Episode 1.4: The Red Special Special (Script)

Hi. I’m Keith Decent and this is From the Ground Up. A podcast about how we make what we make, the materials, the tools, and the stories behind the things we build.

It’s 1966. London England. Rock and roll is inescapable. The Kinks, the Zombies, Cream, the Who, and of course, The Beatles have taken over the airwaves around the world. The city of London has become the epicenter for pop culture and fashion not only of England, but almost anywhere. Just about every teenage boy of alive is dreaming of picking up an electric guitar, walking out on stage, and playing to a crowd of thousands of screaming fans. Many are following that dream into town halls, pubs, onto street corners, and just about anywhere else that has a stage. Playing these small gigs, parties, and any gathering that needs tunes for barely enough money to cover transportation, trying to become the next John, Paul, George, or Ringo. This particular evening, one lanky, nervous kid, is walking out on stage for the first time with his band at the Molesey Boat Club on the foggy banks of the River Thames, holding what will become one of the most iconic instruments of all time, an electric guitar that he built at home with his dad out of scraps, named…. The Red Special. Moving forward 19 years and 20 miles to July 1985 at Wembley Stadium in London. The boy, now a man with a lion’s mane of wild hair in a crisp white shirt and jeans, is standing with his band in front of over 70,000 fans and being live-cast to over a billion more in 110 countries. The world is literally watching. The set begins, and it isn’t long until he is wailing away on that very same guitar, almost entirely unchanged since he built it, in one of the greatest live performances ever recorded in rock and roll history. The band, Queen, It’s guitarist Brian May and his trusty Red Special are officially rock legend.

But back in 1963, unable to afford a real guitar, the future looked a lot different to May. A devoted student, he excelled in school and was on track to go to college and even graduate school, like his father, Harold, wanted him to. Harold was an electronics engineer in the Royal Air Force during World War II, and designed landing systems for the Concorde for a living. He was exceptionally talented, having set up a workshop in the family’s spare bedroom where he built many of their appliances by hand, including the television.

While Harold knew he couldn’t buy his son a professional guitar, he figured he could probably make one that was just as good. The first problem became, where to find the materials to do so. See, electric guitars had only really risen to popularity in the last 15 years or so, and the parts were not cheap or easy to come by.

Los Angeles, 33 years before Harold and Brian set to work, another man was having a similar issue, except instead of trying to make an electric guitar, he was toiling away trying to make THE electric guitar. George Beauchamp had been working in guitar manufacturing for the past decade or so, having been a steel guitar player dissatisfied with the poor sound projection many of the instruments had when played with a band. He sought to make a louder guitar, and had been minorly successful through mechanical modifications in the past. His last venture, however, imploded due to volatile partnerships and George now found himself without a job or a new project. He had been chasing the dream of a fully electric guitar for years, as had many others, but now it was time to really get to work. Beauchamp started experimenting with various PA systems and microphones, finding eventual success with a prototype. A single string guitar, made from a 2x4, with a pickup from a Brunswick Electric Phonograph. He was finally on the right track.

At the time, it was known that passing metal through a magnetic field could cause electrical current in a nearby wire coil. Taking this into account, George wound a coil around 6 metal poles, each one positioned under a string. He then took two large, broad, horseshoe shaped magnets and surrounded the entire apparatus, including the strings themselves. Working at his dining room table, George had to wind the coil using the motor from his washing machine. It worked incredibly well. Beauchamp enlisted his friend Adolph Rickenbacker to help him with the manufacturing, and the electric guitar was born. While popular with a few professionals, jazz musicians, and some blues players, the electric guitar didn’t really come into its own until the 1950s, with the birth of rock and roll. New designs by companies like Fender and Gibson had turned what was seen as a novelty into the heart and soul of American music.. The guitarist, once drowned out by the drums and other instruments, was now loud and clear, out in front of their band, and at the forefront of pop culture.

