While browsing the Internet back in 2008 for information on Cripe guitars, I found a post from Adam Palow on a Steve Kimock Discussion Forum. I don’t have the beginning of the thread, but it was from someone admiring Kimock’s Cripe guitars. This is the post that prompted me to contact him:
Palow: As the former owner of both of Kimock’s Cripe guitars, I couldn’t agree more. I knew Steve Cripe personally and felt it was my duty to get these two guitars into the hands of a musician worthy of them. Mr. Cripe would’ve been very pleased with the way this all turned out. Many thanks to the two dedicated people who helped make this happen!
I asked Palow if he owned any other Cripe guitars and asked him if he would be willing to talk to me about a Cripe Tribute website I was developing.
Palow: I do own one other Cripe guitar and would be glad to help with a Cripe specific website. I’ve played and recorded with seven or eight of his guitars, so I know a few of them pretty well including the Eagle.”
Here are excerpts from one of our first conversations from November 11, 2008.
Armato: Tell me about your musical interests growing up.
Palow: I spent most of my youth in the back seat of a ’77 Cutlass Supreme listening to 8 tracks of the Beach Boys and old Motown stuff my parents would play. I didn’t really take an interest in picking any music until my teens. From there it went from punk to surf until I found the Grateful Dead and pretty much stuck with Grateful Dead and classic rock from there on out. I became a musician at some point in the late teens and played in those same themes.
Armato: How did you first hear about Steve Cripe?
Palow: My friend sent me an article from Guitar Shop magazine. The article talked about this guy that built two guitars for Jerry Garcia. This was I believe in November 1995. Being the naive twenty something that I was, I picked up the phone and dialed the guy’s number and ended up having a 2 ½ to 3-hour phone conversation with him.
I was in the process of building a Warmouth Double Cutaway Les Paul Stratocaster Hybrid with three humbuckers and I was looking for someone to fabricate a brass pickup mounting ring for them for me. So that was the first thing that I asked Steve about because I knew that he was making those brass humbucker pickup rings for his own guitars. He said that it would be no problem, I’d have to send him the dimensions. I think that when it came down to it, I ended up going to Stewart McDonald and buying three individual pickup mounting rings that were flat and putting them so that they butted up against each other. It was just a more cost-effective solution for everybody.
I knew the story about him watching the “Dead video” and he told me about that and how he studied the contours and pretty much wore out his video tape. I asked him about how much Grateful Dead music he had because I was a real big taper at the time. As soon as I found out he didn’t have much, I set him up with tapes. I remember he told me he was working on yachts and how that had been his primary gig before building guitars.
Armato: Did he say anything about the transition from yachts to guitars?
Palow: I don’t think there was a transition. I think to him it was all just wood.
Armato: I’ve read articles where it seems like he messed around trying to build guitars for fun, at first because he wanted to learn how to play. Then when he realized he wasn’t that good at playing, he just wanted to build a good guitar, and he wanted some opinions about the quality of the guitars he was making. There was a guy in a metal band that he knew that tried a guitar he built and after listening to him he said, “Well you got all this distortion going on, that’s not going to be a very good factor for me to evaluate my guitars.” Then, I guess he got the idea, why not make one for Jerry? I don’t know if he addressed any of that with you.
Palow: I knew about the metal guy, because I had talked to Cripe about coming down in June 1996, when I first talked to him. I had wanted to meet him, and he was cool about that. I asked him “Do you need someone to play the guitars and evaluate and give opinions?” That’s when he had talked about this metal guy and how he had played the Ebony guitar that Kimock now owns; and he had given him opinions on it. He seemed confident about what he was building at that point. My eventual hope was to intern with him and basically learn the craft from him; to basically become an employee of Cripe Industries. That was my goal, up until Steve passed.
Armato: That conversation set your apprenticeship in motion?
Palow: It had been discussed. He hadn’t said, “Yeah come on down and you can stay three weeks at the trailer with Theresa and me”.
It had gotten to the point where I had discussed with him the specs I wanted on my guitar, and I had expressed interest in wanting to learn what he did. He had a lot of interest in the amplifier side of things, which I was just really starting to understand at that point. I think we had a lot of mutual interests, and I think we were both interested in what the other was doing and how to learn from each other. I think I would’ve gotten more out of the exchange than he did, but that will never be known.
Armato: How many times did you talk to him?
Palow: I think I probably talked to Steve about ten times and that was all between the initial call in November 1995 and the last time I talked to him which was a few weeks before he passed. Of course, my next call to him was not long after he passed, and that’s when Theresa told me the news, and I showed up in Florida three weeks later and met Theresa for the first time.
