After lying about her age to get a job at a medical facility in Long Beach to save up some money, Lita Ford cemented her future when she bought her first serious electric guitar at the age of 14 – a chocolate-finished Gibson SG that accompanied her through the rollercoaster ride that was The Runaways.
Naturally, that’s not the only guitar she’s used throughout her prolific career, and over the past five decades of playing and collecting, Ford has unsurprisingly curated a rich seam of guitar-related anecdotes.
“I remember, one of my guitars went missing,” Ford says in the latest issue of Guitarist. “It was a gorgeous guitar, like, a turquoise-green (B.C. Rich) Mockingbird, ebony fretboard, no fret inlays. And there was a time when I was auditioning guitar players.
“They were coming over to my studio and one guy comes in with that turquoise guitar. I looked at it and I thought, ‘That’s my guitar.’ And he looks at me and says, ‘Oh yeah, isn’t this a great guitar?’
“‘I bought it off some guy on the street for 350 bucks. Can you believe that? It’s my favorite guitar ever.’ I just couldn’t take it away from him. I let him have it. Of course, he didn’t get the audition, but he got to keep the guitar and he didn’t know it was mine.”
Aside from the one guitar that (literally) got away, Ford reveals she’s currently having a guitar made by Neal Moser, the renowned luthier who worked as an independent contractor for B.C. Rich Guitars between 1974 and 1985.
“He’s made all the biggest and the baddest guitars, in my opinion,” Ford asserts. “Recently, he joined forces with another company and they created this guitar called the Raven. I saw it and thought, ‘I have to have that. It looks futuristic, dangerous and sexy at the same time.’”
However, Ford had a few custom requests to make the guitar truly Lita-esque. “I said, ‘It needs to have a Kahler tremolo and DiMarzio Super Distortions, and it’s got to be black on black, no inlays.’
“Because I like to mess people up when they look at me play. They don’t see the inlays, so they don’t know where I’m at. When you see it, you’ll just think, ‘Wow, that guitar is sick.’”
In other Lita Ford news, the veteran guitarist addressed the longstanding rumor that she was approached to replace bassist John Paul Jones in Led Zeppelin.
For more from Lita Ford, plus new interviews with Mike Campbell and Cory Wong, pick up issue 524 of Guitarist at Magazines Direct.
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