Brian and his father had opted to build a hand-cranked pickup winding device for their project, and spare their mother the inconvenience of taking apart the family washing machine. Brian was able to wind the fine copper wire thousands of times around a couple of button magnets he’d bought at the hardware store, using a bicycle odometer to keep count.

Harold and his son had come up with all sorts of ways to gather and use materials in this manner. Without the access to professional parts or tools, they scavenged what they needed and scrounged to buy what they couldn’t make at home. They used only hand tools, and along with Harold’s characteristic perfectionism, it became an incredibly long and detailed process.

The main structure of the body was made from a hard oak section of an old dining table. The neck was made from a mahogany mantle, already 100 years old at that point. It was full of nail and bug holes, which Brian filled with matchsticks, an old carpenter’s trick, as he carved it to shape. The outer portion of the body was made with a sort of engineered hardboard, faced with a veneer, called blockboard. The body was finished with several coats of a brand of lacquer called Rustin’s Plastic Floor Coating.

Whenever faced with a difficult portion of the build, the Mays would toil away until they reached a solid solution. No shortcuts were taken, and every iteration was documented, studied, and improved upon until they were satisfied with the work. Without knowing much about how guitars work, it may be easy to underestimate how amazing the Red Special truly is. Harold and Brian, through their exhaustive and painstaking process, came up with design solutions that were on par with, or even exceeded those of contemporary manufacturers. The tremolo system, which allows the player to alter the tension of the strings via a control, or whammy bar, is one solution that blew other guitar designs out of the water.

The ability to rapidly change the pitch on the strings is a staple of any professional rock player’s guitar, and so Brian’s would be no different. They spent a huge chunk of their time figuring out this very complex system and came up with version after version in their dedicated testing bed for the device. They needed to get as close to a friction less design as possible. The whole contraption rests on a knife blade, tempered with case hardening compound over a stove burner. The strings ride on rollers to further eliminate friction. Brian made each roller by hand using a drill as a lathe.

The tremolo system relies on heavy duty springs to return the bent strings back to their original tuning once released. Most guitar designs use tension springs in the back of the guitar to pull the strings into place. The Red Special, flips this around and uses valve springs from a motorcycle as a compressive force in the front of the body to push the apparatus back into position. The control arm itself was made from a piece of a bicycle luggage rack, tipped with a part of one of his mother, Ruth’s, knitting needles.. A first time guitar builder, and his teenaged son, had accomplished a feat of engineering and design that was out of the reach of some of the most experienced professionals in the world, in a spare bedroom with a bunch of scavenged parts, and they didn’t stop there. The pickups on most guitars are wired in parallel, allowing a switch to choose between them and change the tone of the sound, according to their position on the body. They are also typically wired in phase, to create as full a sound as possible. Brian didn’t want to restrict himself to any one type of sound, and so he and Harold did something unprecedented. They wired the pickups in series, adding a row of switches that turn off each individual pickup, and another row that switches the polarity of the pickup, toggling it into or out of phase. This switch matrix allowed the Red Special to output a number of tones and sounds far greater than anything else available at the time, and most guitarists who have managed it since then have copied May’s design.

The love and care and attention to detail put into this guitar was beyond compare. Harold and Brian had built one of the most advanced and innovative pieces of technology available to any guitarist at the time. In fact, the only modification Brian made was to purchase some professionally manufactured pickups due to a strange sound issue with his homemade versions when he bent strings.

The build had also brought them closer together. The guitar had symbolized to Brian the lengths to which his father would go to make sure his son wasn’t found wanting, despite their modest means. “The Old Lady,” as Brian refers to the instrument, served him well, from his first performance with his band, 1984, up to the formation of Queen. Throughout it all, Brian had been working his way through university, studying physics, then making his way through a doctorate program in astrophysics. However, as Queen’s popularity took off, Brian felt he had to choose, and in turn, disappoint the man who had worked so hard to get him there. Harold didn’t understand, or want to understand, Brian’s eagerness to throw away his career in academia to become a pop star. Brian would often plead with his dad, the man who built the guitar he was still using to perform to sell out crowds around the world, to understand that this was their hard work paying off. His success in music was a result of everything he had learned while they worked together those two years, on their masterpiece.

