Short Takes: 1983 Electro ES-16
Wait, what?
If there’s any one period of time in Rickenbacker’s history that’s a bit of a black hole, information-wise, it’s the late 1970s through the early 1980s.
They made a ton of basses over that period, but not a lot of guitars. And the guitars they did make generally aren’t the ones collectors obsess over today.
So there aren’t many surviving examples to document, and for a long time nobody seemed especially motivated to document them anyway. There’s no deep well of shared knowledge and very little established lore to draw upon.
And since this was the pre-pre-pre-internet era, there aren’t easily searchable press releases or archived product pages to help us out either.
That’s a long way of saying be prepared for a lot of speculation and second or third hand recollections on this one. We know these guitars exist, but have no real idea why. Consider yourself warned.
In 1983, before special runs as we think of them today even existed, Rickenbacker produced one of the strangest special runs in their history: a handful of Electro ES-16s.
I say handful because…that’s all I can say. There are at least six of them on the Rickenbacker register, and I’m pretty sure I stumbled across at least one more while researching this article. Beyond that…I just don’t know.
What even is an Electro ES-16? The short answer is that it was a rebadged short-scale Rickenbacker 1000 produced for music schools to sell as a private-label student guitar from around 1963 to 1967. You can read all about the short-scale solidbodies here, or the private-label models like the Electro ES-16 here.
So, an obscure, short-scale student guitar. Not exactly a prime candidate for a reissue or special run, no?
For starters, it’s not a reissue. While reissues had just become a “thing” for Rickenbacker the year before with the introduction of the B-Series guitars (click to learn more), the 1983 ES-16s featured contemporary specifications like a button-top Higain pickup and Grover Rotomatic tuners (click to learn more).
So what then, if not a reissue? Well, what’s one thing we know about F.C. Hall? He never threw anything away.
The conventional wisdom is that “somebody” found semi-finished 1000 bodies from 1967 on some dusty pallet in the back of the warehouse and decided to finish and sell them. That “somebody,” I suspect, was likely John Hall.
This is all speculation, but Hall was helping his father prepare the company for sale—or maybe he had already decided to buy the company himself—at the time these guitars were finished. And what’s one of the things you do when you’re preparing to sell a company? You get rid of all the dead stock.
They never appeared in a catalog or price list, and if there was a “sell sheet” it hasn’t surfaced. So how did they get sold? My guess is that dealers got a call or a letter that said “Hey, we found this weird thing, do you want one?”
Some sources say they were sold as part of a set with a TR25 amplifier—just like the originals were often sold along with a M-8 amp. It sounds plausible, but no hard evidence has surfaced.
Why the Electro branding, though? These guitars were also sold as the Rickenbacker 1000, after all.
I keep coming back to the “clean up the dead stock” theory. You want to get rid of the inventory, but you don’t necessarily want these oddball guitars hanging on dealers’ walls wearing the Rickenbacker name. Or maybe there were just leftover truss rod covers from 1967 they wanted to get rid of too. There certainly weren’t collectors clamoring for an Electro reissue in 1983.
Most of this is a guess. We know they exist…and that’s about it. But guitars that don’t necessarily make any sense are one of the things we all love about Rickenbacker. And the 1983 Electro ES-16s certainly fit the bill.