16.) Wayne Charvel History
Hello, my name is Wayne Charvel, the following is a brief history of my work in the guitar industry. I started playing guitar at age five, played for about two years, then quit until about the age of fifteen.
My first paint job was laquer and I rubbed it out to a high gloss. It looked pretty good, and when my friends saw it, they wanted me to paint their guitars as well. I learned how to repair them by taking them apart for painting, and was soon doing repairs as well as refinishing. I then decided to go into guitar repair full time.
I bought my first new Fender strat and amplifier in 1959, I wish I still had that guitar. I was working in a sign shop at the time as a spray-painter, and in about 1960 I decided to take my strat apart and paint it Candy Apple Blue. It was then that I became interested in repairing and refinishing guitars.
At the time, Fender Guitars needed someone to do their out-of-warranty refinish work and asked me if I would be interested. I said yes, and worked for them for about three years. I also recovered amplifiers and electric pianos as well in tolex. I repaired guitars in my garage for about a year. My first customer was Jeff Ross, a great tele player. He later became lead guitar player for the Bellamy Brothers.
In those days Fender did not do any custom work except for finishes. Somehow the Who found out I was doing custom work and Alan Rogan, their main roadie and instrument buyer commissioned me to build a clear plastic bass for John Entwistle. Soon after that I started making after-market custom guitar parts that fit Fender and Gibson Guitars.
About eight months or so after opening my shop, a local music store owner asked me if I could make a jack plate that was unbreakable for a Gibson Les Paul. I said yes, because I had already made a few jack plates out of aluminum. This triggered an idea to make jack plates and trem arms for strats that would not break. These were made out of stainless steel and were four times stronger than the original ones.
I advertised in Guitar Player Magazine, and received excellent results, but was only making enough money to pay for the ads. None of the distributors wanted to carry my parts, so I added more and more parts to the line and increased the size of my advertisements.
I was doing quite well, until the Asian markets caught on to what I was doing. They copied my parts, and sold them for about half of the price. At that point, my guitar parts business drastically decreased. The one thing that the Asian market couldn’t do was make guitars.
After that, Eddie would come by the shop a lot, and sometimes he would sit on the floor and play the guitar while I repaired some of his other guitars. He also did some of his own work. About eight or nine months later, I moved my shop to San Dimas, CA. Eddie and Michael Anthony, (also from Van Halen) used to come over to the new shop and hang out.
Shortly after that I purchased two overhead pin routers and made my own bodies and necks. We sold everything, including Dimarzio pickups.
By the way, the first Dimarzio pickup I potted for Eddie, got too hot and the cream plastic bobbin shriveled up. It looked bad, but it still worked fine. Eddie liked the way it looked. (He liked funky things in those days.) He asked us to build a guitar that was black with yellow stripes. It had a birdseye maple neck, only this time the stripes were painted on. In those days we used laquer and polyester.
would like to say that Eddie was and still is a nice and down-to-earth guy, and so is Michael Anthony. I’ve seen Eddie and Michael over the years, and I am happy to say that they haven’t let their “rock star” status go to theirheads. When I was in Hawaii for a Van Halen concert, Eddie introduced his beautiful wife, Valerie Bertinelli to me. She’s even prettier in person.
