The Last Bass Outpost

Horrible indeed, but I love those Burst G3's!

In 1976 Star Case (Orland Park, Il) was contracted by Gibson to build flight cases for a couple of custom made guitars they were making for Joe Walsh. I took the cases up to the Kalamazoo plant. I met with Carl Spinosa who was the production manager. He took me on a tour of the factory. We ended up in a room where they kept prototypes and custom one off guitars. I spotted the bass in question hanging on the wall. I asked him about it and he said it was 1 of 10 basses that they made as a possible model to supercede the Ripper bass that was their current production model. It never had a name designation as I recall (though the seller said it was a Les Paul bass) He said that of the 10, 5 were built of mahogany and 5 were maple. All the basses had neck variations of their EB2 hollow body bass design. 3 were finished in black, 4 were cherry, and 3 were sunburst. There were 3 different pickup configurations for them. Dual large chrome humbackers, 1 large & 1 small humbucker, and 2 humbuckers with black plastic covers. (like the Ripper bass pickups) Carl said they gave 2 basses to Greg Lake (Emerson, Lake, & Palmer) 1 to John Wetton (King Crimson) 1 to Leland Sklar (James Taylor) and the others I don't recall. I asked him if I could buy this bass (which I did for $175.00) and played it on and off for a couple of years. Now about the bass. The finish looks washed out. That's the way I got it. The bow in the neck existed, but I worked around it. I took it to a couple guitar techs who both told me that the truss rod might be bent and couldn't be adjusted. Both suggested replacement. I put the first strap button on the neck heel. (the hole on the upper bout was were the original button was placed) I did that because my guitar strap kept coming off because of the angle. (keep in mind this was before strap locks were on the market) Obviously the screw suffered fatigue at the heel which is why a second screw was inserted at the heel which I didn't do. I used the bass only for certain songs because it had too much bottom,(no highs) and it was very heavy.(my shoulder hurt after extensive use) The 6 position switch was useless. As far as the serial number goes. Carl told me candidly that prototypes don't follow a pattern that would acurrately give you a date of manufacture since hardware, electronics, and other factors may differ because they used whatever was in the bin at the time. He said that bass was probably made in late 74'. It was the second one made.