Baretta

Then there’s the headstock. All six tuners in a row, on a long curve that droops down at the end like a hockey stick, or a banana, which is what everybody calls it.

It also helps you tell it apart from the guitars it gets mixed up with. A Jackson Soloist is from the same era of pointy shred guitars, but its neck runs all the way through the body. A Charvel San Dimas is a bolt-on too, but with Charvel’s pointed headstock. The banana says Kramer.

People get into trouble here. Kramer in the ’80s means Eddie Van Halen to a lot of people, and so every Kramer gets his name hung on it. But Eddie’s stage Kramers are their own story, the striped guitars and the “5150,” and not a Baretta you could order out of the catalog. His later Wolfgang is something else again, and so is his Frankenstrat.

Same goes for Richie Sambora, whose Kramer RS is a different model, and for the pictures of Vivian Campbell with Kramers from the period. Until somebody can point at one and say “that’s a Baretta,” I’m not going to say it for them.

That’s fine. The Baretta never needed a famous name to make sense. It needed a kid with an amp.

The originals, the ones people mean when they say an American Baretta, came out of Kramer’s New Jersey operation in Neptune in the 1980s. The Indonesian-made Specials of today are not those guitars, whatever the headstock says. If you’re looking at an old one, that’s the first question to ask: where was it made? And don’t ask how many there are. Kramer doesn’t publish Baretta totals.

Today Gibson owns Kramer, and the Baretta is still in the catalog. There’s the Original Collection Baretta, a Baretta Special with chrome hardware and a simpler tremolo for players starting out, and Custom Graphics versions painted as loud as you’d expect from something shaped like this.

Forty-odd years later, the versions have multiplied, and the pickups and bridges vary from one to the next. The outline, the bolt-on neck, and the banana on the end haven’t moved.

The Special in the line is the one built for students, and that feels right. The deal Kramer offered in 1983 was fewer choices and more volume, a guitar you could figure out in about four seconds. It’s still a good deal for somebody starting out. Everything that isn’t the loud part, you can learn later.