Short Takes: The 1963 “Suzi Arden” 360/12

The Suzi Arden 360/12OS headstock

“Mr. Hall, he wanted a 12-string, but he wanted the head short, a compact head, he didn’t want six keys and another six keys. He said could we come up with a configuration to make it not much bigger than a regulation six-string head. So I drilled around, and I came up with what we’ve got today…

…I was head of the woodshop at that time, and we worked it different ways. We thought about putting the rout all the way through, in fact I think I made a couple with the rout all the way through. I think it looked better without it. We ended up with a rout about an eighth of an inch in. If you can see through it, I don’t know, it doesn’t look as good. But I’m not a musician…

…I mean, I knew what a classical guitar was from the side. But if you wanted a short head, you had to come in from the side some way, you had to mount them a different way, you know? I was going to go all the way through, like a classical, with the first one we made, but then we came up with one with a back on it. It didn’t take very long to come up with it, you know.”

-Dick Burke, on the birth of the Rickenbacker 12-string headstock

In any list of “the most important individual Rickenbacker guitars” you’re going to see George Harrison’s 1963 360/12OS. And that’s fair—that guitar created the craze that made 12-string guitars a core element of Rickenbacker’s brand identity. While Rickenbacker may not have invented the electric 12-string guitar, they absolutely are a key reason it is a part of the common language of modern “rock music” today and it’s largely due to that guitar.

But I’d argue that there’s another Rickenbacker 12-string that’s just as if not even more important. And that’s because Harrison’s 360/12 wasn’t the first Rickenbacker 12-string guitar, it was the second. And there may not have been a second if one Suzi Arden hadn’t loved the first one so much she refused to give the prototype back. So let’s talk about THAT guitar.

1963 Suzi Arden 360/12

We’ve already touched briefly on how it came to be—F.C. Hall asked for a 12-string guitar with a short headstock, shop manager Dick Burke figured out how to make that short headstock, and in July, 1963 Burke’s headstock got attached to the now-departed Roger Rossmeisl’s 360 to create the first 12-string Rickenbacker.

Bear in mind that the “R” tailpiece you see in the picture above was a later addition—as new the guitar came equipped with a standard trapeze tailpiece. And just like the tailpiece, everything else on the guitar—apart from Burke’s ingenious headstock design—was stock 1963 360 “New Capri”. Everything—electronics, gold plastics, Rogan knobs, hardware, binding, triangle inlays. The only other accommodations made for the extra six strings were extra notches in the nut and bridge and a truss rod cover reshaped to facilitate access to Burke’s headstock routs.

1963 Suzi Arden 360/12 detail

One thing that will jump out to the keen-eyed among you is the stringing. While Rickenbackers are known today for their “backward” stringing, with the octave string second in each pair, this first Rickenbacker 12-string was strung “traditionally” with the octave strings first. Harrison’s was the first to get strung “Rickenbacker-style”.

The other major difference between the first and the second Rickenbacker 12-string was purely cosmetic. Now you may have noticed that I referred to this guitar as a “New Capri” and Harrison’s as an “Old Style”. So what gives?

In late 1961 Roger Rossmeisl redesigned the old semi-hollowbodied Capris by thinning down the body, enlarging the horns, and lowering and pinching the waist. The result was the “New Capri” silhouette that is still in use today on the 330 and 360WB.

Now “New Capri” is a collector term that was never used in period marketing. Heck, even the “Capri” name had disappeared by 1960. So what is the difference between the “New Capri” and the “Old Style” 360? To quote the classic Dustin Hoffman movie The Graduate, “plastics”!

Put simply, the New Capri had gold plastics with brown Rogan knobs, and the Old Style had white plastics with black KK knobs. So Suzi Arden’s July, 1963 guitar with its gold plastics was one of the last “New Capris”, and George Harrison’s November, 1963 guitar was one of the first “Old Styles”.

So we have the guitar, now we need to know why we call it the “Suzi Arden” guitar. Born in Virginia Beach, Mariam Darden began performing as a child as part of the group Mary Belle and the Darden Family.

Through the 1950s, under the stage name Suzi Arden, she performed with both a number of “country and western” groups and as a solo artist, including numerous national radio and television shows. By the early 1960’s she made her way to Las Vegas where she began a long residency at the Mint Hotel and Casino as the leader of “The Suzi Arden Show”.

That’s where she caught the eye of F.C. Hall, and became one of his regular new product testers. In late 1963 he asked her to try out a new guitar and give him her thoughts.

“Mr. Hall brought me the 12-string, it was the first one…he always brought me new things he was doing. He said to try this new 12-string out and see how you like it. I did, and I wouldn’t let him take it back!

…the Rickenbacker was so sweet, sounded so good, and added to my show so much. It made a sharp, beautiful sound—there’s nothing I think sounds as beautiful as a Rickenbacker twelve…I used the 12-string always from that point on, for the next twenty-something years.”

-Suzi Arden on her 1963 360/12

Based on her feedback (plus the fact she kept the prototype!), Hall ordered two more prototypes to be built immediately. You know where number two went, and you probably know where number three eventually ended up as well!

1963 Suzi Arden 360/12

If she had hated it, would Hall have built another? There’s no way to know for sure. Still, it was the first Rickenbacker 12-string guitar—the proof of concept that laid the foundation for all that would follow. If it doesn’t belong on the list of most important individual Rickenbacker guitars I don’t know what does!

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