THE ONES THAT GOT AWAY
OLD KRAFTSMAN BASS GUITAR
This is an early 60s (I think) Old Kraftsman Bass. Old Kraftsman is a spin-off of Kay and Kay made identical basses to this one as well as others just like it using brand names like TrueTone and others. It just depended on which store you bought it in...Montgomery Wards, Sears, etc. I bought it off eBay in 2004 and really liked the way it looked. However, not the best sounding bass in the world. Having said that, it did have a sound of it’s own and I probably would have kept it, but I really wanted to buy something else and this was the logical choice at the time to go on the chopping block. This particular bass had been found by it’s previous owner at a garage sale in Phoenix and the owner had spray painted the entire bass flat black. The guy who found it tried to remove all the black paint, but it was a painstaking process and he got tired. When I got it, most of the black had been removed from the front, and the cool checkerboard binding was visible, but the back was still pretty much covered. The neck was big and fat like the proverbial baseball bat and the action was actually pretty good. I added the pin-up girl myself. The only real use it got was at a jam session with my good friend Mike playing it. It worked.
