George and the black Gretch

[FPSHOT]

This is so cool

The Gretsch guitar site (http://www.gretschguitars.com/features/georgeharrison) has been
running an interesting teaser video for a couple of weeks now….

The advertising spiel goes something like this:

Gretsch is pleased to announce the GEORGE HARRISON product “teaser” that will grace their homepage website beginning at midnight, December 9, 2010. By clicking on the “watch video” icon, George will narrate a brief story about his “ole black Gretsch”. There’s no doubt it will cause a major stir in the global marketplace. Want to know more about this project? Please keep checking back on the website as it will be updated over time…”

Here is a link to the video

http://www.gretschguitars.com/features/georgeharrison

The friend George mentions to whom he gave the guitar and later asked it back is Klaus Voormann

Here is a link to a further article about this

http://beatlesblogger.wordpress.com/2011/01/02/george-harrison-the-ole-black-gretsch/

[Unknown Delight]

Nice...

Anyone care to share the story of George's 'ol black' ? It takes too long for videos to load up on my slow machines, and i have often wondered what the story behind it was.

I know it has been with him a long time, and if i read correctly, it was his first real proper guitar.

Thanks in advance for any interesting insights.

[beatlebangs1964]

Very nice.

In September of 1963, when George came to Benton IL to visit his only sister, he bought his famous Rickenbacher in a music shop in town there. That was the "Rick" George played on Ed Sullivan some 4 months later.

[darkhorse23]

No matter which guitars the Beatles used, the sound is ALWAYS right.

[beatlebangs1964]

Even so, they had to get tuned up first.

[hibgal]

Here's some more on George and the Gretsch.

George Harrison's beloved guitar is reborn as a replica

By Brian Mansfield, Special for USA TODAY

http://i.usatoday.net/life/_photos/2011/01/10/harrisonx-large.jpg

When George Harrison played Liverpool's Cavern Club with The Beatles in the early '60s, he had a Gretsch Duo Jet in his hands.

Now, Gretsch Guitars is putting a limited-run tribute model of the instrument Harrison described as his "first really decent guitar" into the hands of fans.

Harrison played the Duo Jet, known for its trebly tone, on The Beatles' first album (called Meet the Beatles in the USA). It's also pictured on Harrison's 1987 Cloud Nine album.

"I've never seen a more precise and detailed replica of any guitar in my life," says Harrison's son, Dhani.

The tribute Duo Jets, limited to a run of 60, arrive in stores in May with a suggested retail price of $20,000.

That's considerably more than the $210 merchant sailor Ivan Hayward paid for the original at Manny's Music during a late-'50s stopover in New York.

"It didn't have a huge body, and you could get it flat into your body and move with it," says Hayward, now 74. "It was like the nearest thing to making love to a woman. That's what it meant in those days."

Hayward kept the Duo Jet three years before selling it. Harrison recalled finding it through a newspaper ad, but Hayward says the young Beatle learned of it via word of mouth.

Hayward remembers the teenage Harrison as "a bit rough" and wearing tight pants and a jacket made of black plastic. "It was hard to get leather in them days."

Hayward wanted 90 pounds (about $255 at the time) for the guitar, but Harrison had just 70, "all crumpled, smelling, what you get paid when you go on gig, a handful of beer money," Hayward says. Harrison eventually took the guitar and left the 70 pounds and an IOU (a copy of which is included with the tribute guitar). Hayward later went to see Harrison's band play a local church dance, but they never talked again. (The debt has since been settled.)

Gretsch Guitars product manager Joe Carducci says master luthier Stephen Stern re-created the guitar precisely, replicating the nicks and dings of a half-century's use, even using a CAT scan to determine the semi-hollow guitar's body-chambering style.

The CAT scan also resolved a question about a flaw on the neck that resembles a crack.

"The doctor zeroed in on it, like you would a human bone, and said if it was cracked we would see it; there was no fracture at all," Carducci says. "So that line, that finish flaw, is included in the reproduced guitar."

Link to article (http://www.usatoday.com/life/music/news/2011-01-10-harrisonguitar10_ST_N.htm)

[Unknown Delight]

-

Wow...NICE photo there of a young Mr. Harrison ( and friend)

:)

[kayinthelife]

The black Gretsch is neat (and I LOVE it in the photo) but I liked Rocky more, just because it was so darn colorful.

[FPSHOT]

There is an official announcement now on George's official site with different video's

Gretsch Custom Shop Introduces George Harrison "Tribute" Duo Jet Guitar
SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. (Jan. 13, 2011) – Gretsch is extremely proud to introduce a very special limited edition instrument, the Gretsch Custom Shop G6128T-GH George Harrison “Tribute” Duo Jet.

View the "Making Of" video on GretschGuitars.com (http://www.gretschguitars.com/features/georgeharrison)

Limited to 60 pieces worldwide, the guitar is a meticulously crafted replica of the all-black 6128 Duo Jet Harrison played with the Beatles from summer 1961 through spring 1963—a historic period that covered the group’s meteoric rise from regional popularity at home in Liverpool to its gritty rock ‘n’ roll “apprenticeship” in the seedy nightclubs of Hamburg, Germany, to the madness of “Beatlemania”.

Harrison prized his Duo Jet, often referring to it as his first truly good guitar, and as such it occupies a very special place in the history of Harrison, the Beatles and the greater history of rock music in general. It is heard on many early Beatles recordings, and, decades later, on his acclaimed 1987 album Cloud Nine, Harrison posed with it for the cover.

