It’s Swept-Wing Sunday! I haven’t touched these two beauties in a while, so I thought I would get them out this morning for some fresh air.
This is a pair of original 1966–67 Hallmark Swept-Wing guitars made by ex-Mosrite employees Joe Hall and Bill Gruggett in Arvin, California, a small farming town a few miles outside Bakersfield. Original Swept-Wings are very rare; it is estimated there were between forty and fifty made before the company went bankrupt. Bob Shade, who owns the modern Hallmark company (who make reissues of the Swept-Wing and other groovy guitars), may know the exact number produced. But they are RARE, probably rarer than hen’s teeth.
Inspired by a Guitar World magazine centerfold in the early 1980s (a Swept-Wing then owned by Dan Forte, aka Teisco Del Rey, currently owned by Maple Byrne in Nashville), I lusted after a Hallmark Swept-Wing for years and years and years. But they just didn’t turn up. I never saw one for sale. Then in the space of just a couple of years, I managed to find two, a gold-sparkle solidbody originally made for Robby Krieger of the Doors and a very rare hollowbody variant. (Best estimate is that there were less than ten hollowbody Swept-Wings made; the solidbodies are much more common, if you can call another thirty or so guitars “common.”)
The gold sparkle Swept-Wing (with gold-plated tuners) is, according to Bill Gruggett, the only gold sparkle Swept-Wing they made. It was presented to the Doors. Hallmark even ran an ad in the November 1967 issue of Hullabaloo magazine, proudly proclaiming that “THE DOORS ARE ON TOP WITH HALLMARK SWEPT-WING GUITARS!” But no photos have ever turned up of Robby Krieger playing the gold Swept-Wing. The Doors were presented with a full backline of Jordan amplifiers at the same time they were given the Hallmark guitar (Hallmark and Jordan amps had some sort of partnership, as indicated in their 1967 catalog), and the Doors did use the Jordan amps on their first tour of the United States in 1967. The gold Swept-Wing eventually turned up in Alaska, sold by the Doors’ ex-manager from the 1960s, Bill Siddons. Despite my numerous attempts to get in touch with Robby Krieger about the guitar, I have not been able to talk to him about it, and no photos have ever surfaced. However, Bill Gruggett, who built these guitars alongside Joe Hall, remembered vividly that they only made one gold sparkle Swept-Wing, and that they gave it to The Doors as an endorsement guitar.
The hollow-body Swept-Wing has an equally strange story. Here in Los Angeles, there was a guitar collector who hoarded “weird” guitars in the 1980s. He squirreled away over 150 guitars in his parents’ attic in the San Fernando Valley, then got killed in a car accident sometime in the 1980s. As the parents got older, they realized they had to do something with those guitars.
I received a phone call from a buddy of mine who worked part-time at Norm’s Rare Guitars (Peter Huggins, RIP). “Get down here, IMMEDIATELY,” he said. “Some REALLY WEIRD SHIT just walked in the door that has your name all over it.” I knew Peter well enough to know I had to get down there within the hour.
Sure enough, there were cases everywhere inside Norm’s store, taking up lots of valuable real estate. There were Danelectros, Supros, Valcos, Japanese guitars, all kinds of weirdo guitar treasures that were part of the deceased man’s collection he had curated forty years earlier. There were two guitars in particular I knew I had to own: a 1969 Mosrite one-off Telecaster-style guitar (that I figured out belonged to Don Rich of Buck Owens’s Buckaroos and used on the first episode of Hee Haw), and this hollowbody 1967 Hallmark Swept-Wing.
Hell, Norm even took mercy on me, selling me the two guitars at a very reasonable price. I suspected he really just needed to make some room in the store. I kept the Don Rich Mosrite for a while, then realized that Buck Owens Enterprises might be willing to trade me Speedy West’s Bigsby steel guitar (which they owned) for Don Rich’s Mosrite. They were happy to trade, and that’s how I became the caretaker for Speedy West’s steel guitar. But I have kept the hollowbody Swept-Wing. After all, it took me twenty-five years to find one for sale; where am I going to find another?
Kudos to Bob Shade for keeping the Hallmark legacy alive, and for helping restore and set up both of these Swept-Wings (as well as a couple other Bakersfield weirdo guitars that I own).
Now, if anybody has any early candid snapshots of the Doors circa 1966 or early 1967 with Robby Krieger playing the gold Swept-Wing, will you PLEASE let me know?
