by Jol Dantzig
I was the Technical Director and designer at Hamer guitars. The brand had long since been acquired by Kaman Music, which was eventually bought by Fender (FMIC). The company was floundering after a series of bad marketing decisions dictated by the parent company, and I was fighting to pursue a direction that more closely represented the mission (if you could call it that) of the original Hamer company that I founded with Paul Hamer, Jim Walker, and John Montgomery. As part of my vision I wanted to create a blog about our guitars that reminded musicians that Hamer had created the modern vintage boutique electric category. I wanted to showcase our team of craftsmen, and our artistry.
Now, to get to the fucking point, I am attempting to archive our blog.
Back in the early 2000s I suggested that we start a blog about our process and our people. I was aware of how important that was at the time, but when I raised the idea to the marketing people, they didn’t know what I was talking about. A few days later the vice president of sales and marketing (two jobs that never should be controlled by a single person) told me that he thought a blog was a bad idea. He had asked his teenage daughter (you can’t make this shit up) about “bh-lawgs” and she had warned that there were a lot of negative repercussions and bad comments on them. So, before blogs were even in the mainstream, a teenager had shot me down. So, I did what any good corporate soldier would do—I just started one anyway.
By the time corporate realized that I’d gone rogue, we had thousands of readers. Salespeople were telling me that they loved it and that their accounts did too. We were getting a ton of custom orders but it was too little too late. The push into Hamer branded imported guitars destroyed 30 years of work—but that’s a story for another day.
Anyway. I’m going to try to get together the remnants of my blog, which revolved around my take on guitars, and of course the people at Hamer who made the company so great. I don’t know if I have all of my material, but I’ll do the best I can to present a peek back in time, as well as what I’m doing now. Wish me luck—wish us luck.