In 1978, B.C. Rich scored big with the Mockingbird, the choice of many guitarists in the decade to come.
BY DAVE HUNTER
THERE WAS Atime in the late ’70s and early ’80s when the softer, rounder guitar shapes that were developed in the 1950s and ’60s seemed not only old hat but utterly uncool. Sharp, pointy, axe-like and aggressively weapon-esque shapes defined the electric guitar’s future, at least for anything rock or metal. And as of about 1976, that meant not Gibson or Fender but B.C. Rich.
The radically styled and appointed guitars of this California maker looked, felt and sounded rock. And for a good part of the era when hair was big and trousers were tight, B.C. Rich’s guitars appeared on about as many arena stages as those of the big-name guitar makers that had come before. But if you take the story back a couple decades further, the roots of the B.C. Rich operation can be found in a far tamer breed of guitar making.
The B.C. Rich company was founded in the early ’70s by Bernardo “Bernie” Chavez Rico, the son of Bernardo Mason Rico, who had opened his Casa Rico guitar shop on Brooklyn Avenue in Los Angeles in the 1950s.
The elder Rico ran the business operations himself, hiring skilled builders from Mexico to construct the flamenco, classical and mariachi guitars that were the shop’s stock in trade. But when young Bernie joined the company — thereby inspiring his father to change its name to Bernardo’s Guitar Shop — he took a more hands-on approach to the work, and eventually moved into designing and constructing the solidbody electrics that he’d fallen in love with.
Bernie prototyped his early electric designs in the late ’60s using bolt-on Fender necks, but by the early ’70s his designs had evolved into what might be considered the opposite end of the spectrum. He was among the pioneers of the through-neck design, with heel-less transitions between neck and body, 24 frets and other upgrades that were appreciated by musicians seeking something beyond the standard big-name offerings.
Bernardo’s name segued to B.C. Rich, an adaptation of Bernie Chavez Rico, by about the time that the company’s first Seagull guitar and bass models debuted in 1974. This was a less dramatic-looking design than what was to come, but it still presented a radical departure from traditional solidbodies. The features he embraced were further enhanced by phase-reverse and coil-splitting switching options,
