The pink of health

WHEN AMERICAN GUITARbrands suffered a dip in quality during the 1970s and ’80s, the door was open for guitar rivals to make inroads to the U.S. market. While many of them came from Japan, at least one homegrown guitar maker saw his “in”: Paul Reed Smith. With his PRS Guitars, Smith hit the ground running in 1985, creating widely acknowledged “modern classics,” and he’s been accepted as another of the United States’ leading guitar makers ever since.

The 1989 Custom 24 featured here was built just a few years after PRS established proper production but before its guitars were commonplace in dealerships across the country. Not only is it a classic from the maker’s “golden era” but it wears a rare Bonni Pink finish that comes with its own story.

Having played guitar in his youth, Smith built his first guitar in 1975 while in college, an adventure that inspired him to drop out and work full-time as a luthier and repairman. A boatload of research and experimentation went into the effort over the next 10 years, during which he built an average of one guitar a month until funds were in place for him to open the first PRS factory, in Annapolis, Maryland, in 1985. But shortly before then, the budding entrepreneur had tested the waters by buttonholing roadies at backstage doors, guitar in hand, to get touring stars to check out his work. The effort succeeded and proved the viability of Smith’s designs. He quickly received preproduction orders from such stars as Heart’s Howard Leese, Peter Frampton, Al Di Meola and, eventually, Carlos Santana, allowing the PRS factory to fire up with a substantial artist roster in place.

Although they’re familiar to most guitarists today, the features of Smith’s core design were innovative. Significant among these were:

•A hybrid Fender-meets-Gibson ethos that ran throughout the design, affecting both styling and build;

•A glued-in neck with hybrid 10-inch fingerboard radius and 24 frets;

•Optional bird inlays in the rosewood necks (often Brazilian rosewood until around 1990);

•A 25-inch scale length that made it easy for players of other makes to adapt readily to PRS guitars;

•Versatile five-position rotary switching with pickups wired to access both humbucking