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The Prism
December 1998
January 1999

Stories Columns
Guitar

The Starving Musician

Bonez, Thugz, And Harmonys

by Daniel Bayer

When one thinks of great American guitar companies with a long pedigree, names like Martin, Gibson, and Gretsch spring to mind. But what about Harmony, who probably made more guitars than all three of these put together? Located in Chicago, Harmony (est. 1898, four years before Gibson) was once the largest manufacturer of stringed instruments in the United States. If Gibson was the Rolls Royce of the guitar world, then Harmony was the General Motors, cranking out millions of beginner and semi-professional instruments under a variety of names, including Stella (whose acoustic twelve string was favored by Leadbelly), Roy Smeck, and Silvertone (sold through the Sears catalog). During the post-Beatles guitar boom in the mid-sixties, models like the Stratotone, Meteor, and Rocket provided inexpensive entry-level instruments for thousands of would-be John Lennons and Paul McCartneys. (Some real rockers used them too; Keith Richards played a Meteor, and Muff Winwood, Steve's brother, played an H-22 bass in the Spencer Davis Group).

The 1968 Meteor shown here is a Gibson ES-335 knock-off with a cost-effective bolt-on neck and a plywood body. The two DeArmond single coil pickups look like humbuckers but aren't, and it sports injection molded plastic f-hole inserts instead of the more traditional (and expensive) binding. The neck is slim with good fretwork, and the bridge saddles are adjusted by loosening a screw on one side and tightening one on the other, which is rather inconvenient (especially if the saddle falls off and gets lost under the couch). Mine lacks the Bigsby tailpiece, but that's probably a good thing, since tuning can be a bit dodgy. (I replaced the original open-backed tuners with a set of reproduction Klusons, which improved tuning while maintaining the vintage vibe). The pickups produce a suitable faux jazz tone, perfect for the lounge lizard set, while higher gain levels yield a Rickenbacker-esque distortion reminiscent of the early Who.

Harmony went under in 1975, a victim of foreign competition, but there's still plenty of these guitars out there, at prices much lower than their vintage contemporaries (I've never seen one for more than $300). Their clean, twangy tone makes them an excellent choice for rockabilly revivalists and swinger wannabes who don't have the dough for a Gibson or a Grestch, and hey, even if it doesn't sound quite the same, it still looks cool with a sharkskin suit and a fedora.

 


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