Tribute to George Harrison's Rocky Guitar

1 day ago
2 min read

George Harrison's "Rocky" is one of the most iconic guitars in rock history. In 1965, the Beatles' roadie Mal Evans was sent to a London music store to buy Stratocasters for both John and George and returned with two 1961 models. Bored one night in 1967 during the Sgt. Pepper’s era, Harrison took some day-glow paint and re-painted the body and pickguard. He later added an homage to his early rock & roll inspirations George Vincent (Be-bop-a-lula) and Carl Perkins (Go Cat Go) and used his wife's nail polish to paint a caricature of Eric Clapton sporting a Hendrix-inspired Afro perm on the headstock .

Harrison used Rocky to record some of the most famous guitar tracks of the late '60s, including Ticket to Ride, Nowhere Man, Taxman, Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, All You Need is Love, Happiness is a Warm Gun and Hey Jude. Being a huge Beatles fan, I set out to make a tribute to Rocky after I had built my tribute to John Lennon's Rickenbacker guitar.

Part of my motivation to build this came from mistakes I made when building my Ry Cooder Coodercaster tribute. During the course of installing the Supro lap steel pickup on the body I purchased for that project, I tried to route out part of the top and really messed up the finish. I wanted to recycle that ruined body and therefore used wood filler to cover the mistakes made and needed to somehow cover up that hot mess. I thought about the custom paint job on Rocky and thought it would be a great way to salvage the body. Once inspired to make this from parts I already had on hand, I looked at what neck I had laying around (a Fender Squier neck from another project) and what pickups I had on hand. I had replaced the pickups on a Squier Mustang with some beefier hot rail pickups, so had the original two single coils available. When thinking about what to put in as the bridge pickup, I had a 10k Ohm P90 sitting around from an Epiphone LP Special where I had replaced the pickups with P180s. While not true to George's original, I figured that if he had survived his cancer, he might have experimented with getting a bit more oomph than you would usually get from a Strat bridge pickup.

Here's the finished project which plays and sounds great. As usual, each build I do becomes my favorite guitar -- at least until I build the next one!