GRETSCH, RICKENBACKER, FENDER … HAMBURGUITAR? IN THE BEATLES’ MID-NINETIES ANTHOLOGY ERA, GEORGE HARRISON'S GUITARS OF CHOICE WERE BUILT BY A MAN NAMED BERNIE HAMBURGER
By Bill DeMain
BEATLES FANS KNOW George Harrison’s guitars as well as they know his solos from “All My Loving,” “Nowhere Man” and “Something.” There’s the Gretsch Country Gentleman, the Rickenbacker 360/12, the Epiphone Casino (with Bigsby), the psychedelic Strat nicknamed “Rocky,” the ’68 rosewood Telecaster. They’re as much a part of the band’s visual history as velvet-collared suits and Sgt. Pepper mustaches. But in early November, when “Now and Then” added a new epilogue to the Fab Four’s catalog, an unfamiliar guitar came with it. As seen in Peter Jackson’s short film about the making of the track, there’s Harrison in the studio, playing a double-cutaway electric, cherry red with white trim.
“When it showed up in the video, I jumped higher than Michael Jordan,” says Bernie Hamburger, who built the guitar for Harrison in the mid Nineties — a Hamburguitar Model S. Hamburger also made the handsome emerald green Tele-shaped Model T that appears in the Beatles’ Anthology-era “Real Love” music video.
To his delight, Hamburger discovered that these were Harrison’s go-to guitars during his later years. “After George passed away in 2001, his guitar technician, Alan Rogan, told me that George owned many, many instruments, and all of them were in storage — with the exception of the ones I made for him,” he says. “Those were always within reach, plugged into an amp, ready to play. So I guess he liked my stuff.”
Hamburger was born in the Bronx and, like many baby boom kids, had his life forever altered on February 9, 1964, when the Beatles appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show. And like many kids, he soon got his first guitar, a “Tesco Del Rey type of thing.” But there was a difference. “I didn’t like the way it played,” he says. “So I borrowed my father’s tools, and little by little I got to whittle at it until it played really nice. I was just a kid — but my friends said, ‘Hey, can you make my guitar feel like that?’ So one thing led to another.”
By the late Seventies, Hamburger was modifying guitars professionally, which led to him wondering if he could make one of his own from scratch. “I thought, ‘Let me get the stuff to do it,’ and I’m not talking about kits,” he says. “I got the wood, I did everything hand-carved, put in al
