I found out only recently that Guild used Hagstrom pickups in a lot of their basses (including Phil's and Jack Cassidy's, before Wickershams were unleashed on them).
Note the picture of Phil with his original - pre-Alembicized - Starfire (and get a haircut, hippie hairstyle), with pickups and bridge by Hagstrom:
http://www.vintageguitarandbass.com/guild/bass/Starfire.php Note the similarities - and one glaring difference - with Hagstrom's own version (that I would kill to play):
http://www.vintageguitarandbass.com/hagstrom/bass/Concord.php Hagstroms just knock me out. I can recall the exact details of every one I've ever worked on, because it's such a thrill to pop open a case and see a Hagstrom, especially if they've got that mother-of-toilet-seat vibe going on.
One particularly strange one had switches instead of knobs,
and the volume control was a slider that followed the contour of the pickguard. When I took the pickguard off, there was a length of copper foil flush-mounted to the body just inside the boundary of the pickguard, with some kind of stuff half-silvered onto it (graphite paint or something) so that one end of the copper strip was completely covered and gradually faded to nothing at the other end. Who thinks like that? (Same principle as a Morley pedal, except instead of direct electrical contact, the Morley does it with light on a half-silvered card that is completely opaque at one end and reflective at the other.)
I edited this paragraph out, but now that it looks like this damn post turned into a novel anyway, I'll stick it back in.
The technique of half-silvering comes from a magic technique invented by Robert Houdin (from *who Houdini derived the name) so astoundingly popular that he became the most famous magician in the world, mostly based on this trick. This trick stopped a war - between Arabs - true story:
http://magic.about.com/od/magichistory/a/rhoudin.htm A pretty girl became first a corpse, then a skeleton and finally a ghost - in full view of the audience the whole time - over the course of HOURS.
The young woman was on the side of the stage, facing center. The stage backdrop was black velvet, designed to suck up light. The key to the trick is a long pane of half-silvered glass, in which one end is completely silvered (a mirror, in other words) and the other end is clear, with an incredibly fine transition along the way.
The pane crossed center stage at a precise angle so that the mirror reflected the (well-lit) subject in the wings, and as the glass was moved forward and backward on that plane, she would gradually disappear, quickly change costumes and gradually reappear at center stage. Remember that the trick was done in lantern light.
Okay, back to Hagstroms.
Hagstrom manufactured accordians in Sweden since 1925 (please don't hold it against them) and invented their own pickup system for electric accordions when everybody else (I.e. Americans and Italians) were either working with microphones or John Hammond's organ innovations. So Hagstrom created the best accordion pickup in the world at the time, in between chasing reindeer and blondes or whatever they did during those long, cold winters.
When the market for flashy Swedish accordions collapsed (who could have seen that comin'?) Hagstrom began making their own guitars, and supplied parts to other manufacturers.
Here's a picture of Jimi Hendrix playing a Hagstrom 8-string bass (I believe it's strung right-handed, because he could play either way, but no way of telling). Hendrix fans note he recorded a number of songs with this bass. I had a list somewhere ...
Ampeg AES-1 (and very cool lid) on the left. The other is a mystery.
Hagstrom made a lot of hardware for other companies, particularly Guild, but also Burns, Selmer, Goya, Gretsch and Baldwin (Willie Nelson's famous guitar Trigger has a Baldwin pickup, made by Hagstrom). The Burns Bison guitar isn't called that because of the horns, but because originally he used Hagstrom bisonic pickups.
In fact, considering the topic, here is Burns' first guitar, a short-scale Jazz guitar with single coil pickups of unknown provenance, since Burns didn't start making their own pickups until later, I believe.
Okay, we did Starfires, a nice rant about those wacky Scandinavians at Hagstrom, Jimi, Willie, mother-of-toilet-seat, magic tricks ... I'm done.
* I am convinced that the word 'whom' is a plot to make us sound like English butlers. - Mark Twain
