Overview: So Why Am I Doing All This?

The Rickenbacker101 manifesto

The question I most commonly get asked is why am I doing—waves hands—all this to begin with? A year and a half or so into Rickenbacker101 you’re probably due an answer.

The short answer is that when I like something, I really like it. I want to know everything there is to know about it. And it’s not just Rickenbackers. Ask me about Jaguar E-Types, Parker Duofold and Vacumatic fountain pens, or Depression-era North Carolina politics—or any other number of subjects—and I’ll talk your ear off.

That’s the important piece: once I learn something interesting, I want to share it.

Like, have you ever wondered why banana flavored candy doesn’t taste like a banana? Long story short—which I admittedly don’t do well—the Gros Michel was the dominant banana cultivar until a fungus wiped it out in the 1950s. The Cavendish replaced the Gros Michel, and that’s what you eat today. And—importantly—the two taste different.

But the “banana candy” recipe was formulated when the Gros Michel was still the world’s go-to. So banana candy does in fact taste like bananas…just not the one we’re used to.

Crazy, right?

I realize that was completely off-topic, but I had to tell you anyway. That’s kind of the point. Once I learn something interesting, I feel obligated to share it. It’s almost a compulsion.

And while I can fall down a bunch of rabbit holes, I always come back to Rickenbackers.

I won’t bore you with the formative stories that created this fascination, but I’ll try to tell you why it’s only gotten stronger the more I’ve learned.

I work for a large French tire manufacturer that is very proud of its heritage of innovation. At over 130 years old, it has spent decades deliberately shaping its future. Every major decision has a rationale. Every course correction has a strategy. Sure, unexpected discoveries happen, but the response to these is always measured, intentional, and carefully planned.

I don’t see any of that when I look at Rickenbacker’s past, and it’s fascinating.

The more I learn, the less Rickenbacker’s history feels like a carefully executed master plan and the more it feels like a collection of happy accidents, fortunate timing, and people making the best decision they could with the information they had at the time.

If I ever wrote a book about it, I’d call it something like “A Series of Mostly Fortunate Accidents”.

That’s another question I get asked a lot: am I ever going to turn all this into a book? I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t thought about it.

But the temptation isn’t to write another Rickenbacker history. That’s been done, and done better than I could. The temptation is to write a different kind of Rickenbacker book.

Most of the books that already exist follow a familiar formula: a chronological history with detailed coverage of the early years, model-by-model documentation, and not enough time spent on the John Hall years. And those books are valuable. We wouldn’t know much of what we know without them.

But the story that keeps grabbing me is all the things the books don’t really cover. The unintended consequences. The strange detours. The near-misses. The decisions that seemed insignificant at the time but ended up defining entire eras of the company.

Put simply, there is no master plan, and forcing a chronology onto it doesn’t tell you the real story. The history of Rickenbacker is a collection of happy accidents, improvised solutions, strange decisions, and unintended consequences that somehow produced one of the most distinctive guitar companies on earth. And nobody’s ever really told the story that way.

Maybe that’s why I keep doing this. Every time I think I’ve reached the end of the story, I discover another fortunate accident. And when I learn something interesting, I just have to share it.

So that’s why “all this.” Stick around. I’m just getting started.

And to see all the rabbit holes we’ve already gone down, may I suggest a visit to the Rickenbacker101 Archive?