Still, it would take a family crisis to bring the two back together. Their coldness toward each other had driven Ruth into terrible distress. It took her being hospitalized after a nervous breakdown to prompt her family to bury the hatchet. Shortly after her recovery, Brian flew his parents to New York to watch his band perform a sold out show at Madison Square Garden, in 1977. The crowd was amazing. Their response to the band was vivid and electrifying. Afterwards, Harold took his son’s hand, shook it, and told him that he finally understood and was okay with Brian’s choice. He had actually wanted to take off after leaving the RAF and join a band. But with a wife and new child on the way, he needed job security. Watching his son chase the dream he himself had abandoned was a difficult thing for Harold, and as Brian became wealthy and famous, he couldn’t help but feel like a failure himself. After admitting this later in life, his son assured him that he was a wonderful father. Harold was able to pass on his values and his knowledge, his curiosity and ingenuity to Brian through their work together. Despite not believing in his path as a musician, he never stopped believing in his son’s potential. His son, as a result, had become an incredible person. He was one of the most influential musicians of all time, an unparalleled success, and eventually, also held a PhD in astrophysics.

To this day, Brian still uses The Red Special at every performance. When it’s unavailable, he uses replicas that are built to excruciatingly accurate detail, though he says he can feel the difference. Harold passed away in 1991. The guitar serves as a constant reminder. Each motorcycle spring holds the memories of countless hours at the workbench. Each matchstick filled wormhole and carefully wired switch, a lesson in Harold’s motto, which Brian still lives by today. “If anything’s worth doing, it’s worth overdoing.”

Tim Sway is the founder of New Perspectives Music, a company in which he manufactures instruments from reclaimed and recycled materials. An avid upcycler and reclaimer himself, I asked him for his insights into building guitars using salvaged materials and about spending time in the shop with his son, Vance.

Episode 1.4: The Red Special Special

From humble beginnings to rock and roll legend, the story of how a boy and his father built the world’s greatest electric guitar in a makeshift workshop out of a bunch of scraps.

Huge thanks to Tim Sway of New Perspectives Music for the insightful addition to this episode. Check out his excellent reclaimed guitars at: www.newperspectivesmusic.com and his youtube channel: youtube.com/timsway

Music: Lee Rosevere - Puzzle Pieces Lee Rosevere - Under Suspicion Lee Rosevere - Thoughtful Lee Rosevere - In a Moment ©NADA Copyright Free Music - Uptown Nights (youtu.be/4SJkvi_1R_g) Queen - Excerpt from Bohemian Rhapsody, Live @ Wembley Stadium, Live Aid, 1985

Please check out www.keithdecent.com/ftgu and www.patreon.com/keithdecent for further information on this episode’s topics and how you can help support the show

Further Reading:

Episode 1.3: A Pigment of Your Exhumation (Script)

