For some reason, just about any shop selling the 330 lifts its online promotional copy from the Rickenbacker website with a paragraph which starts, “Careful acoustic research has resulted in the full, rich and warm sound of this model.” Which is odd for two reasons: firstly no other guitar seems to suffer from the same ubiquity of description online, and secondly the description in question doesn’t even come close to actually describing the guitar. The main reason for choosing a Rickenbacker is because they look exquisitely cool. And under very certain circumstances they sound good. In that order.
Everything about the look of a 330 is distinctive. The deep, getting close to symmetrical cut-aways in the body shape, the scimitar-styled sound hole, the ‘R’ tail-piece and the contouring it’s set in, the split-level scratch plate arrangement, and of course the iconic sweeping logo on the headstock. Nothing else quite looks like one, and that even includes any of the copies.
When I was 12 or 13, I met the implausibly charismatic, and by his own admission, incredibly good-looking, David Greenfield. The same age as me, he’d somehow managed to pack rather more into his life than I’d managed to achieve, which included some basic knowledge of female anatomy, but more importantly a Jam gig in Newcastle, when they were touring All Mod Cons. I think at this point in my life I still thought that Some Girls by Racey was the acme of rock and roll, so I was set to get a fast-tracked musical education.
David seemed to have a wardrobe basically modelled on the inside sleeve photos of Paul Weller from the Sound Affects album – all groovy jackets with dapper little stripes, whilst I had a school uniform and a couple of pairs of Millets jeans. Collectively, we must have looked like a scene from Gregory’s Girl. In the summer of 1981, not having released an album that year, The Jam embarked on the Buckets and Spades tour of costal towns, taking in the St Austell Coliseum in Cornwall. David somehow procured the necessary tickets and, more impressively, a lift from someone else’s parents from our backwater in South Devon, to what would ordinarily be a backwater further down the peninsula.
I’d, understandably I think, never been to a gig before and pretty much had no idea what to expect. I guess I was imagining Top of the Pops but a bit louder. After what seemed an eternity of waiting and jostling amongst the mods, skinheads, squaddies and students, the support act’s gear was finally cleared from the stage, the lights went down and John Weller was barking his customary introduction to the band. Before he’d actually got onto the stage, the younger Weller was thrashing out the riff to But I’m Different Now, and as he arrived the band kicked in and I experienced that heart-shaking, bone crunching, stomach churning epiphany that will never quite be captured again. Weller, in a black suit, white shirt, wire thin wielding one of his black Ricky 330s. This visual, visceral and sonic perfection instantaneously forged deep and permanent synaptic pathways across my brain.
So, a few years later, armed with £550 in cash earned from my all too short career as a film extra, I managed to get my friend Paddy to drive me up to Bristol where a shop had two 330s in stock - a black one and a fireglo (that’s Rickenbacker for sunburst). I thought I’d gone there with an open mind, but on seeing the two of them, it just wasn’t close – it had to be the black one.
Having bought the guitar though it took me about another three years to get a decent noise out of it. I already had a Stratocaster by this point, and I found the 330 just about the weirdest thing I’d ever played. The neck is incredibly narrow and feels both delicate and cramped at first. And then there’s the sound – it just does Rickenbacker. Listening back to The Jam now, I’ve got to concede that Weller didn’t actually manage to coax a decent sound out of his Rickenbacker collection very often – there’s the occasional few bars of promise, such as the intro to Man in the Corner Shop, but as soon as he leaves the arpeggios behind more typically it sounds like a cat being strangled, or a Telecaster with knackered strings through a nasty transistor amp.
Once you’ve worked out what the 330 can, but mainly can’t do, it’s a brilliant jangling rhythm guitar with a unique sound. It’s also bizarrely well-built and robust given its looks – twenty-odd years on and a fair few gigs behind it and mine still plays superbly. The action is lightening quick, the intonation is perfect and the twin truss-rods have kept the wafer-thin neck absolutely true.
For a better idea of how good a Rickenbacker can sound, doing what it does best, Johnny Marr is the far better British exponent of the instrument – and there are a few clips to be found online to prove the point.
David and I drifted apart in the post-Jam years, when he joined the Royal Marines and I headed off to university in London. He was a huge part of my teenage years, and even though I hadn’t seen him for a couple of years when he committed suicide in the early 90s, it felt like a massive loss. I don’t think David ever saw my 330, which is a shame because he’d have loved it. It’s all so vivid, but it’s more than a lifetime away.
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