Trigger Warning: Rickenbacker nerds will want to skip this one or they risk getting PTSD because in my misspent youth I made some serious mods to this rare guitar.

America produced a lot of crazy stuff in the 1970’s - the AMC Gremlin, Jimmy Carter, leisure suits, etc . . . And at Rickenbacker they produced a handful of guitars with slanted frets.  I purchased this from a guitar shop in Porter square (Cambridge, MA) for something like $350 or so, which was a decent amount of money in the 1980s.  It originally had some proprietary Rickenbacker humbuckers that sounded kind of thin and soapy. So of course I tried to replace them. After a couple of failed attempts with traditional humbuckers (which entailed mutilating the original pickguard), I ended up finding some Rickenbacker single coils, then had a local machine shop make the mounting rings out of brass, and a local plater apply a chrome plating to match the rest of the hardware. Then I found a guy online who specialized in making Rickenbacker pickguards. I sold the original pickups on EBay to some guy in Australia. So here we are.

Very cool looking and sounding guitar, but quirky to fret anything other than first-position cowboy chords. But I feel like a rock star every time I pick it up.