Hi. I’m Keith Decent and this is From the Ground Up. A podcast about how we make what we make, the materials, the tools, and the stories behind the things we build. In 1986, Ferne Snyder was in a bit of a tizzy. An environmental consulting firm, called Biometric Services, had paid a visit to her home in Allentown Pennsylvania, with a rather bizarre objective. They were going to test her dinnerware for radioactivity using a Geiger counter. Now, if you’ve ever seen a movie that involves atomic energy or nuclear fallout, then you’ve seen a Geiger counter, or at least heard the distinctive clicking sound it makes when it detects radiation. Well at that very moment, poor Ferne was hearing it, too, right there in her dining room, as the consultant waved the device over her prized, red, Fiestaware bowl. The firm found that her bowl was emitting about 4 millirem of radioactivity per hour. The average dose of radiation received by people living in the United States is just 620 millirem per year, and she had been cherishing her Fiestaware for about 40 years. “I don’t know what I’m going to do at this point,” Ferne mused, unable to fully grasp the nearly one and a half million millirem of radiation her little red bowl had emitted into her home since she unwrapped it all those decades ago. But how is this possible? What was so special about Ferne Snyder’s red bowl that made it so incredibly dangerous? Turns out, nothing really. Since The Homer Laughlin China Company had introduced Fiestaware in 1936, people had been crazy about the pieces, the Art Deco Design, the affordability, and most of all, the brilliant hues in which is was available. An early company brochure had boasted: "COLOR! that's the trend today..." going on to say, "It gives the hostess the opportunity to create her own table effects....... Plates of one color, Cream Soups of another, contrasting Cups and Saucers....it's FUN to set a table with Fiesta!" As it turns out, what made Fiestaware so much fun, was also what made it so toxic. Those amazing colors. At the time, Red, yellow, and orange glazes in pottery were made with a pigment called Uranium Dioxide. This highly radioactive powder was also found in the heart of nuclear reactors and some weapons, serving as a fuel for the immensely powerful reactions occurring within. Fiestaware, with its bold, solid colors, was laden with the radioactive glaze in ways that most other multicolored ceramic products were not, even though just about every company used the same stuff to make their pieces. In 1943, the government restricted all usage of Uranium for the war effort, and Laughlin, unable to produce half of its required colors, discontinued Fiestaware until the restrictions were lifted in the 50s, when depleted uranium was used instead of the original formulation. Finally, in 1972 the company fully stopped using Uranium in any of its products, the Cold-War Era public having become much more educated as to its nature. ------------- 1816, the Island of St. Helena, in a deep copper bathtub, Napoleon soaks away his troubles. He is in exile, surrounded by false friends and potential assassins, and feeling the pains of an unknown malady eating away at his stomach. He is a defeated man, forced to live on the coldest, wettest portion of this tiny bit of land in the South Atlantic, in an estate turned prison, called Longwood House. The house itself was well below Napoleon’s standards. The walls were rife with cobwebs and mold, vermin scurried beneath the floorboards, and the whole place was as damp and dark as a tomb. His staff, one of the luxuries afforded to him given his status, did their best to make this place a suitable home for their master. They hung draperies and wallpapered over the blemishes, with the finest patterns of green and gold, the colors of his lost Empire to which he so desperately wished to return. Between he and the walls, he might even whisper a promise to rule once more beside his family, who he left behind in France. The walls, however, had other plans.

The color used in Napoleon’s wallpaper was called Sheele’s Green, and it contained a pigment called Copper Arsenite, a highly toxic, inorganic compound. Discovered by a Swedish chemist, Carl Wilhelm Scheele, the pigment, and its chemical cousin, Paris Green, were used in all sorts of everyday objects. Without knowing the danger, manufacturers used this verdent powder in wallpaper, drapes, clothing, candles, newspapers, dyes, and even children’s toys. It was everywhere. As time went by, people started getting suspicious. Aristocrats and theater performers who wore a lot of green tended to die young. Children wasted away in their bright green rooms. Newspaper printers often succumbed to its fumes. The companies that manufactured the pigment altered the recipe a little, changed the labels a lot, and kept right on selling their vibrant poison.

It wasn’t until an Italian medical scientist, Bartolomeo Gosio, published his research on what he called “Gosio gas” in 1893, that anyone fully knew the truth behind their killer decor. Spurred by a rash of mysterious and sudden infant deaths in the 1830s, Gosio surmised that the epidemic was brought on by environmental factors. He tested the various types of molds found throughout the homes, including in the wallpaper. Knowing that four of every five wallpapers were colored with arsenic, he tested those pigments by combining them with mashed potatoes, and using them to grow a culture of the same mold species. In 1891, the cause of the infant deaths, and likely many other mysterious illnesses, became very clear to Bartolomeo. The molds were actually metabolising the arsenic oxide and producing highly toxic fumes, which he named “Gosio gas,” otherwise known as trimethylarsine. In his experiments, mice exposed to the mold cultures died within minutes. 70 years prior to this discovery, in a damp room at Longwood House, in a bed draped in a brilliant green canopy, Napoleon has drawn his last breath. On may 5th, the former Emperor died of a stomach ulcer, later discovered to be cancerous. But what about the arsenic gas? The lavishly toxic decor so irresponsibly slung over every corner of his every waking moment?

