How many!?: Rick Nielsen’s five-neck guitar
One of the best things to come out of America’s rock scene in the 1970s was Rockford’s Cheap Trick. Charged by a fanatical love for The Beatles, surrounding stadium behemoths like The Who and Led Zeppelin, and a dash of glam’s glitter shimmering on both sides of the Atlantic’s charts, Cheap Trick cut a confounding brew of earnest power pop, headfirst hard rock, and a tasty lace of cynicism. It was the perfect mix for the punks waiting around rock’s corner.
They were also captivating poster boys. In their own skewed way, each member of Cheap Trick’s classic line-up stood with an eager, animated presence as if lifted from a strange comic book. The gang’s hyper-real personalities are on display in 1979’s ‘Dream Police’ video, queued in an identity parade, with each professing their innocence to the titular anxiety authorities—mercifully avoiding the karma police.
Frontman Robin Zander steps up in tow boyish good looks and envious golden locks with passionate defiance, bassist Tom Petersson flexes a little dark horse energy in his guarded protestations, and drummer Bun E Carlos gives off an accountant privately regretting the whole rock band thing vibe.
Then there’s Rick Nielsen. Sporting a kid’s upturned cap, an ill-fitted jumper adorned with numerous badges and trinkets, and generally exuding a goofish charm, it’s easy to forget that their oddball guitarist is the principal songwriter and chief kooky creative force of the band. While his bold and brash guitar style is celebrated in the music world, he made just as much of a mark for having reportedly owned over 2,000 guitars in his time, as well as for some novel, custom-built axes in his collection.
We all know Nielsen’s ‘Uncle Dickdouble neck, the guitar based on a sketch of his likeness by a Japanese fan, but legends are abound of a hefty five-neck whipped out on occasional Cheap Trick shows. While always claiming he wasn’t a “virtuoso”, Nielsen was more than happy to indulge in ostentatious guitar theatre, albeit always with a degree of practicality. A keen patron of Hamer guitar manufacturers, the man ordered three five-necks in his time, with the original orange built in 1981 displayed in his Chicago Piece Pizza restaurant.
The idea came from his extravagant habit of stacking up five guitars and grabbing the one he needed, often cycling through all five in one song. He typically stacked a single-cutaway Les Paul Junior with a humbucker, his interchangeable ‘flag’ guitar that could be switched for whatever country he was playing in, and a left-handed Stratocaster with a right-handed maple neck. Initially conceiving of a six-neck that spun like a roulette wheel, Nielsen had to dial down his showboating fancies for the classic quint neck.
“Rick’s out of his mind, but in a wonderful way,” Hamer honcho Frank Untermeyer told Guitar Player in 2021. “By 1981, we had already done some pretty wacky stuff for him and Cheap Trick, like the checkerboard Standard, an electric mandocello, and a 12-string bass, so we were used to the fact that they set all standards for going to the limit. For this guitar, we cut apart five double-cutaway Hamer Special bodies and laminated them together, and then sanded in between the necks to get that sort of swoopy look. As I recall, routing the wires through this thing was also a huge pain in the ass.”
It’s one thing to dream up such innovations, it’s another to actually build them. Technical headaches aside, Nielsen’s five-neck Hamer illustrates Cheap Trick and their extravagant guitarist’s cartoonish spirit and wryly poked fun at rock’s bombast.
