This is the 2006 email I sent to the singer of the aforemention Bruce Springsteen tribute band. I did locate and email my guitar teacher who thought what I'd done to the axe was cool and was happy to hear I was still playing.

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>>6th grade- Bought wood finish highly customized
>>1966 Fender Jazzmaster guitar

>Wow, that's pretty cool. Where did you get it from? Seems like a pretty
>serious guitar for a 6th grader. You'd think you'd just go to Speno's and
>buy one off the rack.

Funny you should ask, Dan. Funny you should ask.... This Fender Jazzmaster is a bit of Auburn History. (I am going to expound because I plan to forward this message to my guitar teacher. I mean, I'm going to really go on and on because I think he would be interested. )

One day at a lesson, Bob Piorun pulled out this odd shaped thing that looked like a Fender but was all skewed, not like a Strat. He said it was a Jazzmaster & I was ready for an electric guitar, and I convinced my mom to buy it from Bob for $175.

I was thrilled to have any electric guitar at all. Later on, I saw the same shape guitar in some Rolling Stones video where they use it to break through a wall.

This was a wood colored guitar, but if you looked really close there were hints of orange. Also, up on the head, it did not say "Fender Jazzmaster" but instead "HOTZ" in big block letters. Wes Procino, who your dad would have remembered, informed me that Hotz was a local musician guy named Hotz Converse. It also had a big gold colored Gibson PAF humbucker in the neck position. This was the thing to do with Fenders back in the day.

Somewhere before senior year, I didn't like that it said "HOTZ" and so I used a xerox machine, the script Fender logo off a pack of guitar strings, and rub-on letters to make a proper "Fender Jazzmaster" logo on a transparency which I epoxied onto the head some time in high school. I think I did it at CCCC for $.15 a copy.

I also rewired the whole thing for some reason, which led to the discovery that the insides of it were (and are) painted orange. So someone, I presume Mr. Converse, decided that wood grain looked better than orange paint, sanded it all down, and clear coated it.

I also put jumbo frets into the neck and did a passable job of dressing them with a file. This is the probably the state of the guitar in our senior year in those videos you just uncovered.

At MIT, when I should have been studying vector calculus, I found it much more fun to practice playing. To the limited extent that I ever did any "woodshedding" this was it. Sophomore year (1988-89), I listened to a lot of Eric Clapton and did a lot of playing.

Around that time I had also learned how to use all the tools in a machine shop at the labs and I noticed the Jazzmaster's vibrato wasn't a very good design, and also that the axe would just not stay in tune.... (this is where Bob Piorun forwards this email to Hotz Converse, and Hotz Converse cringes).

It was the late 80s, with hair metal bands and extreme use of the Floyd Rose tremolo. After many drooling trips to Wurlitzer's music store, I built a from scratch double locking fine tuning tremolo bar system for the Jazzmaster. It went through one prototype iteration. A lot of wood had to get removed and I remember one morning at 2 or 3 AM, the guitar clamped to a milling machine table, thinking "once that endmill cuts into the wood, there's no turning back."

Somewhere in all this I also discovered the joys of obscene levels of gain and distortion. I had to douse all the windings of the bridge pickup with super glue so it wouldn't squeal and howl like a microphone feeding back. I might as well have locked the pickup selector switch for the bridge pickup only because the PAF would also scream and I wasn't about to take that apart. It wasn't that useful for fake harmonic squeals anyway.

A 1988 side story- Now that I had a floating tremolo system, I realized why Eddie Van Halen never bought into that craze- Any change in one string's tension (slipped, broken, bent note) screwed up the tuning of the other five. I invented a simple device to solve this problem, and built it into the Jazzmaster. I tried to get the MIT technology licensing office to patent it, but they didn't see the dollar signs. Morons. Today you can buy a device patented by someone else that does the same thing.

Another side story- This guitar got its picture in the Boston Globe, by accident. They did a story on the highly popular AI Mobile Robot lab. I had been working on the guitar and left it propped up against the wall. It was thus in the background of some color photo.

Somewhere before graduation, I bought a Charvel Spectrum, and pretty much stopped playing the thick-necked Jazzmaster. In 1992 a bandmate offered me several hundred dollars for the '66 Jazzmaster because it looked like Kurt Cobain's guitar. Of course I refused.

These days I hang on to the Fender Jazzmaster simply because I have had it for so long. Sentimental. If I had the time, I would install a pair of EMG active humbucking pickups, a real Floyd Rose low profile tremolo, and a thinner neck, possibly a neck thru body design (that would replace a lot of the empty space that used to be wood before I put in the tremolo). At this point, it would no longer be a 1966 Fender Jazzmaster except for the very cool appearance of the body style.

Like I said, the Jackson Soloist is my main axe.

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