A New Axe To Grind Chuck Lindert’s Dreams Have Finally Found A Sweet, Sweet Voice

Back when it appeared that Chuck Lindert’s fate was to be an apple picker, or even worse, a dead apple picker, people likely regarded his talk about designing guitars as little more than the ramblings of a friendly fellow given to strong drink.

Truth was, he probably didn’t believe it himself.

Certainly, on the morning in 1981 when he opened the door of his Volkswagen beetle and found himself at the top of a tall pine tree, the idea that he might one day hand a Lindert guitar to Chet Atkins seemed ludicrous enough.

That Wenatchee’s economic development planners might eventually want to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in his guitars was downright absurd.

Not that Lindert was thinking any of those things at that moment. He was just trying to figure out how he got the car up in that tree.

“I realized I didn’t even remember getting into the car,” Lindert says, still amazed at the event.

But what he never forgot, even though that hard-partying period of his life distanced him from most of his ambitions, was an odd fascination with the manipulation of sounds.

“When I was a kid, I’d take rubber bands and put them on tin cans and other stuff to see what sounds they’d make,” he remembers.

During high school his interest coalesced into a vague ambition, and he thought he wanted to go to a guitar-making school.

“But my parents didn’t really see it as the kind of thing you could make a living at,” Lindert says.

So after graduating in 1973, “I spent about eight years partying and working these different jobs” - upholstering, painting cars, working in his father’s orchards. “And then I had these three car wrecks in one year, and that last one (with the tree) could’ve killed me.

“So I decided things had to change.

“And within a month or so after I quit drinking, the idea that I was supposed to build instruments just struck me.”

That’s the way Lindert explains his moments of creative genius: as if he is some sort of blundering hitch hiker on the idea turnpike who becomes victim to all these hit-and-run accidents.

Lindert, 42, still looks like the prototypical ‘70’s rocker. Slight of build, with flowing brown hair that frames his face, his uniform is jeans and a black T-shirt with Lindert Guitars emblazoned on the chest. He is softspoken to an extreme, with an almost Southwestern drawl that somehow found Lindert in his home town of Manson, just up the road from Chelan.

And while he may at one level regard his ideas as cosmic accidents, at another level he has an abiding confidence in those ideas that has granted him patience and faith that all of this will somehow come together.

And that’s just what’s been happening over the past 18 months. The ideas are finally changing Lindert’s life, with perhaps far greater changes to come.

“Chuck has done some things here that have never been done before,” says Larry Krupla, his friend and partner in the electric guitar business. “I’m sure people in this industry have started to take notice of what he’s doing here.”

Fruit warehouse is factory

“Here” is a semi-dilapidated Blue Chelan fruit processing warehouse just across the Beebe Bridge on the Columbia River near Chelan.

You have to have some creative vision to look at the warehouse and see a guitar factory, but the new quarters are still a leap beyond the tiny workshop Lindert set up at his trailer after his post-pine-tree revelation.

Lindert and Krupla spent countless evenings in that small workshop over the years, building instruments and bemoaning their circumstances.

“Larry would tell me how about how bad he hated working at Safeway,” Lindert says.

“And Chuck would tell me about how bad he hated working in the orchards,” Krupla laughs.

But as they sat in stunned disbelief in March, during a plane ride home from Frankfurt, Germany, they knew they had to move out of the old workshop.

Another exhibitor had invited them to the giant music industry trade show in Frankfurt to display Lindert’s latest guitar concept.

Lindert’s previous principal design had been an exercise in frustration. Lindert made only 26 of them, and gave most of those away to celebrities, hoping for endorsements.

A couple of years ago, though, Lindert came up with a design he calls the Locomotive series.

“I went over to Germany wondering what in the world we’d do if we got orders for a dozen or even 20 of them,” Lindert says. “But we took orders for 110 guitars at that show.”

So on the plane ride home, Lindert and Krupla had to figure out how they were going to build that many guitars.

