On 17 Dec 2010, at 10:15 , Brian Kelly wrote:
Mike,
I am not arguing with you about the early Baldwin Gretsch¡¯s I am only saying that it seems strange but you and to know Gretsch to understand that they were so mismanaged that anything was possible. Your guitar could have been a hand-made prototype project of some sort. That¡¯s how nuts it was. I liked Cal Collins guitar but I have no cue as to where or when it was made. I lived in Cincinnati where those guitars were in every store in town and I got to play lots of them. My brother always had a ton of them in his office as well. From what I saw they were the most inconsistent guitars ever built and not just in construction quality but in how they were built and designed. Inside these guitars were often structurally different from one year to the next. Some had painted f-holes, some not. Some had sound some not.
I'm the other Mike :-) , but I agree that Gretsch was incredibly mismanaged at times, and produced inconsistently built guitars. They may have been a bit more consistent after Baldwin got hold of them, I visited the factory in Arkansas and got a nice tour of the factory. All the wood work was farmed out at that point. I saw boxes and boxes of tops, sides, backs, and necks¡ª all from some other vendor. They just set them up in jigs and glued then together. Surprisingly, they wound their own pickups. It was more of a guitar assembly plant than a guitar fabricating plant.
Cal Collins seems to have played a 6122 Country Gent at some point, here's a link to a youtube video:
There's an interesting book that gives a look into the workings of the Gretsch factory in Brooklyn from 1957 to 1970, written by Dan Duffy, who was involved with Quality Assurance most of that time (he was also a local jazz guitarist). It was indeed a chaotic place to work.
The other Mike
