MY LIFE IN HONDO GUITARS
Photo by Frog Witch
by Wes Way
(June 2023)
I got my first guitar for Christmas in 1984, when I was fifteen. My dad gave it to me. It was a mid-'80's Hondo All-Star, H-700, candy apple red, with a white pickguard. It came stock with a single humbucker at the bridge, but was otherwise a cheap Stratocaster knock-off. I dutifully signed up for guitar lessons - my teacher was a car salesman who had formerly been in a classic rock bar band. He was a big fan of the Doobie Brothers - I preferred Hüüsker Dü. I never did the exercises he suggested, which were straight out of the Mel Bay instruction book because I couldn't be bothered to finger out the melodies to "Cockles And Mussels" or "Camptown Races," no matter how much he swore it would help me learn to read music. Why would I want to read music?
I paid $10 for an amp that some high school dropout had assembled out of parts, including car stereo speakers. The electronics were open, on top of the plywood speaker cabinet, and I got a few shocks when I accidentally touched something. That amp distorted the signal at low volume. When it was cranked up to ten, the noise was appalling. I was absolutely in love with the huge, ugly sounds I could make. I spent many hours bashing out fuzzy walls of screeching feedback in my mom's basement, which probably didn't impress the neighbors.
I tried to start some bands with friends, and even wrote a few songs, using the first Replacements album as my model. What I really wanted to do was make a lot of awful noise, but I thought you had to start your set with a handful of songs before you could get to the fun part the chaotic freakout. My friends were not totally unwilling to go along with that, but they had aspirations of their own and the fact was that I was too drunk, too stoned and far too unreliable to be in a band.
After one jam session, I threw the All-Star across the room and busted the humbucker. It went into a closet and I gave up on music to devote myself to substance abuse for a decade or so. The friend who I played with most started a small label in Richmond, VA, called Eerie Materials, which released tapes and 7"s by Evolution Control Committee, Man Or Astroman? and Negativland, among many others. One of their V/A compilations even had a track by Chumbawamba. Eerie Materials contributed quite a bit to the cassette-trading underground in the '90s. I was on the edge of that scene, and I did get to play on one or two things that got released - as a guest in other peoples' projects - but I wasn't able to participate much. Some people think drugs and alcohol make you more creative. I'm not one of them.
In 1998, newly clean and sober, I bought a Hondo acoustic, H-50, for $50 from a woman who was liquidating her assets in preparation for driving across the country in a van with her boyfriend. I'd gotten in a fight while drunk and my left forefinger had been broken and had healed badly - I couldn't bend it. Owning the acoustic Hondo inspired me to do the tedious and painful work of getting my finger useful again. It was almost a year before I could form a 'C' chord. For practice, I learned to play "Suicide Is Painless (Theme From M*A*S*H)" because I liked the Royal Trux version.
Because it was broken and not worth anything, I'd never sold the All-Star for drug money. I bought another electric guitar at a pawn shop, pulled out the pick-ups - a humbucker and two single-coils - and had them put into the All-Star. The guitar shop guy was willing to do the job, but he asked "Why would you want to spend money on this guitar?" I told him my dad gave it to me and it was sentimental. What I wanted to say was "Why don't you shut your filthy cakehole?" but I didn't want to make myself unwelcome in what was, at the time, the only guitar shop in town. Since then, I learned to do my own modifications.
I started playing music with various combinations of people, always free improv. I'd gotten really into free jazz and noise and no longer thought it was necessary to waste time with songs. I learned a few things and developed as a guitarist. My playing became less random, but I was still in love with making horrible cacophony. I started a band and became a bandleader, a position that seemed to force me into some sort of structure. Gradually, I started to rely on heavy psych riffs as a base for my free-form noise. Riffs are a good foundation for improv, but I see now that I was stuck in a formula - blast the riff, freak out, repeat. In time, this would lead to me getting burned out.
