The Sardonyx - Correction, luthier credit

Ken Schaffer, Interview: “Luthier extraordinaire Jeff Levin and I partnered to make a handful of very special guitars. The Sardonix had a rectangular body with 2 aluminum outriggers to look like the Romulan spaceship in Star Trek it was patterned after. The body was stuffed with all sorts of special effect electronics, circuits more commonly housed in stomp boxes at a player's feet.

We made just a few of them: Jeff Lynne of Electric Light Orchestra had one, Bootsy Collins… Ian Hunter, Howard Leese (Heart), Plasmatics, Peppy Castro (Blues Magoos!)... John Lennon, and so on... and John fell in love with it. In fact, according to producer Jack Douglas it was the main guitar John used on his last album, "Double Fantasy."

Months after he hung the the guitar over his bed, I got called by John’s personal assistant and asked to come to the Dakota. John had been impressed by the electronics I‘d stuffed into the Sardonyx, and asked to retain me to design the kill-all stereo he had in mind for the new apartment in the Dakota.

In the small bedroom, which was to be Command Central for the system, hung above and behind the bed, vertically --- the Sardonyx! MY Sardonyx…. ! (Tears were welling up) … “Fred, you mean – John is using my guitar as a ($#%$&%*$) WALL ORNAMENT?!”

John's PA settled me down.,.. “No, man – wrong! He loves that guitar so much he even hangs it over his head when he’s sleeping.” (Tears dried; nose rose…) Whoa! And, in fact, there were pictures of this amazing guitar on the packaging of “Double Fantasy.” It was the guitar he used throughout.

John tells it best:

"I bought this beautiful electric guitar, round about the period I got back with Yoko and had the baby," John explains." It's not a normal guitar; it doesn't have a body; it's just an arm and this tubelike, toboggan-looking thing, and you can lengthen the top for the balance of it if you're sitting or standing up. I played it a little, then just hung it up behind the bed, but I'd look at it every now and then, because it had never done a professional thing, it had never really been played. I didn't want to hide it the way one would hide an instrument because it was too painful to look at - like, Artie Shaw went through a big thing and never played again. But I used to look at it and think, 'Will I ever pull it down?'

"Next to it on the wall I'd placed the number 9 and a dagger Yoko had given me - a dagger made out of a bread knife from the American Civil War to cut away the bad vibes, to cut away the past symbolically. It was just like a picture that hangs there but you never really see, and then recently I realized, 'Oh, goody! I can finally find out what this guitar is all about,' and I took it down and used it in making Double Fantasy.