Electric History: Guitar Stories by The Music Zoo. Mike Eldred of El Cabron Guitars, Early Days of Charvel & Running The Fender Custom Shop

I used the Papa Legba rub on my scrambled eggs last night. I'm making this new thing now. It's called Kitchen Dust. It's a bunch of different spices, rubs in it, but then there's a bunch of other spices in it and I keep it next to the stove.

It's funny because the bottles I hardly sell the bottles anymore, but I was selling 40 pounds every maybe two months to this barbecue restaurant up in Arizona. And now they hit me up — it's 80 pounds. It's incredible.

Life is short, and I tell people you got to try everything and you got to really kind of go after it. So if you have an idea in your head, it's like, well, I wonder if I could do that. Just go ahead and do it and then see what happens.

You may fall on your face, but failure is a lot easier to deal with than regret. If it doesn't work, it doesn't work. But if it does work, man, that's fun.

I started playing guitar when I was about 14. My dad had bought guitars for us when we were younger, and I didn't really actually start picking up the guitar until I was about 14.

Mike Farley was a guy who told me, 'We got to go see this guitar player.' So we drove up to Hollywood to Gazzarri's and they were doing four sets a night and they were doing covers. Ed was playing a Les Paul at that point and then he had the White Explorer.

They came out to open up for UFO and Roth comes out with a bottle of wine, no shirt, looking like Jim Dandy, and because they were a local band, everybody knew who they were. He came out and said, 'We're going to do all originals tonight.'

Then they just went at it. It was one of the best shows I'd ever seen of those guys. Ed killed it. And then UFO came out and at one point Schenker sat on the drum stage and just stopped playing. They were so rattled by that opening band.

I've seen a lot of misinformation. I saw something the other day and they showed a picture of this Strat and they said, 'Oh yeah, it was Frankenstein before.' No. Ed went out and got a '64 Strat or '65 Strat.

He bought the body and neck from Charvel's manufacturing and he painted it and put it together. When he put it together, it wasn't quite right. He had to take it back up to Charvel and I think Carl went in and tweaked it and made it play better.

It was the transition. Grover was buying it at that point and Wayne was on his way out.

When Ed showed me the guitar and told me where he got it, I said, 'Well, I want to get one.' He gave me the phone number for Charvel. So I called Charvel and I spoke to Grover.

I thought, I'm going to get a job building guitars. Number one, that would be pretty cool. Number two, I could probably get the guitar cheaper. I can work on my own guitar, and then I'd be able to play in a band at night because it'd be a nine-to-five job. So I asked Grover, 'Hey, are you hiring?' And he hired me.

The first thing I did was glue bodies together. There were body blanks. You had two slabs of ash and a shaper. You had to shape both sides of it, put it together, put glue on there, clamp it together.

The great thing about Grover is that he showed you how you screwed up. He didn't admonish you. He just showed me how to do it right. And then after that, I never had that problem ever again.

At that moment every guitar player was looking in the back of the record, saying Charvel Manufacturing. And so the phones started ringing.

Once that record hit and people saw that guitar on the back and that said Charvel Manufacturing, that just lit the phones up. There was no internet really, so people had to find you through the phone book or just really do their homework.

Randy was playing in a band called Quiet Riot and he was playing a polka dot Flying V that Carl had made. It was a Charvel V body and Carl had modified a neck and then bonded that neck joint up to make it like a set neck.

Randy came in and he wanted to get a guitar made. He sat down with Grover and they designed the white one and laid it all out. That was Grover and Randy.

That was the first guitar and the first Jackson guitar, first neck-through body. We were doing weird stuff too back then. We were trying a lot of different things.

After the tragedy, more and more kids wanted to play and it just made it even more focused on Jackson guitars. I had bought my first Charvel from Grayson's and then I learned Grover was going to release that guitar.

There was usually a four-digit number and then usually a date on the butt of the neck. The four-digit number is a work order.

When people would bring in a 1960 Stratocaster and say, 'I want the neck shaped like this,' I would make notes about it. I still have the piece of paper that Donnie Wade saved for me.

Gene Simmons walked up to me and asked, 'What do you do?' I told him I build guitars. He got an Ax bass, handed it to me and said, 'Can you make that?' We sat and talked for a long time about that bass and how to make it, and I think we made him four or six basses.

I wanted to make a guitar brand that I could make what I wanted to make. I could do it from an art perspective and I could do it so that it's a collectible guitar.

There's body woods, neck woods, they all make a difference. We hear it here. Certain guitars, whether we're doing a video or you're hanging something in the store, it'll speak to you or it won't.

It still comes down to the people. At times I get discouraged because I feel like some of the guitar industry is losing that, because it's the man and the big banks and the corporations. Thankfully there's still some voices in there going, 'Hey, you got to do this. Don't forget about this.'

I had planned to go to five a month by our anniversary, May 5th, and I'm at five a month right now and it's bonkers right now.

This is that moment where you're taking your entire life and combining it into what you love and who you are in these guitars. To me, there's no better expression for it to culminate into this guitar right now.