I didn't set out to become a collector of Hondos, but it happened. I found another H-50 in a junk shop and installed a piezo mic under the bridge. I saw Acid Mothers Temple and noticed that Kawabata Makoto was playing a left-handed Strat, black, upside-down, and getting the best use of the tremolo bar. A couple weeks later, I was in a guitar shop and found a black, left-handed Hondo Strat copy, H-720, with three single-coils - the cut-rate version of the one Kawabata used. I had to have it. My only eBay purchase to date was a white Hondo bass, no model number, for which I paid $2, plus shipping. I bought another Strat copy, no model number, white, on Craigslist. I don't remember where I got my Hondo mandolin. The guitar shop guy who sold me my black Hondo II, HLP-2B, "lawsuit model", a Les Paul copy with two humbuckers, was openly contemptuous of all things Hondo, but he took the money. I picked up a Hondo acoustic parlor guitar, H-90S, at a yard sale for $10. Actually, there's another Hondo parlor guitar back in the storage room, H-10S-B. The top on that one is just about ruined. I might replace it, if I can find a thin piece of wood to work with, or - more likely - cut a hole in it and stick a metal cookie tin in there. That would make a racket - probably sound like a metal banjo. Or I could bolt the neck to a block of wood, attach some pickups and use it as a tabletop guitar/noise generator. I'll definitely find a way to use it.
In 2017, I stopped playing music. I was bored with riffs, burned out on the whole scene and had other projects going. I was back in college, starting a new career, and making a lot of visual art. The guitars were around, but I didn't pick them up.
In 2022, the urge to play guitar came back, like I always knew it would. I called a friend, a drummer, and we decided to get together and play. Before we made a sound, I let him know that I wasn't interested in anything like songs. I didn't want to play melodies, was not going to stay in rhythm and under no circumstances would I be the band leader. He was cool with that - actually, he wanted the same thing I wanted.
The biggest problem we had starting the band was coming up with a name we could live with. Fortunately, a mentally ill, French woman wrote a book in 1901, which supplied us with the absurd moniker we currently traffic under.
We agreed that we were not going to play in any idiom or genre, but that we felt more akin to free jazz than anything else. That was all it took for me to start hankering for a "jazzy" guitar a semi-hollowbody. Of course, it had to be a Hondo. I would always prefer to find a guitar - or anything else - in a thrift store or junk shop than order it online, but there was no chance I was going to stumble onto something as random and rare as a Hondo semi-hollow anytime soon, so I started searching on the interweb. Turns out, Hondos aren't as cheap as they once were, and every Hondo semi-hollow I could find online was in the $500 neighborhood, plus shipping. I have been poor my whole life - dirt-poor when I was drunk, working poor after I got sober. It was not easy for me to spend $500+ on something as entirely unnecessary as another guitar financially or emotionally - but I finally decided that life is short and, by God, I wanted the damn thing. I found one I liked on Reverb and I am now very happy with my Hondo II Delux 935 semi-hollowbody, which has a beautiful, cherry-sunburst finish and two humbuckers. It doesn't sound particularly "jazzy" in my hands, but it certainly lives up to the reputation hollowbodies and semi-hollowbodies have for feeding back at the slightest provocation. That's a good thing.
Hondo was never a high end guitar company. They're usually referred to as "beginner's" guitars, though some people aren't that generous. My dedication to the brand is an example of how I love outcasts, underdogs and rejects. Many guitar players get suckered into the capitalist trap of thinking that something that costs more is better, but I'm not falling for it. Spending more money on new, improved, Strats or SG's, with unicorn-horn nuts and locking tuners made of kryptonite, will not make anyone a better player. Some of the best guitar music of the 20th century was made using cheap guitars from Sears & Roebuck that wouldn't stay in tune for five minutes. Hondo guitars are at least as good as anything Charley Patton ever got his filthy hands on. Still, they're not high quality. The Hondo II line was better, despite what that guitar shop guy said, but that's relative. Hondo II electric guitars were made of actual wood, as opposed to the glued plywood bodies of the regular Hondo line, but they were assembled by underpaid factory hands in southeast Asia, not by trained luthiers. If there was any possibility of cutting a corner, that corner was cut, probably poorly.
I recently opened up my black lefty to do some mods (modifications) and discovered that part of the inside was a square of cardboard that had been stuck in to separate the front hole, where the pickups are, from the back hole, where the springs for the trem bridge are, and then spray painted with the rest of the body. That is some shoddy work. On a better guitar, those two compartments would have been separated by wood, not a piece of a shoebox. I was doing mods anyway, so it wasn't hard to address that issue.
