', 'Dance The Night Away', 'Beautiful Girls', 'Cradle Will Rock', '(Oh) Pretty Woman', 'Jump', 'Hot For Teacher', 'Panama', Why Can't This Be Love', 'Right Now',... & on & on. Eddie Van Halen wasn't just at the epicenter of the new rock guitar. He WAS the epicenter. Actually a thoughtfully quiet kind of guy offstage but quite capable of melting faces off onstage, and unlike their brooding, dark contemporaries, Van Halen did have swagger to spare but their performances, proven by watching any Van Halen video, were always delivered with a classy wink & a smile and especially Eddie's always smiling performances, easily seen, having the time of his life.

And No other guitar captures the identity of it’s player (and creator) quite like the the Fan Named "Frankenstein" (Eddie referred to it merely as "His Baby"). Eddie wanted to combine the powerful sound of a Gibson with the functionality of a Fender Strat. Being the enterprising sort that he was he purchased a Fender Stratocaster body (a second – not cosmetically perfect) for $50 and a maple neck for $80. He equipped the beast with a Gibson PAF pickup that he had removed from his ES-335 and installed it into the Strat body rotating it slightly to make up for the string spacing & potted it in with paraffin wax (A Genius 'First' - by anyone & now an industry standard.) and modified the controls ever so slightly to give the guitar a unique sound and playability. Working within a limited budget, he made the original pick guard out of an old vinyl album. The custom paint job was done by Eddie by painting the guitar black and then masking it off and applying paint in several stages for the red and white stripes. To complete his creation he used large eye-hooks to lash his guitar strap onto the guitar and placed truck reflectors all over the back. The entire creation cost around $150. 'Frankenstein' went through many additional modifications and changes through the years and has even garnered a tribute model by Fender & his own totally reproduced design by EVH Guitars. Looking at it now, it’s hard to imagine that this creation would have actually set the tone for hard rock guitar for years to come. But just listen to the early recordings and it’s not difficult to hear the reasons.

Stevie Ray Vaughan’s ‘Lenny’ Stratocaster.
 In the early days of his career, Stevie Ray Vaughan was like most struggling musicians. Living on a prayer and the bucks he could earn from gigging locally. As his 26th birthday approached, he and wife Lenora ‘Lenny’ Vaughan wandered into a pawnshop in his adopted hometown of Austin, Texas. Stevie found and fell in love with a Fender Strat that was hanging on the wall. Priced at $350, the guitar was out of his budget but that didn’t stop the desire to own it. Lenny wanted to buy the guitar for him so she set out to find the money. She approached 7 of their friends who all kicked in $50 a piece so she could buy the guitar for him. When she presented the guitar to him, he stayed up all night with it.
 When she awoke in the morning, Stevie was sitting on the edge of the bed where he played for her the song ‘Lenny’ that he had stayed up all night writing. Not long after, friend and Z.Z.Top’s guitarist Billy Gibbons presented Stevie with a Charvel maple neck (with maple fingerboard) which he immediately installed on his new guitar and etched his name on it as a point of pride.  Over the course of his
career, Stevie Ray Vaughan jumped back and forth between his ‘Number 1’ Strat and ‘Lenny’ both in the studio and on stage. But, at least from the stories that are still told about Stevie, he never played the song ‘Lenny’ on anything but the guitar that bore the name. The original ‘Lenny’ Stratocaster was purchased by Guitar Center in 2004 for $623,500 during a charity auction
which raised money for Eric Clapton's ‘Crossroads’ rehabfacility in Antiqua.