Pink Is the Color of Love: a Guitar Story
It was my very first electric guitar: a pink Kramer Focus 3000. Yeah, a pink guitar. It was the 80s; you had to be there.
(To be slightly more precise, my very first electric guitar was a no-name Flying-V knockoff that Marc, the guitarist in my garage band, had drilled large holes in, Swiss-cheese style, and then gotten bored with. He gave this ‘Swiss-cheese guitar’ to me, and I made rapid progress with the lower action of an electric guitar, having tons of fun blasting power chords, even with the horrible gritty distortion of the dime-store pickups through a shitty borrowed amp.)
But back to the pink Focus. It was the first guitar I bought with my own money Well, not exactly my own money — it was money that I didn’t actually have.
I was a freshman at University of Houston, attending on a scholarship that included room and board. It’s the only way I could have afforded college. It was kind of strange living in the dorm at a commuter school like U of H (AKA “cougar high”), but my scholarship was through the Honors Program (now the Honors College), and I was in the Honors dorm with all the other weird-smart kids, and lucky enough to be rooming with my best friend from high school, Robbie (the Willie-style vocalist of Shattered Man fame). I had no job, and no money. Tuition, room and board, and books were all paid for, and I was supposed to be focusing on school, not working.
I was stuck there in the dorm with no musical outlet, having left my drum set at home, for obvious reasons. (Nobody wants to hear attempts at Tom Sawyer at full volume on actual drums in a tiny dorm room.) I had been messing around with guitar for about a year — initially with the aforementioned Swiss-cheese axe, and later with a huge black Fender Gemini II acoustic that I got via a trade that was, well, let’s say somewhat dubious. (That’s another story, for another time.)
I had gotten in on the first wave of those student credit-cards that banks aim at college kids, hoping to mire them in debt before they know anything about managing money. I had a pretty good understanding of the danger of compounding interest, so I did at least know not to use credit the way a lot of other kids did, as if it were ‘free money.’
Back then, if you were in Houston and into rock music, the Drum Keyboard Guitar Shop out on Chimney Rock was the place to go — one of the early music super-stores, having evolved from a tiny place called the Drum Shop to the familiar style of massive store containing every possible configuration of awesome gear, from guitars to synths to massive drum kits, to PA systems and recording equipment. It’s long gone now, replaced by Guitar Center or whatever other chain super-store.
This store was pretty badass, and I spent a lot of time hanging around there, ogling all the gear, and wondering what it would be like to be able to afford and play on shiny, delicious-looking stuff. Oh, and fruitlessly attempting to flirt with that one impossibly hot chick at the register.
I was down there (likely having driven over in my shitty red Ford LTD), staring at the enormous wall o’ guitars (and of course listening to the unremitting parade of basement rocker dudes fumbling their way through Crazy Train or Smoke On The Water on whatever plugged-in instruments were sitting out), and noticed a guitar that had been marked down a lot, like a hundred bucks, with an obvious “we need to sell this shit” hand-drawn marker sign attached to it.
It was a shiny new Kramer, a Focus 3000. The Kramer Focus was their mid-priced range, made in Japan (pre-bubble Japan, when that still kind of meant “cheaper”), with three pickups in HSS configuration — the bridge pickup switchable from single-coil to humbucker — and a real Floyd Rose tremolo system. And the reason for the price drop was pretty apparent — the guitar was, well, a pretty ridiculous pink color.
I later found out this particular finish was called Bubble Gum Pink, but in Texas, this shade would generally be referred to as ‘titty pink’: more or less the color of Pepto-Bismol.
This was when the hair-metal trend was in full swing, and glam-metal bands like Poison and Warrant were high on the charts. There was an abundance of neon and pastel colors in the instruments and outfits, tons of lime green and fluorescent traffic-cone orange. Yeah, even the guys in Mötley Crüe were getting into the act with their Theater of Pain album, sporting scarves and sparkles out the ying-yang.
But even with all that, Bubble Gum Pink appeared to be a bridge too far, and they’d dropped the price by a pretty huge margin, I believe from $450 to $350.
$350 was a crazy sum of money for me as a jobless college student in 1988, and I knew that it would take me a year or more in even the most optimistic scenario to save up that kind of money. But I had that shiny new credit card in my wallet. And I had been thinking for quite a while about getting something real to play on. I knew I’d never make any progress learning if I didn’t have a decent instrument. My ambition (if not my talent) has superseded the Swiss-cheese axe.
And having that credit card, I began reasoning to myself that this sort of purchase was like buying a car, or a house. The only way to buy these expensive but vital items is with a loan, and then paying them off in increments over time. And obviously this guitar was a necessity, like a house. I needed it.
I walked out of there with that pink guitar and a small Crate amplifier (I’m thinking it must have been a G40C), with the obligatory 80s stereo-chorus (clearly aping the coveted, super-elite Galien-Kruger amps that were showing up on Rush and Iron Maiden records). It’s that instantly recognizable, sweet, sweet chorus-drenched 80s sound. I ended up coming in just under the $500 credit limit of that predatory college credit card.
