Hot Again : O.C.-Made Rickenbacker Guitars Popular Once More After Booming With the Beatles, Then Fading

It was 1964, the movie theater was showing “A Hard Day’s Night,” and five young Los Angeles rockers strained to read the names on the guitars the Beatles were playing.

“George Harrison had a Rickenbacker,” recalled Roger McGuinn, who still remembers every guitar in the movie. A few days later, McGuinn traded in his folk guitar for a gleaming new Rickenbacker electric.

In fact, he played it the next year on the Byrds’ first hit record.

Long since out of fashion, Rickenbackers are suddenly the rage again. With a reputation for expensive quality--a sort of guitar version of the BMW--they’re big with yuppies and with foreign buyers these days.

Until the Beatles, Rickenbacker International Corp. was just another guitar maker with an unlikely home in conservative Orange County. The company--once an innovator--became too conservative, even stodgy, some critics say. Rickenbacker, they contend, wasn’t adroit enough to adapt to changes in taste and technology in the 1970s and the invasion of foreign-made instruments.

Rickenbacker didn’t really seem to care about selling a million guitars or becoming a giant like Fender or Gibson, so it has maintained its reputation for quality. And, unlike other U.S. guitar makers, it has refused to move its manufacturing overseas.

After making guitars for nearly 60 years, Rickenbacker has yet to hit sales of $10 million a year, or about what three busy TGI Friday’s-type restaurants would do.

Now the nondescript factory in Santa Ana is swamped with orders for the first time since the 1960s, and Rickenbacker is wrestling with problems it hasn’t had since then: How to make all those guitars without getting sloppy and tarnishing its reputation as a small, quality manufacture.

The people who buy Rickenbackers may be dentists and lawyers now, but they were adolescents in the 1960s when the Beatles, the Byrds and the Who played Rickenbackers.

“A lot of the British rock groups in the ‘60s used them, and nostalgia’s a big part of their appeal now,” said Richard R. Smith, a guitar collector and author of Rickenbacker’s official history.

The guitars’ sound is so distinct that guitar players can often instantly identify one on a record. And even non-experts know there’s something different about the sharp, scratchy guitar on the first few seconds of the Beatles’ “Ticket to Ride” or the 12-string guitar that sounds like chimes on the Byrds’ first hit, “Mr. Tambourine Man.”

Convinced Guitar Was a Fad

The guitars’ unusually high, clear, jangley tone also makes them popular now with younger bands evoking a 1960s sound.

Adolph Rickenbacker was a Swiss immigrant who patented the first solid-body electric guitar in 1935, the forerunner of today’s electric guitars. The company was named to capitalize on the fame of World War I flying ace Eddie Rickenbacker, said to be a distant relative.

By the time Adolph Rickenbacker was ready to retire, he was convinced that the electric guitar was a fad. He sold the company in 1953 to F. C. Hall, a distributor of radio parts who moved it from Los Angeles to be near his home in Orange County.

In the early 1960s, when an obscure young British rocker named John Lennon bought one, Rickenbacker was almost as well-known for its older Hawaiian guitars, which were played on the guitarist’s lap.

“When the Beatles came along, we went from selling thousands of guitars a year to tens of thousands,” said John Hall, 38, son of F. C. Hall and now Rickenbacker’s president.

“The Beatles,” said Hall, “put the company on the map.”

The guitars sold well even though they cost more than $300, by no means cheap then.

But by the end of the 1960s, the first Rickenbacker boom was over. The Beatles had broken up, and most rock had assumed a more blues type of grittier sound. Guitar players emerged from anonymity, and every kid wanted the same kind of guitar his idol played, or at least one that looked like it.

Tried ‘Dirtier Sound’

The new stars of the guitar--such as Eric Clapton--usually played a Gibson Les Paul, which could get the rougher sound.

With Fender’s Stratocaster--played by another innovative musician, Jimi Hendrix--Gibsons were guitars to have in the 1970s. Their sales soared; Rickenbacker sales went off a cliff.

The company tried to change the guitars, but it was never really able to.

“We tried to put in a dirtier sound,” said Hall, who bought the company from his father 4 years ago. “It didn’t really work.”

By the mid-1970s, things weren’t going too well for the rest of the U.S. guitar industry, either. Sales of electric and “folk” guitars and other fretted instruments had jumped from 400,000 in 1960--before folk music and rock hit it big--to 2.5 million in 1972. But the manufacturers would never again sell that many.

Why? Well, the baby-boomers started to age, and there were fewer teen-agers to buy guitars. The late 1970s were rather directionless musically; sales of records also suffered. By the 1980s, video games and other distractions competed for kids’ attention. And rock became more sophisticated and harder to play; you couldn’t just learn three chords anymore, find a garage and some buddies and play the stuff that was on the radio. By 1987, the latest available figures, sales of new guitars had dipped to 1.2 million.

Not only was the boom over, but first the Japanese and then the Koreans had ridden it right into the U.S. guitar market.

The Japanese first captured the market for inexpensive “beginners” guitars and--as the quality of their guitars improved--began making dents in the markets for middle-priced and even expensive instruments.

Now guitars manufactured abroad dominate what was once an industry as unique to the United States as rock ‘n’ roll. Of the 1.2 million fretted instruments sold last year in the United States, just 123,000 were made in America.

Of the imports, the federal government says nearly half were made in Korea now that the strong yen makes Japanese-made guitars too expensive in the United States. A few guitars are still made in Japan and some in even less likely places such as India and Thailand.

Most are made by foreign manufacturers. But even some of the bigger and more prestigious U.S. companies have moved much of their manufacturing offshore to cut costs. Fender, for instance, now makes 40% of its guitars abroad and once quit manufacturing in the United States altogether.