Well, to be honest, no one is really sure. Some people are sure, but no one has proven themselves irrefutably correct. The toxicity of trimethylarsine is highly disputed, experiments and research subsequent to Gosio’s work have both confirmed and debunked his results. Napoleon definitely died due to the ulcer, but his body, which was not embalmed, was moved 19 years after his burial back to his homeland of France. It was noted, several times, that he was remarkably well preserved for a man who’d been dead for nearly two decades. Not only that, but preserved locks of Napoleon’s hair contained detectable levels of arsenic. But again, the mystery prevails. Napoleon was buried in a sealed metal coffin, in an airtight underground vault, covered with cement to maintain both its own impressive integrity and that of his body. The arsenic in his hair could have easily come from any number of sources. At the time, the poison was used as a hair tonic, it was found in fish surrounding St Helena, it was often prescribed by doctors or even taken recreationally. Yes, people back then did arsenic for funsies. Was the ulcer helped along by toxic fumes, leaching into the air around Napoleon? There is strong evidence to consider this probability. Those living with him noted, in their own correspondence, they were suffering from widespread physical distress, including stomach pains and swollen extremities. Some even died, including a child and the Emperor’s personal butler. The death of Napoleon, the rash of mysterious and fatal illness across the 19th century, even Gosio’s dead mice paint a pretty grim portrait of life at the time. The manufacturing industry showed no desire to discontinue use of arsenic based pigments until a much less toxic formulation was popularized at the turn of the century. Should they have just stopped or gone back to the older, duller greens of the olden days? Possibly. But maybe they thought people preferred a shorter, more vibrant life. Maybe they were right. Even after it’s well documented lethality, artists, especially those in the Impressionist and Post Impressionist movements, favored Paris Green, another arsenite color. Gauguin, Cezanne, and Van Gogh all utilized the pigment even as it had gone from being used mostly in wallpaper, to being sprayed as an insecticide and dumped in the sewers of Paris to kill rats. Incidentally, this is where the name “Paris Green” comes from. The color’s formal name is Emerald Green.

Historically, the art world has had a results-first attitude when it comes to pigments. A quick look in any artist’s paint collection and you’ll discover labels that read “White Lead,” “Cadmium Red,” and “Barium Yellow.” It seems that exposing oneself to multiple, lethal chemical compounds over and over is well worth the pursuit of breathtaking art, at least to those engaged in said pursuit. And, really, isn’t that their choice? Unlike when manufacturers pump out poison curtains or radioactive mugs, these artists are technically only endangering themselves. The painters aren’t violating any widespread moral code in order to achieve their aspirations… except in the case of Mummy Brown.

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On a Sunday afternoon, in Victorian London, Edward Burne Jones was hosting lunch for his friend, and fellow painter, Lawrence Alma Tadema and their families. His wife, Georgiana, recounted in her biography of her late husband, that the peculiar afternoon, “was remembered by us all as the day of the funeral of a tube of mummy-paint. We were sitting together after lunch ..., the men talking about different colours that they used, when Mr.Tadema startled us by saying he had lately been invited to go and see a mummy that was in his colourman's workshop before it was ground down into paint. Edward scouted the idea of the pigment having anything to do with a mummy — said the name must be only borrowed to describe a particular shade of brown — but when assured that it was actually compounded of real mummy, he left us at once, hastened to the studio, and returning with the only tube he had, insisted on our giving it decent burial there and then. So a hole was bored in the green grass at our feet, and we all watched it put safely in, and the spot was marked by one of the girls planting a daisy root above it”

A real, dead person, pulverized and used for pigment in a tube of paint. Jones’ reaction was pretty on point for someone who had just discovered he had been brushing the preserved remains of ancient Egyptians on his canvases, but how was this even possible? More importantly why was this even a thing in the first place?

