Where were you when Bob Dylan switched from acoustic to electric guitar?  I know that may seem like a wholly rhetorical question to many of you reading this, since a lot of you probably weren’t around yet.  But when Bob Dylan picked up a Stratocaster, he helped change the course of popular music—and definitely the history of guitars.  Introduced in 1963, this Guild S-200 Thunderbird would have existed anyway, but Dylan’s plugging in certainly helped propel it into the limelight.

Guild s200

In the summer of 1965, Folk Music was still the most popular music in America, well, among a lot of young folks, at least.  Oh, there were the Ventures and The Beach Boys, both semi-Surf bands, and there was that little quartet from England with a hit in “I Want to Hold Your Hand.”  But Hootenanny was a hit TV show and the Folkies who played on it were religiously acoustic.  Bob and his compatriots played “vintage” Martin and Gibson guitars.  The concept of “vintage” wasn’t invented back then, but that’s where it started.  

In the Spring of 1965 Dylan released his album Bringing It All Back Home, half acoustic, as expected, but the other half backed by a rock band.  Less than a week before his appearance at the Newport Folk Festival in July Dylan released the rock classic “Like a Rolling Stone.”  At Newport Dylan played backed by Mike Bloomfield and other electric musicians.

The reaction to Dylan’s “going electric” was swift and hostile.  I was teaching and performing folk music back then and subscribed to Folkie rags like Broadside and Sing Out!.  They were full of op-eds loaded with righteous indignation.  Electric guitars just weren’t…well, correct!

It took about 5 minutes for the electric guitar to become “correct.”  A once-venerable jug band became The Lovin’ Spoonful, with Zal Yanovsky playing lead on a Guild Thunderbird.  A relatively minor, up-and-coming folksinger named Jesse Colin Young became the leader of The Youngbloods who had a major hit with “Get Together.”  He hired a lead guitarist named Lowell Levenger, who went by the moniker Banana, and was one of the few bold enough to play the distinctive Guild Thunderbird. 

Watch: The Lovin’ Spoonful ‘Do You Believe In Magic’?

Guild really went out on a limb with the S-200.  Professional musicians mainly played Gibson or Fender guitars, occasionally a Gretsch.  Guild had made its reputation with its fine acoustic guitars in the ‘50s.  Someone must have been smoking something when they designed the Thunderbird!  Or was a big fan of Gumby.  What made Guild’s move even more bold was that this was the time when Japanese were making their move on the American guitar market and those guitars were, by U.S. standards, often a little bizarre.  Especially from the perspective of the time, still heavily influenced by World War II.  Guild risked the chance of being identified with what were considered to be “beginner” guitars.

But the Guild Thunderbird was anything but a “beginner” guitar!  Despite the somewhat goofy appearance, the 1966 S-200 seen here was actually a guitar engineering marvel.  The S-200 Thunderbird was actually unveiled in 1963 along with two down-scale companions, the S-100 Polara and the S-50 Jet-Star, all similar with fairly equal cutaways.  

By 1966, the Thunderbird had evolved to have more offset cutaways and remarkable electronics.  The “Frequency Tested” humbucking pickups were not especially powerful by today’s standards, but few pickups were back then.  Like other more advanced guitars of the time, the Thunderbird had both lead and rhythm circuits.  In lead mode you got a volume and tone control with a lower value capacitor that gave you more treble, plus access to a phase switch for the funky tones.  In rhythm mode the tone control had a higher value for more bass, of course, bypassing the phase switch.  The two smaller knobs are then master volumes for each pickup, to “preset” the balance.  The sliding switches chose lead or rhythm mode and activated the phasing.  Of course, you get breaks when you play a gig, so the Thunderbird came with a built-in stand on the back, a chrome bar you could snap out to lean the guitar on.  Oh, and a couple of rubber feet on the bottom wings to keep the wood off the floor!…

As unusual as the Guild Thunderbird looks, it’s a pretty remarkable guitar, with a set-in neck, and those are pretty nifty sounds available, especially for that time.

Dan Auerbach and a vintage Guild S200

Folk music and electricity seemed to be Blowin’ In The Wind.  The Lovin’ Spoonful and The Youngbloods weren’t the only bands plugging in.  There was this little group called The Byrds.  Critics had to invent a new term: Folk Rock.  By 1967 even the venerable Folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary were singing “I Dig Rock and Roll Music,” which was supposed to be satire but was almost universally accepted by their fans as gospel.

The Guild Thunderbird was actually offered from 1963-1968, but I don’t think it was very popular and I doubt if a whole lot were sold.  Still, it’s a unique American guitar design that reminds us of what a big deal it was when Folk musicians finally plugged in!

By Michael Wright

The Different Strummer

The Times They Were A Changin’: 1966 Guild S-200 Thunderbird from MyRareGuitars.com

History seems to go in cycles, it appears.  Not perfect circles, but close enough.  When it comes to guitars we seem to go through periods when guitar designers go nuts and start pushing the envelope with whacky shapes.  Now, I’m one of that subset of guitar fans that’s always a sucker for really oddball guitars.  I mean, Les Pauls are wonderful, but show me something straight out of the Jetsons like the Gretsch Astrojet and I’m hooked!

