You may not know her name, but Carla Olson has worked with just about everybody as a singer/guitarist, songwriter, and producer. Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, Percy Sledge, Ry Cooder, Mick Taylor, Eric Johnson, Gene Clark, John Fogerty, Don Henley…the list goes on and on.
She first gained notice in the LA punk/pop scene in the late 1970s, playing in a band called the Textones that also featured future Go-Go Kathy Valentine. Already a Rickenbacker fan, in 1980 she called the factory and asked F.C. Hall himself to make her something special.
Now looking at that photo, you’re probably thinking “OK, Azureglo 620 with toasters…I didn’t think they were making toasters in 1981?” They weren’t. Those were added later by Seymour Duncan himself. So what’s so special about it?
Let’s zoom in a bit:
Checkered binding! Now the 660—with the same cresting wave body and checkered binding—has been around since 1991 so it may not seem like a big deal, but ask yourself this: have you seen another 620 with checkered binding? When I originally posted this, I said I hadn’t, but John Minutaglio reminded me of another one that we will talk about soon so there are at least two…but still pretty rare!
Now we’ve talked before about how memory is a funny thing. Carla has claimed that F.C. offered her “some checkerboard binding he found in the warehouse.” He may well have offered the binding, but it was still in use on the 4002 bass (click to learn more) at the time, so it wasn’t some pile of dead stock he stumbled across. But does it really matter? Show me another 620 with checkered binding.
Now if you read the subhead of this article you’ll know that something bad happened. And it did, in 1988 when the guitar was stolen from a storage unit and disappeared. Olson made several appeals over the years for any information or sightings, but none came.
Until 2024, that is, when photos of a 1981 620 that could only be Olson’s guitar began circulating on Facebook.
It appears that at some point the guitar made its way across the Pacific. There it ended up in the hands of a Japanese collector who recognized the unusual checkered binding but knew nothing of the guitar’s history.
Sadly, once contacted, the collector—who had no idea he had purchased a guitar that had been stolen decades before—was unwilling to return or sell the guitar to Olson.
So its location is known, but it’s not with Olson. Like we said, sometimes not every story has a happy ending.
What a jack wagon! No way I'm keeping a stolen guitar. I don't care how rich or poor I am.
I remember when the guitar was found — it’s a shame! What a cool and unique example.