This was my first guitar ever. I bought it for $70. Hilger's previous band Socially Unacceptable had jammed in his garage shortly before they broke up. Mike P. was their singer ,he was a frontman. He didn't play guitar, at least not in the band. But at some point he bought this guitar and brought it to a rehersal. One night Hilger and I were in his garage (before Low Profile was even formed) and I found this guitar. It was in the winter, freezing out. Bad enviornment for a guitar. The strings were rusted terribly and 1 or 2 were broken and missing. I started to play a bit with a credit card. A few days later I found Mike and made him an offer he couldn't refuse. I scored the guitar. That's when it started to fall into pieces.
First thing to go were the pickups. Pickups are really just coils of wire. In shitty pickups, or damaged/hard played pickups, those coils of wire start to become loose and un-coil. This translates into screeching, uncontrollable feedback. I played it like that for a while, then I brought it into a shithole music store called Park Place Music (don't go there, the people are dicks). I had them install 3 new EMG Select Single Coils for $100. Then the guitar rocked. I eventually broke the input jack and replaced that. Then the volume pot started to die. So I bought a new one and went to solder it in. I found that the pot was too big, so I took a huge butcher knife and spun it around in the empty hole for a while and ground it a bit bigger. When I stuck the knob back on top of it, it stuck out from the guitar and looked silly but worked great.
All was well until recently, the pickup selector started to go. So I figured I could wire without it. Then I started thinking that the tone knobs were useless too. So I tried to wire around everything, it worked but made a lot of noise. So I brought it in, and had them re-wire it with no knobs or pickup selector at all -- just 1 kill switch. I also got a new all black pickguard and now this guitar is finally happy.