Messenger guitars are truly unique and cool!

Messenger guitars are not something you see every day. What's that you say? You never heard of one? Well, sit back and we'll have a little chat...

Messenger guitars were born in California around 1967. The company was known as Musicraft Inc. out of San Francisco. Bert Casey and Arnold Curtis were the principals involved. They intended to expand production in 1968 by moving to Astoria, Oregon but vanished from the scene soon thereafter.

Messengers were built in six string, twelve string and bass configurations. Some had stereo and some have built in fuzz units. All had a revolutionary aluminum through-the-body neck design. The neck was tuned to 440 hertz (or A) and it needed no adjustments. The guitars came in sunburst, red, green and a few other finishes.

Now that's the good news...

I fell in love with this guitar back in the late sixties. I bought Grand Funk Railroads red album and the cover had a picture of Mark Farner, Mel Schachter and Don Brewer. Mark was leaning over playing a guitar I have never seen before.

It sort of looked like a Harmony guitar but not quite. There was no cutaways and the pot configuration seemed different. Someone told me it was a Les Paul. Since I never heard of Les Paul at that time nor ever seen one, I assumed it was true. There was better pictures on their live album and I decided I had to get one of these! I started playing guitar in the mean time and realized my mistake on what a Les Paul looked like! Well that wasn't what Mark Farner was playing.

I don't remember when I found out it was a Messenger guitar but I started looked high and low for one of these guitars. Around 1974 I saw one for sale in the local paper. When I met up with the owner, he told me he was selling because he was buying a Les Paul Custom.(hmmm) I paid him 200 bucks for the guitar and off I went very excited about my new ax!

My Messenger is a very sweet and unique guitar. It has a semi-hollow body style, a bound body and neck, stereo configured, red sunburst finish and a Bigsby tailpiece. I'm not sure if they had any names for the different guitars in their lineup. I have never heard of any.

There are some crazy quirks with this guitar that's never seen on others.

For instance...

• It's fairly heavy for a semi-hollow body and has a habit of the head tilting towards the floor when you let go of the neck. It falls a little too quick.
• I have always thought the plastic nut had a defect in it as the high-E string was forever popping out of the groove. I found out later that this was endemic on all of the Messenger guitars. Some people tied a string or headband around the head stock to hold the string in place. Just a lousy mismatch between the nut and Grover tuners.
• The pickup selector switch is located near the neck pickup. There is no plate in the back of the guitar body that corresponds with the switch. I'm not sure how you would work on the switch if you took it out of the plate area behind the pots. You couldn't get it back in its hole without endless patience or special tools.
• The weak link with any Messenger guitar is the pickups. For a guitar that was far ahead of its time, Musicraft used standard, cheap, run of the mill single coil DeArmond pickups. Weak, noisy and prone towards terrible feedback. I can see why Mark Farner replaced his with Humbuckers. This guitar is just not suited for loud rock and roll music.

On the plus side, it does stay in tune and you can adjust the strings down for the lowest action without fret buzz.

It does have that cool Grand Funk Railroad sound when you play songs off of the early albums such as Closer to Home, Heartbreaker and Inside Looking Out.

I understand there was only around 300-400 guitars and basses built during the short period Musicraft operated. If you can find one cheap, get it!

If you are interested check out Mark Farner's blog. Also this website has some great pictures and if you can read Japanese so much more!

Messenger guitars are truly one-of-a-kind instruments. It's fortunate for us that Mark Farner's mom gave him one back in the day. Otherwise they would have been consigned to that great trash heap of unknown and forgotten guitars, relics of luthier dreams!

Below are some pictures of my Messenger Stereo serial number A1199.

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