A call to Leo Fender

After he got the Volkswagen out of the tree, Lindert might have figured out what he wanted to do with his life, but he still didn’t know much about building guitars.

First he tried violins. Not that he cared much for the violin, but they were small, and the wood was less expensive. Next he tried electric mandolins. He made four, “and they sounded really good.”

Uncertain where to go from there, he called Leo Fender, founder of Fender guitars, seeking advice. An undoubtedly bemused Fender referred Lindert to one of his designers, and that’s how Lindert came to know Freddy Tavares.

Whether we realize it or not, almost every one of us has a connection to Freddy Tavares. He was a steel guitar player who did a lot of studio work. It is Tavares who plays the bending steel guitar whine that are the opening notes of the Looney Toons cartoon theme song.

But Tavares was also an instrument designer who hooked up with Leo Fender in the ‘50s when they were trying to get a fledgling guitar company off the ground. Fender went on to become among the most successful electric guitar manufacturers in the world, and its most legendary instrument, the Fender Stratocaster, was designed by Tavares.

Lindert continues to be amazed at all the circumstances, the quirks of timing and coincidence, that have shaped his long quest. At another time, Tavares might have paid little interest to the inquiries of a novice designer from Washington state.

But Tavares had just retired from Fender, Lindert says, and he missed the business. Mostly, he missed talking to people about instruments and designs.

“So I’d call him up,” Lindert says, “and he’d talk to me for a couple of hours, and then he’d apologize for taking up so much of my time.”

He told Lindert about all the basics - how a guitar should balance in your hands, how it should rest on your knee. He told Lindert what they went through starting up the Fender company, going out and doing their own promotions, trying to find bands that would play their guitars.

The two exchanged long letters discussing design concepts. When Lindert sent photos of his first efforts that closely resembled the Fender designs, Tavares told him about the importance of coming up with something original that the public could identify with Lindert’s name.

That’s where Lindert’s “thumbs up” trademark was born.

As good as Lindert’s guitars sound and feel, one of their most marketable aspects is the unique headstock - the part of the guitar at the end of the neck where the tuning pegs are located - in the shape of a fist with an upraised thumb.

A universal symbol of approval.

“After Freddy talked to me I sat down for about eight hours, sketching different designs, but none of them were right,” Lindert recalls. “They were just nondescript shapes.

“And finally, I just had my hand resting on the paper, with my thumb kind of sticking up, and I looked down and I saw it, and I said ‘That’s it!’ ” Since then, people have told Lindert he adopted one of those primal symbols that transcends language, culture and history. The thumbs-up gesture would likely even be understood by a cave man, he’s been told.

Tavares’s discussions with Lindert became more complex. In fact, Lindert’s design of his futuristic Levitator - a squarish, hollowbodied departure from the continuous line curved design that is the industry standard - was an effort to convey to Tavares that Lindert was indeed beginning to understand all these abstractions Tavares presented.

When Tavares died in 1993, he and Lindert had never met face-to-face, but, “He had a real big influence on me,” Lindert says. “He was very encouraging.”

A search for celebrity endorsements

With that encouragement, Lindert made guitars.

Along the way he strolled through Krupla’s checkout line at the Chelan Safeway, and talked about guitar building. Krupla is a devoted guitarist who had long wanted to build acoustic guitars. And he was soon spending a lot of evenings at Lindert’s workshop, learning how to wind pickups and assemble wood and electric components.

Among all his early designs, Lindert thought the Levitator was the one that would make it. He gave Levitators Most to established recording artists like Willie Nelson or Carl Wilson of the Beach Boys or Johnny Cash, in hopes they’d like the guitar well enough to use it in a public appearance.

The real key to marketing in the guitar industry, he explains, is celebrity endorsements, whether through rich endorsement contracts - which only established guitar companies can afford - or through the tacit endorsement of someone using the guitar in a performance.

