Zebrawood core with Cocobolo top and back, laminated Cocobolo and maple neck with Brazilian rosewood center stripe, 22 fret ebony fretboard, laminated headstock, black Schaller bridge, Grotoh tuners. Wired same as #4. Warm sound. The only reason I did not send this guitar (instead of Lightning Bolt) to Jerry was because the fretboard was 22 frets. I assumed that he would want 24 frets, so I built the “Bolt” using this guitar as the basic design.
— Original description by Steve Cripe and transcribed by Hal Hammer, Jr.
Excerpts from Conversation with Lightning Bolt Prototype 2 Owner
May 4, 2009
Armato: Tell me how it all started.
Paul: I got it right here; the December 1995 Guitar Player Magazine that had a mixture of different interviews with Jerry in it. I guess he was on the advisory board, so he had several interviews over 20 years. At the very end of the article, they had given Steve Cripe’s address. So, I wrote him a letter and said, “Hey, I’m interested, give me a buzz and we can talk about it.” He called me back and told me what he could do. He was pretty loose with the whole thing … “You can have whatever you want… you can do this… you can do that… I don’t know… you tell me”, and I said, “Well, how much?” and he said “Well… I don’t know…” So, he was really mellow about the whole thing. But he did say it would probably take 4-6 months.
I’m the kind of guy who decides if I’m going to get something; I want it now. So, we talked, and I said let me think about it and I’ll get back to you. I thought about it, and called him back and said, “Listen, do you have anything already made?” and he said, “Well yeah, I have this prototype to the Lightning Bolt. But it’s only 22-frets.” I said, “I don’t care, I can’t play 12 of them, let alone 24. I’m interested in 22, that’s OK!”
So, he sent me a couple pictures and I’ve got the original pictures. I guess this was the guitar he brought to some of his first shows. It had some different pickups in it. It had a weird phase shift switch that changed the phase on the pickups. It was set up similar to Brian May’s from Queen that had a lot of phase shift switches on his guitar.
So, I said, “I like the guitar, but I want you to change all the pickups to DiMarzio Super 2’s and put in three coil tap switches and give me a push-pull knob on one of the tone controls so I can have the neck and the bridge pick-up on at the same time. He said, “OK. I can do that. It will probably be a couple hundred bucks more.” I said “That’s fine. OK, let’s do it.”
I’ve got a letter here I wrote up, like a purchase and sales agreement that includes this, that, and the other thing. If I don’t like it, I can send it back to you for 10%, shipping, or restocking, or whatever you like.
He was agreeable to that. It showed up on, let’s see, what do I have for a date… the magazine must have come early …
Armato: Usually, magazine street dates are a few months ahead of time.
Paul: Oh, OK. I have a receipt here: December 16, 1995.
Armato: Cool, nice Christmas present. What was your first reaction when you opened it up?
Paul: It was the sweetest thing I had ever seen. It has nine laminates in the neck and five laminates in the body. It is smooth, nice to the touch, it’s great to polish. You can feel it, you know? It hangs fantastically, it’s comfortable, and it was quite amazing … other than sitting down. You can’t sit down and play it because you’ll get a bruise right in front of your ribcage from that dog-ear. But, standing up it is very, very comfortable, even for 11 pounds. I put it on my scale. I always wanted to weigh it, and I never got around to it, until you asked the question … but it’s so well balanced, it’s extremely comfortable.
Armato: The pictures he sent you, before you bought it, is that the picture I have on my website? Go to cripeguitars.com and go to Other Cripes, then Honoring Irwin.
Paul: OH, SON OF A BITCH! It is!
Armato: Cool. Is that the picture he sent you?
Paul: Yeah. You know, that is!
Armato: I got these pictures from his files. I went down to Florida, and went to Resurrection Guitars, who picked up all the remains of his inventory and his files. It’s a beautiful guitar, and I’ve always admired it. I prefer 22-frets. It’s cool that you were able to get it in the very beginning there. So, after you got the guitar, did you talk to him about it?
Paul: I did. We talked a little bit. After I got it, I told Cripe how much I liked it, and said “It’s not coming back.”
I’m looking through some of my other stuff here and he sent me a Christmas card. It’s the picture of the Lightning Bolt. It’s the same picture that is in Guitar Player magazine, from that article. He wrote, “Have a Jerry Christmas” Ha-ha. The picture looked familiar, and it’s the same one from Guitar Player magazine taken by Randy Anglin from Ithaca, New York.
