I had my Parker Fly with me at a gig in NYC, when back stage I met Les Paul. He had never seen one, and he admired its radical choices.

So we found a nice big permanent sharpie, and Les Paul signed my Parker Fly.

Les was known for that. I heard a story of him doing a signing and these two guys came and one had a Gibson Les Paul for him to sign. He turns to the other guy there and he said he didn't have a Les Paul, but he had a Strat. Les signed that too and told him "there, now you have a Les Paul".

That’s totally rad. Bummed I never got to see Les play. At least I got to see Dick Dale a couple times.

That’s amazing! From one of the original innovators to one of the most recent.

That is an absolutely amazing story, thank you for sharing it!

Just a note that he continued on his path of innovation w/ Ken Parker Archtops, which he was still involved in building until just before the end. These are $20k+ custom orders so there aren't too many in the wild.

The neck 'join' in particular is wicked: https://kenparkerarchtops.com/guitars2

Wow, so you can adjust action with just a screw at the back? I wish it were that easy on nylon-string guitars instead of having to file and shape nuts and saddles. The last time I made a saddle from a bone blank I spent hours only to find I'd messed the curvature up.

My dad got to play a prototype Parker Fly while doing some collab at the Fishman R&D facility. (I’m not sure many generations, but fishman made the piezo bridge pickup for the more acoustic sound.) Of course this was well before phone cameras but the way he described it with the naturally curved ergonomic neck and stuff made it sound like pure magic. Gotta say, when there was one I could play at my local music shop a couple years later, it didn’t disappoint. Too delicate feeling for me but it felt like the future.

Yeah. I am not the greatest guitar player but once after seeing Pops Staples playing one on TV a little voice in my head told me “get a Parker Fly, you will never need another guitar” … and I ignored it. Shouldn’t have.

the guitar market is very conservative , as can be seen by the fact that the design itself was pretty divisive even if a lot of their innovations have stuck around.

I always though the Fly looked awful but I played one once and it was amazing. If they could've just done that but made it look less like a piece of modern art from Patrick Bateman's apartment, I would've definitely been more interested

I feel like Ken unfortunately started Parker Guitars a decade too late for the 80s and too soon for the technical players of the 2010s.

He also caught mostly the attention of forward-looking players of past decades, rather than new players.

I wonder if he had gone after nu-metal artists like PRS did the brand would have survived.

Pretty much this. They were perfect guitars for the 80s that came out right smack in the middle of 90s grunge. They were shredder guitars right as shredding was going out of fashion.

I loved Parkers, even though I was way more a grunge person than a 80s person, but I'm mainly a bass player, and bass building is generally a lot less conservative than guitar building, and building with more exotic materials wasn't out of style for bass in the 90s, so Parkers kind of felt like a 90s guitar that had been built by a bass company.

I always envied the amount of options bass players had. Even in the 90s there were new brands starting to pop up like crazy. Lakland, Ritter, Tobias, BassLab...

With guitars, apart from the metal guitars, there's only vintage-inspired stuff with either a tune-o-matic or a Wilkinson tremolos... I'm exaggerating but that's indeed what I see for sale on my local shops.

On the other hand we do have Teuffel guitars in Germany, so maybe I should just put up and buy one from Uli Teuffel while he's still young.

My fancy basses are a Lakland and a Sandberg (also German). But even, say, Ibanez was doing a lot of interesting stuff with low-cost instruments in the 90s, and on the high end there was Alembic, Modulus, Fodera, Ken Smith, hell, even Music Man (from Leo Fender), Tobias (and later MTD). Neck-through construction, active electronics, composite bodies, fiberglass necks. I don't want all of those things in my basses, but it was exciting to be able to try them. There was so much experimentation in basses at that time, but it was pretty rare with guitars. Again, Parker seemed to be the only well-known company doing it.

My theory has been that it was that bass guitar is a new instrument. Electric bass really isn't an electric double bass, but electric guitar is an electric version of a steel-string guitar. There was a lot of history and nostalgia in guitar playing, whereas bass was this new thing.

The other part of my theory is that bass amplification demanded it to some extent. Amplifying a bass was hard at the time. And it's come so incredibly far. Guitar players still basically use the same amps they did in 1965. But bass players moved quickly from tubes to transistors, and now to class-d amplifiers, and miniaturized speakers. My 500 watt amp weighs 1.1 kg and fits in the pocket of my gig back, and my 4x5" cab which handles 400 watts of power and goes down to 35 Hz is 30 x 30 x 30 cm and weighs 9.5 kg. Those together are smaller and weigh less than my 15 watt guitar tube amp.

Man I love how pragmatic bass players are. I also have a tiny Class D for my bass (I play a bit of fretless for fun) and it's magical how much better it is than the amps I played in the past. Granted I never had an SVT, but on the other hand my back is thankful for that.

I feel like guitar players are constantly trying to get into the technology but then fashion changes. Grunge for example made everyone sell their racks and shredder guitars.

Now that I think about it, I actually had a POD bean before I even had an amplifier, but then it became unfashionable to not have tube amps among my in-group back then. On the other hand I see lots of touring bands using Kempers, Quad Cortex, Tonex, etc. so maybe the tide has turned! For now!