In 1993, Mr. Parker founded Parker Guitars in Wilmington, Mass., with Larry Fishman, who oversaw the management of the company and the electronics of the guitars. Mr. Parker leveraged his extensive experience in woodworking and guitar repair, along with his maverick streak, to build groundbreaking guitars that went on to be displayed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington.
Which is not to say he thought of guitars as art objects. “I’m a toolmaker,” he was quoted as saying in a 2007 profile in The New Yorker. “I make tools for musicians.”
In Mr. Parker’s view, guitar innovation stalled after the debut in the 1950s of hallowed models like the Fender Stratocaster and the Gibson Les Paul — guitars that Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page and countless others used to amplify a generation. His goal was to bundle together all available advances in technology and materials and build a guitar for a new age.
His alternative was the Parker Fly, a head-turning guitar that relied heavily on composite materials and looked like a prop from “Flash Gordon.”
Priced at around $2,000, the Fly was never a big seller, but it did find admirers among an array of notable musicians including Joni Mitchell, Adrian Belew and Dave Navarro of Jane’s Addiction. Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails once said he recorded about 80 percent of the guitar parts for the band’s platinum-selling 1999 album, “The Fragile,” on a Parker Fly.
In practical terms, the Fly lived up to its name, weighing about five pounds — roughly half of many Les Pauls. Mr. Parker accomplished this in part by shaving away all extraneous material and using lighter woods for the body, like poplar and spruce, instead of traditional hardwoods like ash or mahogany. He then reinforced the back and neck with an thin external skeleton of carbon, fiberglass and epoxy resin for strength.
The Fly also offered an array of tones. Its pickups (devices that translate string motion into an electronic form that gets passed on to an amplifier) could approximate the rich, muscular sound of classic Gibson humbuckers or the shimmer and quack of the single-coil Stratocaster pickups. Its piezo pickups could conjure the airy sounds of an acoustic.
The guitar featured a composite fingerboard with glued-on, wear-resistant stainless steel frets, locking tuners and a strikingly angular cutaway headstock that reduced weight and helped its overall balance. The Fly also had a distinctive flat-spring vibrato system to improve responsiveness over a standard tremolo bar.
And then there were its looks. Everyone seemed to have an opinion. In the Reverb interview, Mr. Parker recalled that Joni Mitchell once told him: “Looks like you found it on a beach. But then it also looks like it came from outer space.” Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones asked, “Nice guitar, but why does it have to look like a bleeding assault rifle?”
by Alex Williams, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Robert Martin
[ed. Great guitars, and Mr. Parker was a true innovator. They'll always have a prominent place in guitar design history. See also: History of the Parker Fly (Guitar.com).]