The Gretsch Astrojet is an artifact from the early 1960s.  The music industry didn’t know it yet, but it was beginning to lose its grip at the time.  Music has always been led by popular tastes, but the “product” was always fairly tightly controlled by managers, promoters, record companies, radio.  When “folk music” hit big in the late 1950s it introduced a wild card: musicians from outside the “business.”  Outsider art.  Then came rock ‘n’ roll. Rock was fickle, unpredictable.  Just what did those Baby Boomers want?

1964 Gretsch 6126 Astro-Jet

For electric guitar-makers this was an important question.  Gibson had tried something new back in the late ‘50s with the holy trinity of the Explorer, Flying V, and mythical Moderne, all of which totally bombed (except with Lonny Mack).  Folk music was still riding high, but folkies played acoustic guitars.  But then there were these surfers and the Ventures.  And those Chicago dudes playing electric guitars.  What was happening?  Maybe, thought some brainiacs, we need a guitar that’s “far out” for the Boomers.  (OK, “far out” came a bit later.  I was there.) 

Maybe the kids would want a Gumby guitar!  Guild introduced its S-200 Thunderbird.  WITH a built-in stand so you could set it up on stage during your breaks between sets.  Yeah, like that flimsy piece of metal would keep your guitar safe!…  Except for Banana of the Youngbloods (from whom I bought a cool old banjo a few years back), almost no one would touch the Gumby-shaped Thunderbird.  (I have one.)

Gretsch considered the same conundrum.  Why don’t we ask Jimmie Webster?  You youngsters may not know who Jimmie Webster was, but he was a great champion of “tapping” technique decades before Eddie Van Halen.  Actually, Jimmie, born in Ohio, learned tapping from Harry DeArmond, the famous pickup manufacturer from Toledo who produced Gretsch’s pickups.  Exactly what that transfer of knowledge was we don’t know, but Jimmie tapped.  His “Webster’s Unabridged” album is one of the great guitar records.  

Anyhow, after the War Webster became a consultant for Gretsch and was hired to travel around the country demonstrating Gretsch electric guitars using his tapping technique.  There’s a whole class of “tapping guitars” that derived from those workshops, including those of Dave Bunker, who’s produced Bunker guitars since the late 1960s (and the Ibanez USA guitars in the early ‘90s).  

Gretsch asked Webster to come up with a guitar design that would appeal to the kids, and the result was the Astrojet, developed in 1964.  What can you say?  This was like Bizarro to Superman.  I don’t know.  I don’t find many guitars “ugly,” but this pretty much qualifies.  

1964 Gretsch 6126 Astro-Jet… rare and exotic

The name undoubtedly came from the fascination with the Space Race at the time.  The Telstar satellite had been launched in 1962.  The Jetsons cartoon series debuted the next year.  How about we call the new guitar the Astrojet?  

Actually, Gretsch put a lot of effort into the Astrojet. These had solid mahogany bodies with a set-in neck using Gretsch’s unique dowelled joints (that make them impossible to work on).  The fingerboard is ebony.  The pickups are high-end DeArmond Super Filter ‘Tron humbuckers.  (High-output DiMarzio Super Distortions lay more than a decade in the future.)  As you might expect from a guitar designed by a pro guitarist, the Astrojet has pretty interesting controls.  The knobs are a master volume and two tone controls.  The switches include a threeway select, a threeway tone selector, and (my favorite waste of space) a “standby” switch.  The tone toggle let you choose different capacitors giving you a mid-bass range, a treble sound for lead, and a heavy bass tone.

I guess if you had a “combo” of neatly coifed young men in matching Nehru jackets all playing matching Gretsch Astrojets and probably called the Supersonic Four Lads, this guitar might be a pretty cool part of the “look.”  However, by 1965, the year this guitar hit the Gretsch catalog, the Beatles had let their hair begin to grow and they had shed the matching suits for more Bohemian leather jackets and turtlenecks (“Rubber Soul”), a harbinger of what was fast approaching.  Hippies.  

Actually, it’s kind of ironic that the somewhat eclectic tastes of anti-establishment young folks didn’t embrace the rather radical design of the Astrojet.  But I guess it was just too strained, too over the top.  I’m not sure how long the Astrojet was offered but it was not in the 1968 catalog.  I think that Astrojets are pretty rare.  You just don’t see them come up for sale that often.

The Gretsch Astrojet wasn’t the last odd guitar to appear, of course.  There have always been guitar designers whose vision transcends popular tastes.  Just think of the early 1980s when both Heavy Metal and New Wave players stumbled over each other to play exotic-shaped guitars.  But Jimmy Webster’s visionary creation, however near-sighted, puts the Gretsch Astrojet in a class by itself.

By Michael Wright

The Different Strummer

1964 Gretsch 6126 Astro-Jet from MyRareGuitars.com