The mods. I don't really use the controls in any of my guitars. I set the pickup switch where I want it, turn the volume and tone up to ten, and then leave everything alone. That's not unusual, especially for guitar players who cut their teeth on punk rock. Greg Ginn of Black Flag reputedly set his volume and tone to ten and then soldered the controls so they couldn't be changed. The knobs are out of the way on most of my guitars, but on the lefty, which I play upside-down, they're where I put my forearm. So I took out all the controls and soldered the pickups directly to the jack. In theory, this will result in a stronger signal from the pickups going to the amp; in practice, I don't have knobs in my way. I also don't use the tremolo, so I was planning on blocking the bridge with a piece of wood to make it more stable. It wasn't any more trouble to cut another piece of wood and stick it in the back hole, where that bit of cardboard was. I've got to play the guitar a bit - with distortion and at high volume - to determine whether there is any noticeable difference in the sound, but I'm pretty happy with the new setup. Electric guitars are made to be altered to suit the needs and tastes of individual players. Cheap electric guitars practically beg to be modded. My next project will be to melt the wax out of the pickups on the white Strat copy. That's supposed to change how they sound. Some guitar players modify guitars to make them sound "warmer" or "fatter" or "wooly" or whatever, usually by adding some pricey gimcracks, or switching out stock parts for more expensive versions. I don't have a specific agenda when I modify a guitar - I just want to see what will happen. If melting out the wax makes that guitar sound like a dump truck choking on a chicken bone, I'll be happy to use that sound.
The overwhelming majority of guitarists are casual players. They want to jam with friends and aren't trying to dig into electronics or research a manufacturer.
Just for some background, Hondo was founded in Fort Worth, TX, in 1969 - the year I was born - by Jerry Freed and Tommy Moore. The company outsourced all manufacturing to factories in Korea and Indonesia. Hondo was out of production from 1985 to 1989, then Freed got the rights to the name back from the parent company,
International Music Co., relocated the office to Stuart, FL, and started production again in India, China and Taiwan. Musicorp bought Hondo in 1995, and killed the line in 2005. For most players, a stock mid-level guitar is fine - Yamaha or Rogue for acoustic, Squire or PRS for electric. A player who is serious and has some cash might opt for a Marshall or Fender. Gearheads and rock-star-wannabes will find plenty of gadgets and doo-dads to spend money on.
I'm an outlier in the guitar world - an experimental player who fell in love with a particular cheap brand. There must be others - an acid jazzhead who only plays Kays, or a noiserocker who favors modded Teiscos. Somebody, somewhere, has the world's largest collection of Silvertones, and I would love to see that. Weird, cheap guitars always get my attention, especially when they're being played in a way that no one with any musical career aspirations would want to do. I saw Kawabata Makoto shred on First Acts a bunch of times - I don't know if they were stock or modded. Elmore James played Silvertones with Kay pickups. Hound Dog Taylor played a Teisco. A lot of interesting players sold out and got famous, but continued to use cheap, modified guitars - Tom Morello, Kurt Cobain, Beck and Sonic Youth come to mind. St. Vincent started with a Harmony and a Silvertone. Brian May almost exclusively played a guitar he built in his garage. Eddie van Halen played Teiscos until he built his Frankenstrat out of spare parts. He continued to build his own guitars out of odds and ends, and said at one point that he didn't have more than $200 in any of his guitars. There are freaks for other instruments too. Back in the '80's, Pianosaurus only played toy instruments and some of their stuff was pretty good. I used to play with a very talented woman who only used a mid '60's Wurlitzer electric piano that was grossly out of tune. Ian Anderson used cheap flutes, made for students, with Jethro Tull. I'm sure there are others, but I mostly pay attention to guitars.
For me, Hondos are a collection, an interest and a means of exploring what I can do that I haven't heard anybody else do with the basic wood-and-wire, six-string object called a guitar. I'm never going to be rich or famous, and I don't care about sounding "good" to people who are cursed with perfect pitch. The only person I have to please is me.
If you, or someone you know, has an obsession with weird, old cheap guitars, or any other instrument, I'd love to hear about it. If you have an old Hondo in a closet - especially a short scale, flying V or one of those weird H-2 Death Daggers they made in the 1980s - I might be interested.