THE JINGLE-JANGLE MORNING

DISCOVERING THE 12-STRING GUITAR: PART ONE

Got there in the end: the Rickenbacker 360/12 V64... but it was a long time coming

I can say with relative accuracy when I first decided I needed a 12-string guitar: it was in 1976. I’d been playing guitar for around five years, and had owned an electric for three, albeit I’d got used to playing it acoustically: being a deep-bodied semi-acoustic, it didn’t sound too bad. My taste in music was also changing; having favoured current chart pop/rock when I started out, I quickly turned to more vintage sounds... the Beatles, naturally, had always been there, but as I began to discover other bands from the 1960s, I began to work out what it was I liked about the music of that era. It all boiled down to one simple ingredient: jangling guitar. I’m not sure I remembered The Byrds’ Mr. Tambourine Man from its original release, but it still turned up now and then on the radio, having acquired the status of a ‘golden oldie.’ I particularly liked the intro, without giving much thought as to what kind of guitar was being played. I was also drawn to the guitar sound on various singles by The Hollies, and of course I was very familiar with Beatle guitar tones such as those heard on A Hard Day’s Night and the single Ticket to Ride. I think it might have been a friend of mine, equally attuned to such vintage sounds, who told me the bands in question – the Beatles in particular – had been using 12-string guitars.

At some point during 1976, I found myself in one of Birmingham’s big music stores (there were several key retailers in the city at the time). This particular store was Woodroffe’s, which had relocated relatively recently from its original premises in John Bright Street to a spacious new establishment in Dale End... which looked exactly as it does in the photograph below. It was in this store, with its decidedly 70s signage, that I first learned the secret of those guitar sounds of the 1960s.

Woodroffe's in Dale End Birmingham in the 1970s: photo from Birminghammusicarchive.com

Until this point, I had no idea how one played a 12-string guitar: to a novice, it looked potentially twice as hard as playing a 6-string. It was only when I sat down to play one of Woodroffe’s cheap acoustic 12-strings that I discovered the secret of their chiming tone: strings arranged in pairs, with the first four an octave apart. One experimental strum was enough to convince me. This was a sound I knew very well... the acoustic guitar parts on Beatles recordings like Help! and I’m Only Sleeping were clearly played on a 12-string. The assistant in the shop duly confirmed that the Beatles used 12-strings a lot. He also used a piece of terminology that has since become muddied by confusion and mis-use. He referred to 12-string guitars as ‘jangle-boxes’. This, apparently, was the nickname by which all musos knew them.

Many years later, in his seminal work on the Beatles recording sessions, writer and Fabs authority Mark Lewisohn reproduced a studio note dating from the Revolver sessions, which referred to a ‘jangle box through Leslie.’ To me, this clearly indicated that the engineers had tried recording a 12-string guitar via the rotating Leslie speaker from a Hammond organ, a typical Beatle engineering trick much used during the mid-60s. However, in a later book, Beatles Gear, another Fabs expert, Andy Babiuk, deduced this to have been a reference to a ‘tack piano’ – essentially, a normal upright piano with tin tacks fixed onto the hammer pads to give a percussive sound. What he didn’t consider is where and how such an incongruous sound might have fit into the recording of Paperback Writer, the track in question. Now, tack piano was occasionally but not widely referred to as a ‘jangle box’ (most specifically in the case of Joe ‘Mr. Piano’ Henderson’s waxing, ‘jangle box rag’), but it wasn’t a term widely used in Britain. Here in the UK, in the mid 60s, a ‘jangle box’ was a 12-string guitar: a term still understood and in use during the mid-70s.

On the basis of my brief acquaintance with the 12-string guitar, I decided that this was the sound I’d been looking for, and the cheap far eastern model I’d tried in Woodroffe’s duly turned up as a present that Christmas. Over the following years, I played it almost to the exclusion of my other guitars (I now owned three – the 12-string plus the Shaftesbury semi-acoustic [covered in an earlier blog post] and a Peerless nylon-string guitar which had started the ball rolling at Christmas 1970).

Of course I realised that it wasn’t an acoustic 12-string that had created the sounds I’d heard on Mr. Tambourine Man, A Hard Day’s Night and others, but it gave a pretty good approximation. Besides, I’d already decided that the Beatles were cheating. I’d watched A Hard Day’s Night a couple of times by now, and hadn’t seen a 12-string guitar anywhere amongst the instruments being weilded by the fabs. You could spot a 12-string guitar a mile off from its elongated headstock, and there was nothing like that to be seen in A Hard Day’s Night. Clearly, something else had been used in the studio. Or so I thought. I’d only seen the film on television, where the small screen and relatively low resolution weren’t enough to reveal fine details. Roger McGuinn has often told the story of how he cottoned on to George Harrison’s use of the Rickenbacker 12-string when he saw A Hard Day’s Night at a movie theatre, but he had the advantage of a big screen to guide him. Me, I hardly twigged that George was even using a Rickenbacker.

In the mid-70s electric 12-strings had fallen out of favour, and it was rare to see them in any music shop. I’d spotted a Baldwin example very early on, and later saw an identical model (if not the same one) being played by a member of my cousin’s band ‘Wild Honey’ during 1975, but these had been my only sightings to date. I hadn’t even seen them on television, and few if any recording artists of the era seemed to be interested in what was by then considered an outmoded sound. Acoustic 12s, on the other hand, were almost de rigeur for the singer-songwriters who began to flourish around this time.

David Byrne plays a mid-60s Gibson ES 335-12 in the early days of Talking Heads

One of the first bands to rediscover the electric 12-string was Talking Heads: frontman David Byrne was using a Gibson 335-12 by the time the group cut its first album, Talking Heads 77, and its zingy tone is a distinctive part of the album’s sonic texture. Their use predates even that of Tom Petty, who is often credited for reviving interest in electric 12s with his 1979 album Damn the Torpedoes (featuring a Rickenbacker on the sleeve). It took a year or two for me to cotton onto any of this, by which time a British band had begun its own investigation of similar jangling territory. The band in question were XTC, and their double album English Settlement, released in early 1982, made extensive use of a Rickenbacker electric 12-string. I saw them on TV, and lead guitarist Dave Gregory was using what I would later idenfify as a Rickenbacker 360/12. This was what I needed.

The band’s frontman and songwriter Andy Partridge claimed (perhaps mischievously) in a contemporary radio interview, that the band had attemped to buy George Harrison’s 12-string Rickenbacker. Joking or not, they were very hard to obtain at the time, as I was to discover...