It’s a funny coincidence, my drummer’s mother, had lived in Florida. She sent him anything that had to do with The Dead. She sends him this article from the St. Petersburg Times, January 26, 1996. She cut it out, gave it to him; he gave it to me. He said, “My mother sent me this, this guy is in the paper down there.” Little did she know that I had one of his guitars. I’ve got another article here she had sent up about the explosion. I can’t recall, but I think his wife… what’s his [common law] wife’s name?
Armato: Theresa.
Paul: Theresa. That’s it. She called me to tell me about it. When was it?
Armato: He died on May 21st.
Paul: It was only 5 months later.
Armato: It still gives me the willies to think about it.
Paul: He told me he was working on some new brass cannons. I guess he made his own brass cannons.
Armato: You know, his sister has one in her living room, and the thing works.
Paul: I don’t doubt it.
Yep. That was quite amazing. It was all a very small type of community. Just as it was starting to take off, all this happened. Not long after that, I saw that these guys [Resurrection Guitars] had taken over, and I see pictures and I feel a fair amount are from Resurrection. How many actual Cripe guitars are there out there?
Armato: Well. I’m guessing, from the research I’ve done, 25-30. I’ve found some guitars that I thought were Cripe’s. I go through the verification process with Resurrection Guitars, and I’d tell them, “I came across this one, it’s got a Wizard on the battery cover.” He [Pat O’Donnell] says, “Yeah, I made that.” So, cross that one off, that wasn’t a Cripe. Essentially, everything I have done has been from his files, and I’m trying to take a real careful approach to documenting the work he did.
Paul: If you take some polish and a rag, and you rub your hands around this thing, you FEEL the curves.
Armato: It’s silky smooth, isn’t it?
Paul: It’s unbelievable. The way your arm comes across to the bridge, and the way it hangs. It’s just awesome.
Armato: What do you think of the Volute?
Paul: I love the volute. It’s like a backstop. You can slide your hand up there, it’s got room. If you were to play, say an E chord and you’re not using your first finger. Your hand sits up there, without feeling like you’ve gone past the neck. If you take a Strat and try that, you know your fingers go out over the strings. The volute is very comfortable.
Armato: It’s a remarkable frame of reference, isn’t it?
Paul: Yeah.
Armato: It probably balances things out, too.
Paul: I don’t know how much it weighs, if that comes into play or not. You wouldn’t know until you cut it off. It’s very comfortable. It’s more of a benefit than a detraction. It curves around too, if you look at the volute, the way it’s sanded down, your thumb and your first finger fit right in there. It is an amazing piece of woodwork to boot. Regardless of how the guitar sounds, it is a beautiful piece of wood.
Armato: How does it sound?
Paul: It sounds just like freakin’ Jerry. It does. It’s one-dimensional more or less. But I have several guitars, I’ve been playing this guitar for 15 years. It’s been my main guitar for 15 years. But I bounce around. I play my Telecaster occasionally. I play a Wolf replica and people come to me and say, you’re sounding really good, that guitar has its own unique sound, but I still like … [the Cripe] and I keep going back to it. I can appreciate that, but I need a little change of scenery from time to time. You know?
Armato: Sure. Does it have a 5-way switch?
Paul: It does have a 5-way switch. Yeah.
Armato: So how are your electronics working?
Paul: Like a Strat. It’s got the volume, and the 2 tones, then I’ve got the push-pull, where you could have …
Armato: Neck and bridge, you said.
Paul: Or you put it in the 2 of the 3 position, and you could have all 3 pickups on. I’ve never used that; it sounds kind of weird. But it’s either the middle pickup, you know the individual pickups or having the front and back like a Les Paul, where you could have those both on.
Armato: And you’ve got coil splitters in each of the humbuckers?
Paul: I do. Which, I don’t know… I’ve never used the single coil portion of a humbucker. The Wolf replica has its own thing in it, and it’s not a single coil. I’ve never used it. But they are there.
Armato: I’m looking at a picture, it looks like at one time you had a Roland on it? Or you still do?
Paul: Yeah, I took that off. That was when I had the pictures on the Dozin site. I played around with that for a little while. The tracking just wasn’t accurate. A few things, you know.
Paul: There are 5 layers. My notes here I’ve got cocobolo, it’s got a zebra core. I’ve got Brazilian written down here. And I’ve got padauk and vermilion written down here too.
Armato: There is cocobolo on the top, then maybe vermilion, then padauk, then zebra wood, and then cocobolo again. Does that sound about right?
