By Request — The Flamingo Guitar Saga

Published by Rick on Tagged Uncategorized

No really, someone from the Midwest who happened to see the first Pee Wee Herman show when he was seven has been curious about my flamingo guitar ever since. So dude, this is for you, but it may be of interest to others as well.

Back in the mid 70’s, when Rick & Ruby were still playing your basic 9:30 to 1:30 gigs, three sets of about 50 minutes each, we began experimenting more with the visual end of performance, not just a few props here and there. It was one thing for Ruby to be wearing outfits that were about as far removed from Vogue Magazine as possible, but I had a flair for the camp side of things, too. We decided it was time to complement our bizarre costuming with stage decorations, and it helped that one of our best friends back then was a budding fashion designer, not to mention the first gay friend I ever had. He had suggested that since our whole stage identity was coming very much from a White Suburban perspective, plastic lawn flamingoes would be a must for our stage setting.

So we scored a couple from a yard sale for maybe a dollar or two, and they became a central part of our stage furnishings, which also for a time included a mirror ball (It WAS the 70’s after all!). There was definite use for the mirror ball, particularly on the torch songs and our rare forays into disco. But the flamingoes just stood there rather unobtrusive, with us not even commenting on them, just allowing them to co-exist on stage with us.

At a gig in summer of 76 in San Jose, someone, sort of a heckler, though I knew him, had a great idea. The guy was the estranged husband of a woman I’d been dating at the time, and she may well have been there with him pretending there was nothing going on. He never impressed me as having anything resembling a sense of humor, but in the middle of one of our between-song patter sections, he yelled out, “Hey, why don’t you play some flamingo guitar?” Somehow the pun resonated with me, especially since I knew I couldn’t play Flamenco guitar if my life depended on it. I picked up one of our plastic stage buddies and strummed the guitar with it, not knowing that 38 years later, that bad pun would still be with me.

Strumming the guitar with the flamingo became a regular throw-away line in the act, but we began to get more elaborate with it, doing a bit of choreography, and constructing other props that amplified the same joke, since we liked running gags anyway. When you have to entertain for 3-4 hours a night, you tend to look for any kind of break from singing. I remember one stupid prop we made out of cardboard and some black string that unknowingly became exactly the same design as what would come later.

In the next three years, we would graduate from the cabarets into concert venues, and insert here all the almost-famous stories and who-we-opened-for stories that I’ve already talked about in other blogs. Suffice to say, in 1979, we made a fair amount of money, and Ruby got the idea of having an actual functioning electric guitar custom-made for me. As my Christmas present, she, our keyboardist, and our manager contributed to have such a design become reality, enlisting a now-defunct company from San Francisco known as Stars Guitars, who had also made a guitar out of a toilet seat for The Tubes.

Stars Guitars were the right ones to call, but this wasn’t going to be cheap. The man who did most of the work was a guitar enthusiast who was also paralyzed from the waist down, but obviously very good with his hands. He liked and understood Rick & Ruby, which helped a lot. One of the other guitars he’d done, besides the toilet seat, was a Jack Daniels bottle design for an Eddie Van Halen guitar, name drop city. Anyway, this clever man, whose name I’ve unfortunately forgotten, took a neck from an old Fender Telecaster guitar, attached on self-built wood pieces in the shape of the flamingo’s head and body, and doing such an intricate job that even after all this time, it’s impossible for me to tell where he soldered the pieces together. Before painting the whole thing a bright pink (except the beak of course!), he added a marble in the flamingo’s head, where the tuning pegs are, to simulate the bird’s eye. The price tag for the whole job was $1500, and today would probably be a steal at $5000. You could get a decent used car for $1500 back then, but Rick & Ruby decided to splurge on me!

The guitar made its national TV debut on Mork & Mindy a year or so later, and on the Pee Wee show a couple months after that. It’s been with me for 34 years, and it’s been very rare where I have performed with it on any stage without acknowledging the bad joke that “flamingo guitar” is. The guitar has suffered some damage over the years, most prominently, a bit of the beak breaking off when the thing broke loose from its strap and crashed onto the floor. I was able to find the piece, but after a couple of super-gluings, the thing just mysteriously broke off again to where I couldn’t find it. It’s also not the easiest guitar to keep in tune, but many Fender guitars are like that.

For the time being, it stays in UK, while I keep my Gibson Les Paul in the US for work there. (Saves me the extra baggage cost when I fly!) I have a feeling it will stay in England, even if I don’t. So there’s the story, Midwestern fan! Now I can sleep well, having kept a promise.

November 14th, 2014



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