If you know me, you know I love a good GUITAR MYSTERY! I’ve showcased two “Boyd-Bilt” guitars on Facebook before, and they’ve inspired hours of wonder and delight, wondering who this “Boyd” was (it wasn’t Solon “Curly” Boyd—that’s for sure. I wrote a whole chapter about discovering Curly Boyd and his Boyd-Vibe and Robot Drummer that he built in 1955 in my book Strat in the Attic.)
The first “Boyd-Bilt” I found was the two-tone sunburst guitar. It popped up on Craigslist and a punk rock kid in Whittier claimed his uncle had found it decades earlier, abandoned in an orchard in Orange County. The guitar fascinated me because the construction hinted at Bigsby (the body shape and the handmade aluminum bridge and aluminum nut), Rickenbacker (the multi-level pickguards), Fender (the headstock as well as the hand-milled knurled metal knobs), and Mosrite (the faux-alligator case was identical in construction to the case for my 1959 TNM Custom, which Terry McArthur told me was identical to Joe Maphis and Larry Collins cases, and Semie Moseley even got the case ordered for Terry at the place he used here in L.A.).
I went down a rabbit hole of research and discovered a completely DIFFERENT Boyd who made guitars and vibratos down in El Cajon (San Diego). As I mentioned, Solon “Curly” Boyd is an entirely different story, covered in a chapter of my Strat in the Attic book. I still have no idea who this Boyd-Bilt guy was.
A couple years later, a dealer friend of mine in L.A. said, “I have one of those funny guitars that you like.” He told me it was a Boyd-Bilt, and I said, “I’ll take it!” When I finally saw the guitar, it was . . . super interesting! This Boyd-Bilt was a complete rip-off of a 1950s Mosrite guitar, from the tri-color sunburst to the elaborate pickguards and carved bridge to the gold-plated parts and flamed maple back. Whoever this Boyd guy was, he was definitely a part of the 1950s Los Angeles guitar-making scene.
A couple years after finding the two guitars, my friend Jim Washburn saw the Boyd-Bilt guitars set up at the Guitar Geek Festival in Anaheim and told me, “I think I have a Boyd-Bilt pickup at home—you need to have it.” I didn’t believe him at first, but when he produced the pickup for me, he was absolutely right. It was a stray Boyd-Bilt pickup, exactly like the ones on the other two Boyd-Bilt guitars.
Recently, my friend Karl B. Wallin forwarded some photos from an auction of guitars in upstate New York. I flipped out when I saw the photos—by Jove, it was another Boyd-Bilt—this time a doubleneck! The auction company had no story to go with it, but you could make out that “CHURCH OF GOD” had been inlaid into the bottom neck at one time. The instrument was in very poor condition, so I asked Karl if he’d let me bid on it, I told my other guitar buddies with similar weird taste to NOT BID ON IT, and I got the doubleneck really cheap.
Like the other two Boyd-Bilt instruments, this guitar has so many interesting features on it, it’s hard to know where to start. I have a feeling that the doubleneck predates the other two guitars, because it’s much cruder in construction. There are similar elements to the other guitars, including the same two-color sunburst, the same pickups (more on that in a second), the same headstocks, the same weird glued-in neck construction, and the same faux-alligator case. Sadly the guitar was missing both of the bridges, it only had broken bits of the original pickguards, as well as lots of other problems. One really weird and interesting feature: the necks get SKINNIER as you go up. The nut is a pretty standard width, but by the time you’re up at the 16th fret or so, it’s about the width of a banjo, which makes me think this guitar is destined to be a wall-hanger.
The doubleneck had two Boyd-Bilt pickups and one Doc Kauffman pickup with a vacu-form pickup cover, which was obviously installed as a later replacement (and the Doc Kauffman angle adds another tantalizing layer of mystery, although the guitar’s construction is totally different than the Kauffman “Kremo-Kustom” guitars of that era). But, like a miracle: I ACTUALLY HAVE A BOYD-BILT PICKUP IN A BOX, thanks to my friend Jim Washburn. How much do you want to bet that it’s probably the original pickup that was on this doubleneck?
It’s weird, sometimes when you become known for a certain thing, in this case 1950s-era hand-built electric guitars, the circular vortex just seems to swirl everything toward you (for example anytime some really weird, messed-up hillbilly guitar shows up on eBay or Reverb, I usually have 25 or 30 guys email the link saying “HAVE YOU SEEN THIS YET?” ha ha!). I can’t think of what the odds would be of finding a Boyd-Bilt doubleneck that needed a handmade Boyd-Bilt pickup and actually having one of those pickups in your parts drawer, but I would imagine they’re probably similar to winning the Powerball lottery. Which, of course, I didn’t, but I did win the Boyd-Bilt guitar prizes from the hillbilly gospel claw machine mystery vortex. What a weird and wonderful thing!
