Your music is always on the radio when you play a custom Crosley Radio Tone guitar.
BY TERRY CARLETON
EVER SINCE I can remember having my own money, I have collected two things; guitars and radios (records don’t count). So you can imagine my glee when I first saw Jon Trickey’s radio-guitars! I immediately bought his radio-themed Bass and Tenor models. But guitar number three — the radio-guitar shown here — was made for me. Jon and I share a love for weirdo guitars, so when he was visiting the San Francisco Bay Area from his studio/gallery in Sonora, California, he circled over to check out my whack jobs, as well as my radio collection. When I asked if he could make a guitar body from a blue-and-gold 1950 Crosley E-15TN tube radio that’s been in my collection for about 30 years, he quickly said yes. A few months later, it came back as the pink-and-gray beauty you see here. While it would satisfy me if it were just a surreal and almost absurd piece of art, it’s actually a high-functioning electric guitar with a sonic vibe as cool as its look. pickups that, obviously, sound great, but because of their spacing — and perhaps because of all the metal pieces on the face of the body — all five pickup positions reveal a distinctly chimey character. I call that a feature, not a failure!
As for that body, Jon tells me this was one of his harder builds. He fabricated a piece of alder that had to be geometrically articulated to meet up with what he calls “a Mayan temple of angles” in order to connect the beautifully sculpted back to the radio front. The radio’s original knobs are now used for global volume and tone control. Overall, the tones vary from Strat-like to a very snarky P90 midrange biting tone in the bridge and number two position. Played clean, it’s a cool strummer and funk-er. With overdrive, it’s smooth and sustaining.
