When Pat O’Donnell retrieved files from Cripe’s workshop, they were in disarray and most of the pictures that were to supplement Cripe’s Notes were loosely scattered throughout the files. I obtained this fax of Cripe’s Notes from Tim O’Donnell in April 2004. I visited Pat in his workshop in June 2008 and scanned numerous photos, took pictures of his guitar body and neck templates, the opium bed wood, and scanned all the other materials he had gotten from Steve’s files.
These descriptions were prepared by Stephen Cripe and transcribed by Hal Hammer. They are undated but I estimate they were written in October 1993. The notes capture of snapshot, a moment in time amidst constant change in Cripe’s life. After all, this was right after Jerry started playing Lightning Bolt.
I met with Hal Hammer in May 2009 and showed him the 2 pages of Cripe Notes.
Armato: Do these look familiar?
Hammer: I did that. That’s my work. That’s on a word processor; see how it’s centered – automatic centering. And I circled #4 and put a star next to it.
Now, do you understand why I wrote all this stuff? I wrote this with him sitting with me. We wrote this for the book, this was for the Blue Book. They rejected it. They didn’t want this stuff; they wouldn’t put all this stuff in the book.
Armato: Too much detail for them.
Hammer: They didn’t want this level of detail. They said it’s too much stuff for an unknown guitar maker.
Every one of these guitars that’s here I had in my hands, because I wrote the description. The notes that said, “I intended this, or I intended that,” is what he was telling me. But all this description, I wrote it from holding the guitars in my hands, and looking at them with him, and we talked about it. Every one of those guitars that’s on there, unless it says different, I had in my possession. And I have played every guitar that I know that he had ever made that he brought to me. I played everyone.
***
Hammer later ended up getting a listing for Steve Cripe’s guitars in the Fifth Edition of The Blue Book of Guitars in 1998. It featured photos of the first Bolt prototype and Tribute AKA Saturn.