I had gotten to know Theresa because whenever I would call Steve, Theresa would answer the phone, and then put the phone down on the table, and get Steve out in his workshop, which at that time would have been located on the property behind the house. I would always laugh because I would talk to Theresa for a few minutes, and I’d listen to Andy Griffith for about 7 minutes. And it never failed, it was almost always Andy Griffith! So, I kind of had a working relationship with Theresa before I ever met her in person.
Armato: Had you talked to Steve about building a guitar for you?
Palow: I had talked the specs through with him. I was going to order just a copy of the Lightning Bolt, very true to Jerry’s first guitar that he had received from Steve. I didn’t want fancy inlays, just the dots on the Stewart McDonald neck. The only change I was going to have from stock was on the cover plate. Instead of red and blue on the “steal your face” Lightning Bolt I was going to have it be lavender and yellow. That was just for personal reasons at the time. I know Steve had started on it. I hadn’t sent him the thousand-dollar deposit yet, but I know that he had started on it from talking to him. The best guess I have, was that it was in the shack when it blew up, in the workshop.
Armato: How much was he going to charge for the guitar?
Palow: I think the final price was going to be $3,800. At the time he was requiring a thousand dollar down payment to get started.
Armato: Had he mentioned Pat O’Donnell Resurrection Guitars, at all?
Palow: If he had, it was just in passing. Most of my conversations with Steve, I would just call him and ask him what he was working on at the time. He would tell me in-depth whatever project he was working on. At the time, most of it was way over my head. I was just very interested because, to my Deadhead mind, at the time, if Jerry loved those guitars, there must have been something very special about them. Every time I saw Jerry play those guitars; I recognized the tone. There was that certain, almost semi-acoustic quality that you hear on those recordings, it just had a certain bite and sustain to it.
Armato: So, one day you called up and Theresa answered the phone, and you asked for Steve and what did she say?
Palow: Her exact words were: “Oh no, you haven’t heard?” At that point I knew something had happened, but I couldn’t have fathomed in my wildest dreams that Steve had blown up. She was distraught. Like most people dealing with grief, she had told the story a hundred times by that point. It was just basically that he had been building fireworks, which is something he had discussed with me as one of his hobbies in the past, and that the work shed blew up.
We talked a little while about it and I had told her I was coming down there in three weeks and that I’d really like to come down and see the spot and just pay my respects. She was totally open to that.
We met her and I didn’t really expect to buy any guitars or get anything out of it other than just to pay respects to someone who I considered a friend, he was very generous with the way he shared information. It was just something I really respected and appreciated and wanted to pay my respects to that person, that I never got to meet in person.
Armato: So, three weeks later you showed up and were able to meet her, and spend a little time with her, see the workshop and the property?
Palow: My friend and I went to meet Theresa. She was still very, very distraught at that point. She was really working through the grief process and was telling us about who Steve was and showing us everything in the house that he built, which was at least half the furniture in the house; it had been hand crafted by him. Every single piece she showed us, the craftsmanship was… I don’t even know how to describe it. The guitars themselves describe what he was capable of, but to see his craftsmanship in other forms, it was spectacular. We saw the workshop, there were all sorts of slats for the necks that were already cut at the proper angle, that were all ready to be glued and clamped. There were body pieces. I traced the template for the Tribute at that time.
I know Pat O’Donnell had come by and picked up a lot of the wood at that point. There were a lot of pieces of completely un-worked lumber, like any craftsman would have laying around.
Armato: How many times did you visit Theresa?
Palow: I think all in all probably about six times down to her place then she came out here to Orlando one time to go to the studio with us. That was in 1997. That’s when she brought the six guitars out, which were the Tribute, the Eagle…
Armato: The Teak?
Palow: Well, the Teak didn’t have any electronics in it. I had already purchased it in 1996 at that first meeting with her. I ended up giving her all the cash in my pocket and that was my down payment on the body for the Teak guitar, which was probably only $200. That was how it started.
During our conversation that first time I visited, she got emotional. She was showing us guitars and if I ever find the pictures I will send them to you. There are pictures of me with the Eagle, there are pictures of me with Steve’s (Kimock) Ebony guitar, there are pictures of me with Steve’s Teak guitar, just the body, no hardware. There are pictures of the three of us standing there, it’s kind of funny. It was a big deal for us all.
It just seemed like it was meant to be. Theresa got this flash of insight and said, “You need to take number 6”, which was the unfinished Teak guitar. She knew I had built the Warmoth parts guitar so she figured I could finish number 6. The Teak guitar was taken apart when I bought it, but it had a finish on it and had at one time been assembled and then disassembled. It was a little beyond my capabilities, which is why I never did finish it, but at that point I couldn’t say no to a Cripe guitar. So, I made a down payment. I started sending her $200 a month, every month. I believe when I came back in 1997, she came down for the recording session and brought five or six guitars. It was the Ebony, the Tribute, the Eagle, and the Irwin shaped guitar that had the oval inlays. I’m pretty sure that was one of the six that she loaned me and there were a couple others too. I might have taken a picture of the whole stash. She left those guitars in my possession for a good two or three weeks. When we took the guitars back to Trilby, that was when I made a down payment on the Ebony guitar.
