Music Is My Weapon

In the early 1960's, relying on four generations of family heritage, the infamous B.C. Rich legacy began. Bernie Rico's reputation for guitar-crafting excellence spread quickly in the music industry circles and soon legendary players such as The Beach Boys, Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix and even Elvis Presley were requesting Bernie to build them guitars.

The founding father of B.C. Rich, Bernardo Chavez Rico, was born in Los Angeles, California in 1941. He started building banjos and ukuleles in the early 1950s along side his father while working in his father's shop. Bernie Rico continued at handcrafting beautiful acoustic guitars well into the late 1960s. The B.C. Rico guitar name was modified slightly and then changed to B.C. Rich somewhere around 1967. Rico made only acoustic guitars up until 1968 when Bernie made his first attempt at handcrafting a custom electric solid body. There are probably only about 300 of these pre-1969 acoustics built according to very scarce and limited records.

Bernie was doing a lot of refinishing and repair work at this time. His assistant working for him at the time suggested he provide more avant-garde styles and colors in his guitar finishes. Since he was riding a lot of motorcycles with fancy paint jobs at the time, this made sense to Bernie and excited him as well. This is where the B.C. Rich tradition of wild finishes first originated.

In 1969 Rico began his first attempts at guitar production with ten Gibson EB-3 bass copies, with arched tops and fancy inlays and ten matching Les Paul guitars. Both models were carved out of one single block of mahogany. Rico's custom guitars, basically versions of popular Gibson and Fender models, continued until the early 1970s, when the trademark "weird" shapes began to appear, the first being the Seagull. Bernie Rico's B.C. Rich legend was about to explode