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Forums > Associated artists & people > Dave Rusan Guitarworks Facebook Post - The Wendycaster!
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Thread started 05/28/17 2:18pm

LEATHRSAIL

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Dave Rusan Guitarworks Facebook Post - The Wendycaster!

Dave Rusan who made the Cloud Guitar just posted on Facebook about the custom guitar that was made in 1984 for Wendy.

https://www.facebook.com/RusanGuitarworks/

The Wendycaster!

Here's a story about a guitar associated with Prince and the Revolution that's so obscure most fans don't know it exists. After the success of ...the movie Purple Rain Prince and the band got ready to tour, and as I was making the second Cloud I was informed by my boss at the music store that Wendy wanted a special guitar to play on stage. It was supposed to play like and have the body shape of a Rickenbacker, her favorite brand at the time, but with a very different body- instead of painted wood she wanted it to be clear see through plexiglass with flowers embedded in it! I thought that the Cloud was challenging but this took it up a notch-I would be working with a material that was new to me and somehow attach a Rick neck to it. I picked out a bunch of silk flowers at a local shop and sent them to a place on the east coast that embedded them into a guitar shaped chunk of clear Lucite. I found out how different this material was to work with when I started to route the holes for the pickups and controls-the heat of the router caused hairline cracks if I didn't go very slowly. I made pickup rings from wood and painted them purple and used a Gibson style bridge and tailpiece. The pickguard was thin clear Lucite that was semi-transparent purple and the neck that was modified to fit was band sawed off of a brand new Rickenbacker! Here I am getting ready to get into my brand new 1984 Honda and deliver the Cloud and Wendy's guitar to the Minneapolis auditorium, which Prince had rented as a very expensive rehearsal space.Wendy liked the way the guitar played and sounded but she soon discovered she hadn't thought about how heavy Lucite can be! She decided she couldn't deal with that on stage so the guitar came back to the store, where it spent a couple of years hanging on the wall. One day it was gone, however, and I was told it was sold to the Hard Rock Cafe. I've never been able to find any info about it on the web (as though it never existed), but a Prince fan told me last month that it was in this book, which came out in 2001.

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Forums > Associated artists & people > Dave Rusan Guitarworks Facebook Post - The Wendycaster!