Unknowledgeable Executives

Some legendary names in the guitar business got hurt by imports, weak management and bad moves. Most had been bought by bigger companies dazzled by the glamour of the business. The cash that the new parent companies brought to the table sometimes helped soften the blow from imports. But, some critics say, the new owners often didn’t know much about the business and hadn’t the faintest idea how to compete with the imports.

“Some of them had a succession of executives who didn’t know how to tune a guitar,” said George Gruhn, a Nashville dealer in vintage guitars who has written extensively about the industry. “The Japanese often showed a better knowledge of the American market than the Americans did.”

Nashville-based Gibson, manufacturer of the Les Paul, was bought in the early 1970s by Norlin Corp., a New York conglomerate. Gibson’s market share began to drop, sales of even the famous Les Paul waned, and Norlin sold the company in the early 1980s to three Harvard MBAs from an Oklahoma computer equipment company.

Fender, another revered name, fell perhaps the furthest. CBS bought the Orange County company in 1965, but Fender soon got stuck with a reputation for sloppiness that even some guitar collectors say was largely undeserved. Fender started losing money, and CBS unloaded it 4 years ago.

Buying the company was a group of executives and investors, 52% of whom are U.S. investors and Fender employees, the company says, and the rest of whom are said in the industry to be Japanese.

Even for the big companies, this is not the Fortune 500: In 1987, for instance, all guitar manufacturers, foreign and domestic, shipped only $328 million worth of guitars at retail in the United States. By contrast, makers of computers shipped $3.9 billion worth of home computers.

Similar Looks

Rickenbacker is small even by the standards of this matchbox-size industry. What saved the company in the 1970s was its basses. As the guitars became unfashionable, the basses just as suddenly became hip. They were prized for their own bright, clear sound. It lifted the instrument out of the rhythm section in some groups--such as the art rock combo Yes, whose bassist played a Rickenbacker--and made the bass another solo instrument.

When the guitars began to come back a few years ago, it wasn’t terribly surprising that they still looked pretty much the same as they did 25 years ago, since a large part of their appeal is based on nostalgia. And they still make the same limited--though distinct--range of sounds.

“They’re not very versatile, but a lot of buying a guitar is the aesthetics,” said Smith, the guitar collector and author. “A guitar’s as much a part of the dress code as a sound.”

Stylishness is not cheap: A new Rickenbacker starts at around $500 and goes up to $2,700. That’s without an amplifier or a case, both essential to the complete rock ‘n’ roller. And it’s by no means the most expensive guitar these days.

A Jackson--a rakish semi-custom guitar

often painted in garish reds or blues--starts at $1,500 and goes up to $3,000. It’s the guitar of choice for heavy metal bands these days.

A gaggle of them perch on pegs on the wall of the Guitar Center in Santa Ana, just a few feet away from a squadron of Rickenbackers. As a young guitarist tried some loud heavy metal riffs on an electric blue Jackson, store manager Andy Heyneman explained the appeal of the Rickenbacker over the din.

“Guitars tend to go back and forth between two basic body styles, the Les Paul and the Fender Stratocaster,” he said. “Rickenbacker is one of the few companies that hasn’t automatically hopped on that bandwagon.”

Compared to the heavy metal types, it is quieter and often older professional rockers who tend to play Rickenbackers, such as Tom Petty and Jackson Browne. Some newer groups are playing them too, including REM and the Bangles.

It’s on MTV? It’s Hot

But the guitar market is fickle. “Most people don’t shop for quality because even a lot of guitarists don’t know much about electric guitars,” grumbled Doc Pittillo, a Costa Mesa guitar repairman.

“What’s really hot,” he said, “is usually what the kids saw on MTV last week. That’s why I’m in business.”

What happens when the Rickenbacker fad wanes again, as some experts say it surely must?

The younger Hall seems more willing to change with the times, to some extent. A guitar player, unlike his father, and a friend to some of his more renowned customers such as McGuinn, Hall has mostly tinkered with a few changes in the company’s marketing strategy.

There are few new models, however, and critics say the company could get caught flat-footed when fashion and technology change again. The last new guitars came out 4 years ago and aren’t selling particularly well compared to the more classic models because--in a classic Catch-22--the new models “don’t look like Rickenbackers,” Hall said. The company is working on some new guitars it will unveil this year.

In marketing its guitars, Rickenbacker has finally deigned to use one of the oldest ploys in the guitar industry: Get a famous guitar player to endorse your product. But Rickenbacker’s pitch is still largely nostalgic: Its deals are with older rockers such as the Byrds’ McGuinn and Pete Townshend of the Who. Rickenbacker is selling new models of the guitars McGuinn and Townshend played in the 1960s and making them only in limited editions so it can charge more.

The company has also taken to sticking “Made in America” labels on its guitars. That’s mostly for foreign buyers. It doesn’t really make much difference to the U.S. mass market now that guitars from abroad are as good as most U.S. guitars. The international market is important to Rickenbacker: Almost half the 10,000 guitars the company says it usually makes each year are sold abroad.

There’s also a plan to manufacture better and more expensive amplifiers, which the company has been making for an indifferent public for 60 years.

Otherwise, Rickenbacker still sticks stubbornly to a nondescript section of Santa Ana--almost in the shadow of several sparkling new glass office towers--where it employs 100 to make guitars largely by hand.

There are no plans to make the guitars abroad, and Hall says little will change at its tiny plant, where blocks of dull, beige Eastern Rock Maple enter only to emerge 6 weeks later as burnished art objects. “My name’s not Rickenbacker,” said Hall, “but I act like it is.”