OK, so I had the LesPaul rip-off and the Ibanez Artist, but nothing I could play Van Halen on. This was the early 80's and not a lot of guitar companies were putting out guitars with vibrato bars on them available at local guitar shops, so for my 13th birthday I got a '57 Fender Stratocaster re-issue.

(photo taken Oct 30th, 1982)

I was psyched. It was a beautiful guitar. But the pickups squealed and had no sustain, and every time I touched the vibrato bar, the guitar would go out of tune. The fretboard was glossy and curved, and it just didn't feel right for me. I had put in DiMarzio Super-Distortion pickups in my other two guitars, so the first renovation I made on this guitar was to chisel away the wood around the bridge pickup and put one in there. Over the next few years, I earned money re-wiring people's guitars and gathered a lot of extra guitar parts. Eventually I replaced the old nut with a locking nut.

I always loved "B" movies. Low-budget horror movies and weird stuff.  I remember when I saw the movie "The Funhouse" with my friends, we were about 11 or 12, back when kids could go see horror movies in theaters without age restrictions. Jump ahead six years to late 1987...  one of the scenes in "The Funhouse" stuck in my head, when the kids were checking out the freak show - they were looking at this cow, the cow turned its head and there was a second small mutated head growing off it.  The Stratocaster would be my interpretation of that cow. I took a bass neck, pulled off the frets and cut the neck across at where the 7th fret was. I re-fretted the small neck with a spacing similar to a guitar's at the 12th fret and above.  I put guitar tuners on the top of the neck and a locking nut.  I bored out a section of the Stratocaster's body bottom horn and attached the neck, cut away wood to attach a pickup and a Badass bridge, set at the proper distance from the neck so the frets would intonate properly at 1-octave higher than a standard guitar (the strings on the little neck were tuned an octave higher.)  I wired in a 3-way toggle switch to select either or both necks, and cut a hole straight through the body where the old input jack was.  Painted the guitar red on the front, blue on the back, and set a gold watch-on-a-chain into the body.  This was my 'mutant cow'...