Launched as a post-WWII startup, Carvin Guitars grew into a guitar gear giant, one catalog sale at a time.
BY DAVE HUNTER
GUITARISTS OLD ENOUGH to have had their early exposure to the instrument through mail-order catalogs are likely to remember the outsized presence of Carvin guitars, amplifiers and PA systems. As a kid in the early ’80s, I was drawn to order my first Carvin catalog by an ad in the back of Guitar Player. I never did order anything significant, other than a replacement pickup for my Yamaha SG-2000 (Carvin declared its 22-pole M22 humbucker to be the hottest pickup available at the time). By then Carvin was no small operation, manufacturing 600 guitars a month on essentially a custom-order basis, and selling them direct to the consumer. The company had evolved out of much humbler origins that dated back as far as those of its California neighbor, Fender.
Founder Lowell C. Kiesel started making and selling pickups out of his own garage in Southern California in 1946, before scaling up to full lap-steel guitars the following year. In 1949, he dropped his surname from the company’s moniker and replaced it with a contraction made from the names of his two sons, Carson and Gavin. Just a few years later, Lowell was making guitars and amplifiers that could have been considered rivals to those of his neighbor Leo Fender, were it not for the fact that they were rarely seen outside their Southern California environs. By 1954, Carvin was as much a seller of guitar parts as it was of entire instruments and amps, and often promoted its “build your own” opportunities. It even acted as an authorized dealer for Martin and Fender guitars.
Through the ’50s, however, Carvin’s own distinct styling began to take shape as the company made greater efforts to make its place in the electric guitar market. The 1960 Model 3-SGB shown in these pages represents a design Carvin launched in 1956 and offered unchanged until shortly after this one was made, when it evolved into the offset-double-cutaway 31-SGB. Notably, Carvin was no longer a Fender reseller by this time, although the 31-SGB boasted a distinctly Strat-like profile, albeit with squared-off body edges and a less elegant shape overall. As photos of the 3-SGB reveal, the guitar’s aesthetic was rather DIY, with a crudely cut pickguard, a prominent truss-rod nut at the body end of the neck, a plastic tailpiece partnering a fixed version of Bigsby’s rocking aluminum bridge and an understated brand decal on its six-a-side headstock.
Regardless of the basic appearance, the guitars were well put toge
