Back in my young-man days, whenever I would find another crazy guitar, my ex-wife Jessica Daniel would always get this funny look on her face and say, “Oh, good, you found some magic beans!“ Ever since then, my life has been a series of events where I take money that could be used for practical purposes and spend it on “magic beans.” That really does seem to be my special talent.
Last year I posted about Farber guitars, a little-known California brand. It’s been a real mystery for me for years. Only a few of them are known to exist. Most famously, “Little” Jimmy Dickens played a Farber custom acoustic guitar in the early 1960s. Bobby Adamson of the legendary Bakersfield sound duo The Farmer Boys (known for their Capitol single “Flash, Crash and Thunder”) also had one. I found a project Farber guitar on eBay about twenty years ago, and it remains a project; it needs a bunch of work to be playable. The Bigsby-style headstock and the superb construction of the two examples I had been able to examine made me know this was a guy worth researching. There is definitely a story there.
Also many years ago, I remembered a Farber solidbody electric guitar sold on eBay. I took a few screenshots at the time, and hadn’t really thought about it for two decades. Until a couple of weeks ago.
The Farber solidbody electric guitar surfaced in San Pedro, mistakenly identified as a Harvey Thomas guitar. I communicated with the guy who had the guitar, and we worked out a reasonable price we could both agree on. Today, on my way down to San Diego, I picked up the Farber electric guitar and held it in my hands for the first time.
Holy cow, what a wacky beast. The guitar is obviously heavily influenced by the sunburst and bound Mosrite ventures model guitars of the early 1960s, but the guy really went all out to apply every variation of the French curve he could possibly come up with. This thing is nuts! He really had a vision!
As you can see, the guitar has been stripped of parts and pickups. So the first order of business is to do more research on the Farber history and see if I can find any photos of this guitar in its original configuration. Then I’m going to try and restore it to as original as possible.
Thanks again to my new pal, Josh, for making this happen and working with me so that I could be the new caretaker. Hooray, I found some more magic beans!
See more photos at Deke’s original Facebook post!
