Our Story begins in late January, 1977. Edward has been playing a modified 1961 Stratocaster for some time, likely purchased from Wayne Charvel in 1976, equipped with a few humbuckers over it’s tenure, wired directly to the master volume and out to the jack. This platform was an immediate success for Ed, and would become the basis for all of his primary instruments for the remainder of his life – A tremolo, bridge humbucker, and master volume; everything else was secondary.
Ed had recently painted his Ibanez Destroyer, another mainstay instrument of his collection, white and was itching to customize his other instruments to try to carve out an identity for himself as attention was growing around Van Halen. As we enter February, Ed takes his 1961 Sunburst Strat and sprays white lacquer right over the existing nitrocellulose finish. However, this was a temporary and last ditch attempt to modify this guitar before something very important would happen.
The story, as Ed tells it, involved him hanging around Wayne Charvel’s shop, as usual, and spotting an Ash Strat style body down on the floor. Ed inquires about the body, to which (presumably) Wayne responds that it is a ‘second’. Ed, initially thinking that this simply mean the body was “second in line to be manufactured”, was informed that it was cosmetically unfit for sale at full price, in this case due to a knot on the edge of the body inside the lower horn. Ed, unphased by the blemish, purchased the body for a reported $50 ($225 in 2021, adjusted for inflation), where the catalog price for a non-blemish body was $89.95 ($405 in 2021, adjusted for inflation).
The body itself, a ~5-1/2 lb Northern Ash ‘Boogie Bodies’ branded Strat clone, made by Wayne Charvel and Dave Schecter – *using Schecter’s templates* – in a batch of 100 Ash bodies in 1976, was advertised by Charvel to have “improved tonal properties” as a result of the “heavy ash body”. This “upgrade” was the next step in Ed’s experiment.
Upon receiving the body, he would proceed to cut his own single humbucker pickguard from a black plastic sheet, and cannibalize his 1961 Stratocaster in order to bring to life, for the first time, the Frankenstrat