John Lennon Rickenbacker 325 Tribute

John on the second Ed Sullivan appearance

In 1964, the Beatles burst onto the world stage when they appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show. John was playing a black Rickenbacker guitar that had been his mainstay since he bought it in 1960 from a music store in Hamburg.

It was a 1958 Rickenbacker Capri model 325. When purchased, it had a natural finish, huge "stove knobs" on it and a vibrato that didn't work very well and made the guitar go rapidly out of tune. For incarnation 2 of the guitar, John replaced the stove knobs with four radio knobs, replaced the vibrato with a better one made by Bigsby and replaced the bridge at the same time. Once Brian Epstein started managing the band and got them all wearing stylish suits, he encouraged John to paint the guitar black to go with George's dark Gretsch guitar and Ringo's black pearl drum set. John also changed the knobs again to match those Paul had on his Hofner bass. It was this 3rd incarnation that John played on their first Ed Sullivan appearance. After that appearance, Rickenbacker gave John a new model 325 that was painted black from the factory and had a newly designed bridge that offered a lot more adjustability. John played that guitar on the second Ed Sullivan Show appearance and continued playing until he got his Epiphone Casino.

I was looking to create a replica of John's guitar. I bought a cheap Chinese knock off of a Rickenbacker 325. It had the black paint, Bigsby style vibrato, the improved Rickenbacker bridge and a white pickguard. It came with pickups that looked like the original "toaster" pickups, but were humbucking. I replaced these with single coil pickups which the original had which were much brighter in tone. It also had an unlicensed Lennon autograph on the upper pickguard which I removed..

One thing that no one has ever nailed down is whether Lennon disconnected the middle pickup on the guitar. One theory is he did because he didn’t like hearing the amplified clicks when he would strike it with his aggressive rhythm guitar picking. Another theory is he did it because Rickenbacker had a really weird pickup switching system for their three pickup guitars. Rickenbacker uses a 3-way switch like the Gibson Les Paul and Fender Telecaster, but those guitars only had two pickups. They allowed you to switch between the neck pickup, the bridge pickup or both pickups at once in the middle position. Rickenbacker adapted that to a three pickup guitar by permanently wiring the neck and middle pickups together so the switch allowed neck + middle pickups in one position, bridge pickup only in another and the middle position would be all three pickups. Wiring the pickups together in parallel makes their overall output go down when they are combined, so this unique Rickenbacker schema results in some pretty weak output for two of the three positions. It's entirely likely that John disconnected the middle pickup for either or both of these reasons.

In order to give the option of the original 1958 model 325 wiring plus provide for the option of a disconnected middle pickup, I added a push-pull volume pot for the neck/middle. When down, it disconnects the middle pickup and when pulled up, restores it. This gives 5 unique pickup combinations (bridge only is the same no matter the position of the push-pull).

Tom's Rickenbacker 325