Another trip in the Ade Phazy Gear Time Machine. The year is 1984. The guitar is a brand new Ibanez Roadstar II RS135.
Image courtesy of www.ibanezwiki.com.
I soon outgrew the Westbury as (a) it was not a great guitar (b) it was a horrible wine red colour and (c) I really, really, really wanted a Fender Strat so that I could emulate Mark Knopfler’s sound on the first two Dire Straits albums. Yeah. Right.
Thank goodness for the internet! After much surfing around I stumbled on the amazing www.ibanezwiki.com site, chocked full of old Ibanez catalogues, etc, which helped my track down the exact model. Yippee!
The guitar was a Roadstar RS135, near the bottom of the Roadstar range, a nice looking and playing Strat copy and extremely affordable compared to the ridiculous prices of USA guitars.
This was my second electric guitar and replaced the Westbury. I suspect that I purchased this in around 1984 when I started playing regularly with King Rat. In those days, I was into mildly pushed clean tones, à la Mark Knopfler’s sound on the first two Dire Straits albums, but a Fender Strat was out of the question price-wise. Luckily, the local ABC Music (long gone now, but once upon a time ABC was the Guitar Centre of southern England) had new Ibanez Roadstars in stock. No idea why I chose white – perhaps that was the only RS135 in stock. I’m guessing, but I think this must have cost around 300 quid, which was a lot of money for me at that time.
I can’t remember too much about the guitar other than it was an off-white solid colour with a maple neck/fingerboard, lovely neck profile, but rather cheap low quality single coils in a S-S-S configuration. As I never was much of a vibrato user, I think I blocked off the vibrato to stop the bridge floating around. If memory serves me well I believe I was using .008 strings in those days too, hough I may have had to go up to .009s with the Ibanez.
Not sure what happened to this guitar. I suspect I either part-exchanged it for the MIJ Fender Stratocaster which replaced it, or I gave/sold it to a friend. Actually, as the mists are clearing from my memory as I type this, I have dim memories that I sold it for a few quid to a friend.
The Roadstar was replaced by a brand new MIJ Fender Strat in around 1986.
Check out my Guitar Timeline to see where this one fits into the Ade Phazy guitar history.
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