Armato: So, the first time you went there, and you made a down payment on the Teak, were you able to leave with the Teak guitar then?
Palow: I left the body of the guitar with her at that point because I still owed so much money on it. Every month I would send her $200 and she would fax me back a receipt. That was good enough for me. So, a year later when I showed up, I had paid off most of the balance on that guitar. It was in 1997 when I shipped that guitar back home to California. I made the down payment on the Ebony guitar which she let me have at that time and I shipped those two guitars home in 1997.
Armato: So, the first two you got were the Teak and the Ebony?
Palow: Correct. And I played the Ebony occasionally while it was in my possession. I mostly played the Warmoth guitar I had built for myself. The neck on the Ebony was considerably thinner than what I normally would play. It just kind of stayed in the case and I knew that those two guitars at some point would either be finished or be passed on to someone else. I had always envisioned in my mind they would go to Kimock, because I knew that it would further Steve Cripe’s legacy.
Armato: That is awesome! Did you do any work on the Teak guitar when you got it?
Palow: I didn’t touch it. All I did was buy a trio of DiMarzio Super Distortion 2 pickups from Theresa that Cripe had on hand. When The Other One’s tour was getting ready to happen in 1998, Ed contacted me to purchase the guitar to give to Kimock. It was just the stripped body, and I gave them the 3 pickups. I don’t know if they used them or not. I think Steve went with the Z 90’s at that point.
Armato: Actually, he used the humbuckers for a period. I’ve seen pictures of him the first night he got it at Studio X, and its got the three humbucker pickups in it.
Palow: Gotcha. Well, those came out of my closet.
Armato: What about the Koa guitar? When did you get possession of that one?
Palow: That was after I had already acquired the Tribute. A relative contacted me and told me that he wanted a Cripe guitar. I thought the only one left at that point, that was a Strat shape, was the Eagle. But when I called Theresa and talked to her about it, number 9 just kind of turned up out of the woodwork. I don’t know where it came from, I don’t really know much about it. The body was completely assembled, the neck was on, everything was drilled except the holes for the volume, tone and switches. So, basically, I bought that body from Theresa and when I got it home, I applied a very light tung oil finish to the body because I didn’t know how to do any other finishes. Whether or not it came out as Steve intended, Steve probably would have had a beautiful polish lacquer finish on it, so I apologize to him for that.
Theresa referred to it as #9, I had him check and he did not see a brass number under the truss rod cover. The guitar was unfinished with no hardware at all when I got it, so I’m not sure that Steve ever had it wired up to get an idea of the tone.
Armato: Didn’t you say you thought you saw another bolt-on guitar?
Palow: There was a bolt-on that was never assembled as far as I could tell. It had a double cutaway Les Paul style body. It had a very fat like rounded 59 Les Paul style bolt-on neck with kind of a cross between a Gibson head stock and an Irwin Wolf Head stock. It was more Irwin Wolf with that big bump in the middle where the moon would be on his logo. That was just tucked on the side of the nightstand back in their bedroom just lying there in two pieces. It was something that Steve had started and never finished.
Armato: You saw the bass?
Palow: I saw the bass. It was damaged at the time. I believe that the lower wing was completely broken off.
Armato: I spoke to Pat O’Donnell. When he got it, he didn’t know if it was damaged or whether it just had never been put on. He said that he glued on the lower bout of the bass. Do you recall whether it had the pickup holes, or the pickup inlays drilled out?
Palow: It’s hard to say. I may have a photo of it. I know that my friend was taken by it when she saw it. The grain on it and everything was so exotic and the fact that it was a one off we both were just wowed by it. We also didn’t know anybody at the time that would be able to do a quality repair on it. I think Theresa had already made plans to send it to Resurrection (Guitars) at that point.
Armato: Did you ever talk to Cripe about his use of volutes?
Palow: Not so much, he mentioned that each one was individual and unique, but I was coming at him from an amp and amateurish guitar builder perspective, so a lot of those more technical questions didn’t even occur to me at the time because my understanding of vibrations of the wood was minimal at that point.
***
Palow: And that last conversation I had with Steve Cripe; it was almost prophetic in a way. He was talking about the Tribute guitar, specifically, and how he was building it for Jerry, and Jerry had passed away and he really poured himself into it to make it a tribute to Garcia. Which it obviously is. But the comment he made was, he didn’t know what he was going to do with it at this point because the last thing he wanted was for it to hang on some collector’s wall and never get played. To me, when he passed away, shortly after that conversation, I kind of just considered it a personal mission to get it into the hands of players because that’s what Steve would’ve wanted.