The best quote from Irwin is below:
SQ: So you built one in your kitchen--did you just use some power tools and some chisels?
DI: No, I had to go to a high school, night school woodshop class to use their tools, but after I got the wood cut up, I was able to do it all in my kitchen with a few hand tools. Then after I finished building this guitar, I went out and hit the sidewalks and looked for some more job training, and I came across this company called Alembic--and they hired me on.
SQ: Were they in San Francisco?
DI: Yeah, they were in San Francisco at the time. This was when they were still down on Judith Street, down an alley. I always thought people were saying Olympic, so I couldn't find the place. But, after a number of tries, I finally located the place, and Rick Turner was working there and he decided to--since welfare was willing to pay half my wages--he decided to hire me on. I built a number of guitars working for them, but while I was working for them, and I worked for them for 1-1/2 or two years, I decided to build an electric guitar of my own because they were using all these lone pickups with all the electronics, and that worked great for a bass, but it didn't work good for a guitar. I mean, they got pretty famous for their basses, but nobody ever really played an Alembic guitar. So I decided to build one with regular pickups in it on my own time, because we were allowed to, you know, do our own projects after work. That was the guitar that Jerry first saw, that's the first guitar that I build under my own name?..
The rest of it is at the dozin.com site:
