Just over a week ago we put up a post on Rex Bogue – a guitar maker who lived in the US. Michael Gnapp (who contacted us with the orginal information) left more in a long comment for us. Its a lovely slice of guitar making history.

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I’d like to share some of my experience of what it was like to work with Rex: I’d taken an annual post-Christmas two-month vacation from where I was employed making wooden toys, and spent that vacation in the shop building my very first original solidbody electric (coincidentally, this was the same year that Paul Reed Smith built his very first electric guitar, a copy of a Les Paul).

The guitar I built was made completely from Andaman Padauk (Vermilion), a wonderful tonewood that is now unavailable. It was carved in symmetrical scrolls three layers deep, and looked like it came from the 1500s, very classical in essence, yet a solidbody screamer. It had an unradiused fretboard like a classical guitar, and the neck was flattened on the back, very thin from fret to the back of the neck. It had a 1/2″ cold-rolled square steel trussrod epoxied into the neck, no need for any future adjustment.

I had phoned Rex early on in the creation of this guitar, and he’d informed me of the truss process. I had equipped it with Dimarzios, and took it to Rex for some wiring advice. I walked into his shop, opened the handmade green alligator case that I’d lined with high-density foam covered with gold crushed velvet, and Rex’s eyes popped. “What do you do for a living?” he asked. I told him I was a toymaker, and he said, “Quit that job. You’re working for me now.” And so I did, and so I really learned the intracacies of luthiery ala Rex Bogue.

My guitar had no inlay, not even fretmarkers, because inlay was something I didn’t consider myself qualified to do. But I learned inlay from Rex; his shell work was very detailed and immaculate. You can see it in the “tree of life” inlay on the two necks of John McLaughlin’s “Double Rainbow.” Rex was extreme in everything he took on. His luthiery was a radical departure from what had come before. He rethought all the phases of design and construction, and reinvented the electromagnetic method of converting string vibration to an electronic signal.

His extreme approach to making guitars resulted in the very finest electric guitars of the period, if not still. But, Rex was extreme in all he did. If he took an interest in anything, he took it all the way. He had in interest in rum; my first duty in the morning was to prepare a 5-gallon water cooler full of pina colada, and it would be empty at the end of every day. There were always clients and friends hanging out in the shop, which was a small house he’d inherited from his grandmother, I believe, and so 5 gallons of the potion was usually just enough. I did the woodworking, another young man, a master of electronics, did the pickups, preamps, and wiring.

The two of us didn’t partake of the rum concoctions, but Rex did as he hosted his clients and their friends. On any given day, there would be a fair amount of celebrity in the house; as we worked on a very heavy guitar for Frank Zappa (think sustain) his band would come in and hang out. Steve Vai was Zappa’s transposer at the time, and occaisionally part of the crowd.

Frank himself never came during the creative process, not until the guitar was finished and ready did he come to pick it up. I’d met him years earlier in Greenwich Village, and was impressed that Frank actually remembered me and acknowledged our acquaintance. We didn’t say much, it was Rex’s day that day.

I left the shop after a period of apprenticeship, in order to set up my own shop. That didn’t happen for another 20 years, but in 1986, Xylonix Fine Woodworks was born in New Hampshire, and by 1997 Xylonix Guitars was operative, and I was producing the prototypes that are pictured as my guitars. I’d been working musically and mechanically with John Mann (MannMadeUSA.com), Paul Reed Smith’s original metal machinist, and we planned to open a factory utilizing John’s CNC machines to make the manufacturing process competitive.

Then the economy began to fail, and dragged our plans along with it. I sold my shop and left New Hampshire for warmer climes, and became a fulltime musician. I’m now planning a new and better shop facility in northern California, and Xylonix Guitars may finally come to production.

That very first guitar I built is no longer in my possession. It was gifted to someone very special, who didn’t appreciate the value of it, and didn’t keep it. I would like to have it back, and that’s why sites like dbTwang are quite important.

I have only one photo of the guitar as being played by me at an outdoor concert long ago, but only the back of the headstock and neck, part of the back of the body are visible in the photo. I will make a sketch of it and post it here later. Thanks again, you guys are wonderful.

Michael Gnapp, Xylonix Guitars

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You can check out Michael’s Xylonix guitars here

keith

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