Several big names liked the Levitator. Chet Atkins even took the guitar to Gibson - the company that pays Atkins to endorse its guitars - and suggested they manufacture it. But Atkins wrote to Lindert saying, “They don’t listen to me.”

So Lindert returned to the continuous curve design, added his own unique, quirky touches, and concentrated on a guitar of high quality that would be simple to paint and assemble on a production line. He kept the Levitator concepts of single-wound pickups mounted in a hollowed guitar body, rather than a solid wood block. He kept a unique, ergonomic neck design.

He made one prototype of this new guitar, and decided to get reaction at the March, 1996, National Association of Music Merchants trade show in Anaheim, Calif.

Trade show provides breakthrough

Lindert and Krupla had tried trade shows before. In 1994, they’d displayed a Levitator to little response.

The cost of a booth at a major trade show was far beyond Lindert’s budget. So mostly it was a matter of showing up, and talking, and hoping someone would ask to see the guitar.

He first showed it to Paul Kim, a Korean entrepreneur Lindert met during his efforts to find guitar hardware manufacturers in the Pacific Rim.

“Paul said he thought it was ugly,” Lindert recalls.

But on the last day of the show, Kim hung the guitar in his booth.

“There was so much interest that he invited us to display with him in Frankfurt the next month, at the biggest trade show in the world,” Lindert says.

Response there was overwhelming. Based on the 110 orders, Lindert and Krupla finally had something they could show to a bank, and obtained a $100,000 loan.

After the Frankfurt show in March, they secured their financing in April, moved into their new building in May and were turning out guitars in July.

“Orders continue to come in,” Lindert says. “We get 150 inquiries a week. Sales average 40 to 50 a month, and we aren’t doing anything to promote them. They are just selling themselves.”

They now have 65 distributors around the country, including Hoffman Music Co. in Spokane. Hoffman has sold several of the guitars.

The guitar necks and hardware are made in Korea. The cabinet maker who occupies the space next to Lindert Guitars in the old Blue Chelan warehouse cuts out the bodies. As the company’s production manager (he’s also the entire production crew at this point), Krupla does the careful final assembly.

The orders and market demographics show that with a concerted advertising campaign, the company can be selling 800 guitars a month within two years. That would produce profits, Krupla says, of about $1.5 million annually.

But getting there jumps the two former part-time guitar makers - the former grocery checker and the former orchard worker - into a whole new league. Lindert calls it their “leap into hyperspace.”

A Wenatchee advertising agency has prepared an ad campaign that it feels will allow Lindert Guitars to be heard in the intensely competitive market. The price tag is $250,000 for the first year.

Lindert has sold small blocks of stock - much of it purchased by Lindert’s father who has been instrumental in keeping the company afloat. But $250,000 is beyond them.

So Quest for Economic Development, the Wenatchee area’s economic development organization, has pledged to help the company find $750,000 in investment capital.

The price of the $750,000 will be control of the company. Investors will undoubtedly insist on professional management of their choosing.

But that’s okay.

Lindert isn’t really interested in being a businessman, anyway.

“I’ve always known that if I ever made any guitars that were successful, I wasn’t going to be able to produce them with my own hands.

“That never was the point.

“The idea was to come up with the designs that I believed in, and do whatever I had to do to get them shown and get them going.”

Being able to be the company’s designer would be fine for Lindert. But if things didn’t work out, he has a backup plan.

“I’ve already started learning electronics, and I’m trying to make some amplifiers.”

He could go off on his own with the amplifiers, “If it turns out I can’t stand to mess with all the other (business) stuff.”

Somehow, Lindert knows that he’ll keep having these random collisions with ideas, just like he always has. Things will work out. He has his past experience as evidence.

“It’s been a pretty strange life I guess,” Lindert says. “The right people just show up. The right designs just come along.

“Well, what the heck. You know?”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 3 Photos (2 Color)