The new Gretsch replica, built by master luthier Stephen Stern and his crew at the Gretsch Custom Shop, mirrors every scratch, ding and rust spot of Harrison’s guitar. True to form, the tremolo arm of its Bigsby B6C tailpiece has a black Phillips head pivot bolt, and the strap button on the lower bout is offset to accommodate the Bigsby.

Harrison bought the guitar in summer 1961, from Liverpool cab driver and former merchant seaman Ivan Hayward. Hayward, who bought the guitar new in 1957 in New York, had the Bigsby installed soon after buying the guitar. Offered for sale at £90, Harrison had paid Hayward £70, writing an IOU for the remaining £20 on the back of the instrument’s customs slip (since settled, Harrison fans will be interested to know).

“It was my first real American guitar,” Harrison told Guitar Player magazine in 1987. “And I’ll tell you, it was secondhand, but I polished that thing. I was so proud to own that.”

Indeed, Harrison had procured a truly fine guitar for himself—no small feat for an 18-year-old in Liverpool in 1961 and a very large step up from the poor-quality, difficult-to-play Futurama model he’d been playing up to that time. It became Harrison’s main guitar. In addition to the many Cavern gigs, this meant that the Duo Jet accompanied the young guitarist on several of the Beatles’ legendary visits to Hamburg, Germany. Harrison played the guitar during their 1962 stints at the Star-Club in April, May, November and December. This was a wild and formative chapter in Beatles history;

Hamburg was where the group honed its live skills, widened its reputation, lost a certain amount of innocence and recorded and released its first single (“My Bonnie,” backing singer Tony Sheridan, June 1961).

Harrison played his black Gretsch Duo Jet at the Beatles’ first recording session at Abbey Road Studios in London, on June 6, 1962, and at subsequent sessions later that year and in early 1963. Consequently, the guitar is heard on early Beatles singles such “Please Please Me”—the group’s second single and first number-one hit—and on most of their March 1963 debut album Please Please Me, which includes famous tracks such as “I Saw Her Standing There,” “Love Me Do,” “P.S. I Love You,” “Do You Want to Know a Secret,” and a magnificently raucous cover of “Twist and Shout.”

As Beatlemania gripped the U.K., Harrison acquired other Gretsch guitars after mid-1963, most notably the Country Gentleman® and Tennessean® models, and largely retired the Duo Jet. In the mid-1960s, he gave the Duo Jet as a gift to bassist and artist Klaus Voormann, a longtime friend of the band from the Hamburg days well known to Beatles fans as the designer of the seminal 1966 Beatles album Revolver, as well as the mid-’90s Beatles Anthology albums.

Voormann kept the Gretsch for the next 20 years, at some point changing the neck pickup. In the mid-1980s, Harrison recalled, “I’d asked him what happened to the guitar and whether I could have it back, because of its nostalgic value. So he returned it to me, and I had it fixed back in its original form with the original pickup and switches that had been missing from it since he owned it.”

For these late-1985/early-1986 repairs, Harrison turned to noted U.K. guitar tech Alan Rogan, with whom he had worked before. Rogan in turn entrusted the restorative work to luthier Roger Giffin, who rewired it (because “the original wiring was disintegrating”) and installed a spare DeArmond pickup in the neck position that was much closer to the original than the neck pickup Voormann had installed.

In 1987, Harrison released his critically acclaimed and enormously successful Cloud Nine album, which included a massive hit in “Got My Mind Set on You” and a charming tribute to his Beatles years in “When We Was Fab.” When the time came to shoot pictures for the cover, Harrison said, “I was asked if I could take a guitar down for the photo session for the new album, and so I picked that one, and that’s it—the old black Gretsch.”

The cover of Cloud Nine shows a beaming Harrison holding his old Gretsch Duo Jet, back in his hands after more than two decades.

Consequently, there is perhaps a touching symmetry to the notion that Harrison started his career and returned to it decades later for yet another enormous hit album with “the first real decent guitar” he ever had; the one he bought at age 18 with money he’d worked so hard to save from those early Beatles gigs in Hamburg and in the dank confines of the Cavern. The one he affectionately called “the old black Gretsch.”


The extended video with among others the "sailor" George bought the guitar from for 75 pounds is here which includes a very detailed story about the guitar which is awesome and also has Dhani in it.


http://www.gretschguitars.com/features/georgeharrison

[Rellevart]

In September of 1963, when George came to Benton IL to visit his only sister, he bought his famous Rickenbacher in a music shop in town there. That was the "Rick" George played on Ed Sullivan some 4 months later.

Actually, that's not a true story, BB.

The Duo Jet is super cool, but $20K?!? Too bad they'll mostly go to filthy rich collectors and not be played out by real musicians.

[beatlebangs1964]

Oh. I fell for that story. His sister said in the book she co-authored about George's trip to Benton that he bought it there.

[Rellevart]

http://uniqueguitar.blogspot.com/2010/12/in-blues-era-there-were-handful-of.html

Page down a little here and you'll get the real story, BB. :smile1:

[hibgal]

Oh. I fell for that story. His sister said in the book she co-authored about George's trip to Benton that he bought it there.

http://uniqueguitar.blogspot.com/2010/12/in-blues-era-there-were-handful-of.html

Page down a little here and you'll get the real story, BB. :smile1:
Actually, you're both right. George bought his first Rickenbacker, the Jetglo model 425, in Benton in September, 1963 while visiting Louise. February 8th, 1964 is when he got his second Rickerbacker, the 360/12 string, directly from Francis C.Hall. Two stories, two guitars. :smile1:

[Rellevart]

Ah, ok, I thought she was talking about the 12 string, my mistake. I never associate the other one with George!

[beatlebangs1964]

Thank you for clearing that up. :smile1: I always found the guitar stories interesting.