I don’t remember how long it took me to pay it off — at least a couple of years. But I played the shit out of that Kramer Focus 3000 over my (five, yeah, five) college years, right up until the time I left for my stint abroad, when I lived and worked in Japan on the JET Program. My buddy Robbie (the high school bestie and college roommate), ever the charitable soul, took that guitar and the amp off my hands for more than they were likely worth, and off I went to Asia. I had zero cash at the time, and was moving thousands of miles away, starting from nothing, so I needed every cent I could put together.
A few years later, on a trip back to the States, flush with cash from that overpaid government teaching gig, I bought a used 1989 Les Paul Standard (visions of Slash, Jimmy Page, and Marc Bolan in my head) for $500. I still have it today and play pretty constantly. I love the Les, but always regretted getting rid of the titty-pink Focus. You never forget your first love, or your first guitar. Or something like that. But Robbie had eventually sold it to someone else, citing his fat fingers as an impediment to making any real progress with guitar. Plus, you know, fucking pink guitar, who could blame the guy?
Fast-forward to the present, 25 years later. (Holy shit, 25 years?) I’m still very active musically as my alter-ego, Jake Viceroy, in the band Hairstrike. We play all the 80s metal schlock (Poison, Guns ’N’ Roses, Whitesnake, Scorpions), and have a ball dressing up in hair-metal drag when we play. We look totally absurd, but the fun part is that we all can actually play. We sound pretty fucking respectable — check out the videos on YouTube.
Over the years I’ve thought about adding another guitar as a backup for the Les, and checked sites like EBay off and on for era-appropriate guitars, entering the words “Kramer Focus” numerous times, and never finding quite what I was looking for. The ideal in my mind would have been a similar Focus (possible the slightly better 6000) in a similar color, maybe magenta or red. Something that would go with the ridiculous costumes we wear when we play.
A couple of weeks ago I was talking to Joe Miller, who owns our rehearsal space, about getting rid of the Fender DeVille 212 amp that I have. It’s a real tube amp, 80 watts, and way more amp than I would ever really need. It’s the loudest fucking amp I have ever heard. Never mind getting this thing to 11 — I can barely get it to 1 and a half before it’s blowing people out of their chairs like the Maxell dude. “It’s really quite frightening.” It’s also absurdly heavy, and at my relatively advanced age I don’t want to blow out my back or get a hernia.
Joe has an ad board in the rehearsal space, but he suggested I put it up for sale on Reverb.com, a used- and vintage-instrument marketplace site that I’d never heard of. Cool, Joe, thanks, I’ll check it out.
That night I loaded up Reverb.com in the browser, hoping to see what DeVilles are going for, and right there on the front page of the site — holy shit. Holy fucking shit. A pink Kramer. Not just a pink Kramer. A pink. Kramer. Focus. 3000. There were a ton of pictures, and it was clearly in awesome shape. I couldn’t believe it. I have never scrambled faster in my life to grab a credit card and pay for something online.
The seller pinged me later to let me know he’d shipped it, and in the back-and-forth, I let him know about my 80s metal band. He told me that in a fit of nostalgia he’d plugged it in to a Marshall and shredded a bit before packing it up for shipping. I told him that my very first guitar had been a titty-pink Kramer Focus 3000, which was why I was so excited to be buying this particular guitar. Then he said something interesting: “Well, I’ve never seen one in this color before. This could very well be your actual guitar.”
That really hadn’t occurred to me until he said it. I was so happy to be getting the exact same guitar, I hadn’t considered that it might be literally the exact same guitar.
The moment of truth came when I picked it up at the UPS Shipping Center (signature required, and nobody home to sign for it). A buddy of mine from work had come with me, and helped me get it out of the packing right there in the parking lot, styrofoam peanuts flying everywhere in the wind. I couldn’t wait to look at it.
The pink on the body had faded and yellowed to almost a peach color, but the color on the headstock was unchanged. Yep, that pastel Bismol pink. I looked it over, looking for the dings that the seller had mentioned, and had shown in some of the photos. And yes, right there on the bottom was the ding I remember putting on mine. Same size and shape, same location. (I had bought it brand new, without a scratch on it, and that first big ding/dent was one I remembered very clearly.)
Granted, the bottom is a place you can easily imagine someone laying a scratch or a ding on a guitar, but the size, shape, location, are a little too precise. It seems crazy, but the bottom line is that it’s vastly more likely than not that this is the very first electric guitar I ever bought, making its way back to me after 25 years. I can’t believe what great shape it’s in. I have been trying to imagine who else’s hands this thing has passed through. What sort of people buy a pink Kramer? How or why did the manage to keep it in such beautiful condition?
The universe is a weird and wonderful place, and this is one of the weirder and more wonderful events I’ve experienced in my life in it.
I am debating whether or not to restore it to its original, glorious titty-pink, but either way I am so looking forward to strapping up with it for a gig with Hairstrike. I have plugged it into an actual Galien-Kruger amp now, and yes, it sounds pretty fucking rad.
