PERFECTLY FRANK
THE PROTOTYPE FOR THE “SUPER STRAT,” EDDIE VAN HALEN’S FRANKENSTEIN WAS INDEED A MONSTER OF A GUITAR
THE LEGEND OF EDDIE VAN HALEN’S FRANKENSTEIN guitar is almost biblical: “In the beginning, Eddie Van Halen went to Charvel and bought a Boogie Bodies neck and body. He installed thereupon a PAF humbucker and Stratocaster tremolo, then cut by hand a pickguard from blackest vinyl and painted the body with black and white stripes, representing the forces of darkness and light. He plugged the magnificent creation into his Marshall plexi amp, and proclaimed ‘Let there be rock!’ And it was good.”
However — to paraphrase “Runnin’ with the Devil” — the simple things aren’t so simple. As Brad Tolinski and I were working on our upcoming book, Eruption: Conversations with Eddie Van Halen (Hachette Books), we dug deep into research and fact-checking to answer and verify numerous questions, such as when Ed started tapping, what exact date did Ted Templeman discover the band and, particularly, when exactly did Ed build the Frankenstein guitar. I personally searched for every available early photo I could find to stitch together a plausible timeline, dug through old newspapers and fanzines and sought credible witnesses. Along the way, I visited numerous online forums and sifted through various theories, assumptions, facts, myths and arguments to extract the facts and most logical explanations.
One of the most puzzling but fascinating photos I found was a lo-res black-and-white image that I, amongst many other Van Halen guitar fanatics, first viewed when it appeared on a handful of forums in 2014. The photo shows Ed playing a guitar with an unfinished Strat-style body, rosewood neck, “zebra” bobbin humbucking pickup and two control knobs. Inserted in the image is “A younger Eddie shreddin’ at the Whiskey (sic) A Go-Go 1977” and “courtesy of inertia graphics ©2001.” The stage lights in the background are consistent with those of the Whisky at the time, and, since Van Halen’s very first gig at the Whisky took place on December 3, 1976, the 1977 date seems accurate, albeit frustratingly vague.
The most convincing detail that suggested that the guitar body in the photo was Ed’s Frankenstein was the black pickguard. Directly below the volume knob is a notch that’s identical in shape and placement to the notch seen in numerous photos of the Frankenstein when it had the black-and-white striped finish. Although the photo is not particularly sharp, close examination of the body’s wood grain also reveals features consistent with those of a factory second, which is an attribute that
