You got it Doug. Here ya go:
Alembic Sound Wizards
Alembic quickly branched out into three main areas, becoming a recording studio, a developer of PA systems, and a guitar repair/modification workshop. The combination of the wood working talents of Rick Turner, a one-time Massachusetts folk guitarist and guitar repairer, and the electronics knowledge of Ron Wickersham, who came to Alembic from the Ampex recording equipment company, soon turned the workshop into a full-fledged guitar making operation. Alembic became a corporation in 1970 with three equal partners: Rick Turner, Ron Wickersham and recording engineer Bob Matthews.
?We started to customize instruments,? explains Turner, ?what we call ?Alembicizing?. Some Guild Starfire hollow-body basses were Alembicized for Phil Lesh of the Dead and Jack Cassidy of Jefferson Airplane in 1970 and 1971.? The very first official Alembic instrument made to the company?s own design was made for Jack Cassidy in 1971.
By 1973 the Alembic recording studio in San Francisco was becoming a financial headache, but in Septenber of that year a savior appeared in the shape of a two-page article about Alembic, ?Sound Wizards to The Greatful Dead?, in Rolling Stone magazine. Turner says, ?The article was seen by the guys at L D Heater, an instrument distribution company based near Portland, Oregon, owned by Norlin. They had been given a mandate by Norlin to go find some new manufactures? product to distribute, so they came to us and said, ?What would you do if we gave you a purchase order for 50 instruments?? At that point I think we?d built only 32, but it looked like rescue from bankruptcy to us. So we went to the bank and got enough for me to go and consider how to tool up the Alembic factory.?
Hippies and Cashflow
In that Rolling Stone feature from summer 1973 Charles Perry described the young Alembic team as ?the Greatful Dead family?s coven of hi-fi wizards?, and quoted them as ?aiming for that thing electric music has. Its ability to transcend technology?. Turner was Perry?s guide through the Alembic workplaces: he explained to the Rolling Stone writer how he had combined his own design pickups with Ron Wickersham?s electronic systems, showed Perry yet another bass being built for the Dead?s Phil Lesh, demonstrated the sophisticated controls of a typical Alembic bass, and described the Dead?s Alembic PA system.
?All our experimentation is aimed at giving the musician as much control as possible,? Turner said, and photos accompanying the Rolling Stone piece showed the company?s two main premises: the workshop at Cotati, about 40 miles north of San Francisco, where Alembic?s woodwork, metalwork and pickups were made principally by Turner and Frank Fuller, and the Alembic office in nearby Sebastopal where Wickersham dealt with electronics production. The image propounded by the Rolling Stone feature was of amiable, talented hippies who rolled with the flow and did their best to indulge the ?straights? of the business world.
?There seemed to be enough cashflow happening by this point and we had a fairly star-studded clientele, to the point where we got away with it,? laughs Turner in reflective mood. ?We started to slowly standardize a line of short-scale, medium-scale and long-scale basses, at first based on the Guild Starfire Bass, and with equivalents in guitars ? although at that point we probably made 19 basses or more to every guitar. Bass players were far more interested in a new, clear approach, whereas guitar players seemed satisfied with what they had. Guitar players appear to be inherently more conservative than bass players when it comes to equipment.?