Paul: Yeah, it sounds about right. It’s hard to tell because the layers are all very dark so there is not a lot of definition between the two, unless you look really closely at them. I’m looking at your picture now. It’s a shame; the cocobolo has really darkened up. It’s not as red as your picture there.
Armato: It’s more burgundy?
Paul: Yeah. It darkened up quite a bit.
Armato: Yeah, it’s beautiful. Well, it would be cool at some point, I don’t know, if you want me to, I’d be happy to include more pictures of your guitar on the site. I’m sort of taking it in steps. I’m waiting to hear from people, and people are contacting me. I’ll do revisions every now and then, and if you want me to put more pictures of your guitar up there, or not, it’s totally up to you.
Paul: Yeah, you can, I don’t mind. Do you have the back? You have the front picture on your website, do you have the back picture, too?
Armato: I didn’t put anything on the website except the one you see, but I have the ones you posted on Dozin at some point.
Paul: No, I mean the original pictures. Because I have the picture you have, but Steve also sent me a picture of the back.
Paul: It shows the volute, it shows the curve of the neck, and the body curve. There’s a date on the back of these pictures with June 1992. According to Steve, this was the prototype to the Lightning Bolt. Now, I don’t know how many prototypes he had…
Armato: Well, he was messing around a lot, but if you look at my site, he sat down with a buddy of his, with guitars in hand, in late ’93, and he described each of them, and he said that the one you’ve got, he was going to send to Garcia. And the only reason he didn’t do it, was because it had 22 frets.
Paul: OK. Well at least he wasn’t lying to me!
Armato: Well, he’s at least consistent with his story! So, if that’s the case, what I’ll do, he was building several guitars for Garcia, and yours is one of the first ones.
Paul: Yep. So, when he told me that, of course he didn’t have any serial numbers or anything, on the inside cavity plate, which was wood too. I just thought it was awesome. You know, the electronics cavity was all wood with a brass plate on the inside, he put the copper tape on the inside. I said, well you know you don’t have the serial numbers, why don’t you scribe in what you told me? ‘Prototype of J. Garcia’s Lightning Bolt, June “92”, S. R. Cripe’. So, that’s on the inside. I can scan it. I’ll have to take it apart. I put black electrical tape over it. I can peel that off and scan it. I thought that was interesting.
Paul: I’ve used my truss rod to make an adjustment many times. The cover for the truss run is cocobolo, too, made of wood.
Armato: Dead Heads like us; we like all this trivia!
Paul: … It has buckle rash on the back. The waves he had on the top of the headstock, the real slim waves … they were gone after two months of owning the thing. You know, taking it off and hitting the ceiling, it broke. I glued it back on, it hit the ceiling again, and it fell off.
Armato: It’s a working man’s guitar.
Paul: Well, you know, lunch money.
You know what? I’ve been playing that a lot because the Cripe guitar plays beautifully, but I have a small hand, and the frets seem really wide apart, so some things are a real stretch for me. Whereas, the Wolf guitar, and I have a Travis Beam guitar too, was more comfortable for my hand. But that’s not the guitar’s problem, that is my problem.
The other thing I had him change was the bridge. I don’t know what that funny bridge was he had on there, but I had him put on a Schaller bridge, with the fine tuners. I think the same bridge he put on the Lightning Bolt.
Armato: What are you playing, through a Twin?
Paul: I’ve played through everything. I’ve had a Twin, I had a Groove Tubes Amp, I’ve got a Fender Concert, but I just bought a Deluxe Reverb, little 22 watt, and I think that’s the way I’m gonna go. It’s nice and light, man that thing fills up a freakin’ room! But it is loud as hell! I put it through a couple JBL’s, E120’s. It’s pretty good to stand alone. On its own. I don’t know. I’m always changing. I’m always looking for something.
I had some fret work done, I had the nut worked on or replaced but I give him that as a practice, or whatever, it’s not a big deal. Structurally the neck is fine.
Armato: He had a wooden business card. Did he send you one of those? Does that ring any bells?
Paul: You think I would have kept it. But it does ring a bell, and if I kept all this other stuff, I probably would have kept that.
It’s a shame, I threw out the crate probably a year or two ago. It was a wooden box. He didn’t have a guitar case … it was a thin plywood coffin, ha-ha, you know? Some green felt Styrofoam, he packed it all in beautifully. That’s what it came in.
The pickups on this guitar started out with 2 Schallers and a Bill Lawrence Hot Humbucker in the bridge position.
Update: January 2025
Paul: Several year ago, I had it refinished, [re-fretted with] stainless steel frets and had the effects loop put in.