The reasoning behind using mummies for anything, other than chasing would be graverobbers around in cheesy action/adventure movies, was mostly based on a series of incorrect assumptions. Historians in the Middle Ages attributed the darkened color of the mummies themselves to the Egyptians using a substance called “bitumen” in the embalming process. This falsity was based in a belief in the medicinal properties of the substance by the ancient Greeks, who prescribed it for a wide variety of ailments, from toothaches to dysentery. Today, we use it to pave roads, but we call it asphalt. The ancient Persians called it “mum” or “mumiya,” which gave us the term, “mummy.”

There was pitch or tar in some mummies, but not the petroleum-based bitumen as was believed. It was usually wood pitch and a build up of other waxes and resins that had blackened with age. This misconception was of no consequence to the graverobbers, confidence men, importers, apothecaries, dockworkers, doctors, colormen, artists, and anyone else who benefitted from what had become known as the Mummy Trade.

By the 1500s, this grave business had become such a problem that legal restrictions on exporting the corpses were put in place by Egypt, and were promptly ignored. There was just too much profit to be had by raiding the ancient tombs, stealing the bodies, shipping them to Europe, and selling them off in bits and pieces, or just grinding them whole. According to some of the greatest minds of the 16th century, there was almost nothing that could not be cured by a dose of Mummia, as the horrifying substance had come to be known.

After a while, there just wasn’t enough supply to meet the incredible demand. Despite the Egyptians having mummified well into the tens of millions of it’s dead, it is presumed one could only dig so fast. So suppliers of mummia and seekers of fortune sought alternative sources.

Some dealers actually treated the corpses of the recently dead, mostly condemned criminals and slaves, with bitumen and left them in the sun in order to create a facsimile of an ancient mummy. The irony being that these ghastly forgeries were likely the only ones to contain any actual bitumen, one of the main reasons for the trade to exist in the first place. The treated flesh of camels was also commonly sold as authentic mummy.

The fad slowly faded over time. Many of the graverobbers during the trade had remarked how crazy it was that European Christians, who they saw as being quite dainty and delicate, would so willingly consume the flesh of the dead. Many scientists and physicians shared their disgust and were joined in time by more and more voices of dissent. The critics, combined with medical advances, and widespread corruption in the mummy trade, chipped away at the popular belief in the curative properties of mummia.

The art world, however, carried on making pigment out of mummies. The paint itself was able to be found on store shelves up until the 1930s, with a managing director for Roberson’s, a famous London color making firm, lamenting the company finally running out of mummies to grind up in 1964.

Going back again to the scene in Edward Burne-Jones’ yard, it’s easy to see an artist, a scientist, a captain of industry getting caught up in the current of a new trend. The cresting wave of a popular fad is not a place from which most people stop and get all insightful. And it’s really easy to look back from our place in history and clutch our pearls.

But now, in that patch of grass in London, on a Sunday afternoon, we can see a man doing what he believes is right. Despite his friend’s apparent glee at getting to see a corpse get mashed into paint, he sets an example for those in attendance of his strange, tiny funeral, his best attempt to do right by someone he never knew, but could relate to. His family, among which was a young Rudyard Kipling, took note. The future author, decades later detailing the experience and how it stuck with him as follows:

“He descended in broad daylight with a tube of ‘Mummy Brown’ in his hand, saying that he had discovered it was made of dead Pharaohs and we must bury it accordingly. So we all went out and helped – according to the rites of Mizraim and Memphis, I hope – and to this day I could drive a spade within a foot of where that tube lies”

Until next time, this is Keith Decent saying, later makers.