A showcase of guitars on the web

The Del Mars

FEATURED ARTIST SEPTEMBER 08

In Berkeley, summer of 1998, bassist Bill Rock and drummer Dave Indigo started an instrumental surf band and got their guitarist/keyboardist roommate Ramon Sanchez to join them. They lived on Alcatraz below Telegraph. Bill had moved from San Francisco from a residence hotel on 6th Street after a stranger randomly stabbed him in the gut in the hallway. The practice room was a shoebox with an upright piano against one wall, the door to the driveway and two windows opposite. Ramon's bedroom was at one end, the kitchen at the other. Ramon and Bill kept cats. Indigo's drums were in the corner next to a funky coffee table. They needed a guitar player so Bill called John Lee. Johnny had just bought a '59 Fender Jazzmaster. (Continue reading bio here...)

Use the mp3 player below to listen to a track by The Del Mars.

The Del Mars - Track 3


More information about The Del Mars is available at http://www.johnnydelmar.com/

Johnny Del Mar on the '59 Jazzmaster

I bought this '59 Jazzmaster in 1998 for about $2,000 from Jay Rosen (http://www.jayrosen.com). The frets were badly worn so Tom Cerletti replaced them and the tuners. Tom is good at replacing frets and restoring damaged vintage instruments. I started playing in a surf cover band that became the Del Mars because this was the perfect instrument. One of my guitar students had sold me a black face Fender Tremolux many years before with a blonde cabinet that had two Fane speakers. Later I bought a reverb tank from Jay. I had a Fender 2 X 12 cabinet with Electro Voice speakers that I replaced with D120 JBL speakers that I bought one at a time.

The guitar was set up and the bridge glued into place by guitar tech Steve White in Berkeley. In October 2006 after my band's Oakland practice space on the second floor burned down in a fire that started at the carpet store next door and totally gutted most of the other spaces, the guitar had been submerged in its case by water from the fire hoses. The case has a water mark halfway up the case. The Jazzmaster wicked up water which caused the finish on the body to have striations between the bridge plate and the bottom of the guitar and the neck was warped. I took the guitar to Tom Cerletti and he got it back into playing condition. I had to get my speakers reconed at abrownsound in Marin after the fire and take apart, dry out and clean all my amps. The particle board baffle on the cabinet was crumbling from water damage so my neighbor made me a new one out of aircraft plywood.