Bartell (guitars)
Riverside, California-based maker of guitars and basses
Bartell was a Riverside, California-based maker of guitars and basses, founded by Paul Barth and Ted Peckels. The company was active from 1964 to 1969. According to Peckels, approximately 2,000 instruments were made during this period. The company also made instruments for Hohner, St. George, and Lancer.
George Harrison
George Harrison was gifted a Bartell fretless guitar (the first prototype) by Hollywood session player and music shop owner Al Casey, whose wife Maxine on 1 August 1967 took it up to Blue Jay Way, where Harrison was staying. Harrison took the guitar back to the UK, where it ended up at Abbey Road Studios. John Lennon was intrigued by the Bartell, but he found it difficult to play. They passed it around, then put it in the studio locker in studio 2. In a 6 June 1968 radio interview with Kenny Everett, Harrison referred to it as 'the mad guitar'.
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This entry incorporates text from “Bartell (guitars)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.