If ever a guitar typified the glorious excesses of the 1950s, the White Falcon would be that guitar. To paraphrase Tom Wolfe, the Falcon was a "Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby."
And it was also "the most beautiful guitar in the world," to quote the Gretsch literature of the day.
A hellishly expensive dreamboat even when new, White Falcons continue to be highly treasured, high-dollar guitars.
But for all the things the 6136 White Falcon was, it was not necessarily intended to be a production model at all. It was originally a trade show guitar, a "dream machine" Gretsch put together to show off a little. As the orders came rushing in after its introduction at the 1954 music trade shows, the Falcon was rushed into production.
The story really begins years earlier with Gretsch master salesman and player Jimmy Webster. During the World War II Webster was playing an all-white Harmony. Pictures of him playing the guitar turned up in an armed forces newsletter, interestingly titled The White Falcon.
After the war, Webster would wander the Gretsch factory, looking for ideas. The Falcon's outrageous blend of looks and features came from several places in the factory, as well as from Webster's penchant for gizmos.
From the drum side, Webster picked up gold sparkle drum material. From the banjo side, he saw the rhinestones and other ornamentation that bejeweled the high-end banjos. He put it all together and came up with the White Falcon.
From its debut in '54, the Falcon featured gleaming white paint and gold sparkle trim, 24-karat gold-plated metal parts, ebony and real mother of pearl, all working together to dazzle players and dreamers alike. The guitar had three-layer white, gold and black binding, bird-themed engravings on the neck markers, a special winged headstock and "Cadillac G" tailpiece, so named becauce the "V" at the end was reminiscent of a Cadillac logo, back when Cadillac was "The Standard of the World," and the first GM division with a modern V-8 engine, too.
All the Falcon's hardware was top-shelf, right down to the Grover Imperial tuners. It was also, except for the occasional Country Club, the only spruce-topped Gretsch. It was a big bird, too, at 17 inches wide and almost three inches deep.
In the 60s, the White Falcon switched to a twin-cutaway body, and continously had more gadgets thrown at it. By the late '60s there were so many knobs and switches stuck on the White Falcon it took an electrical engineer, not a guitar player, to actually use one. Much like the Cadillacs they took styling cues from and that other icon of the '50s, Elvis, the Falcons entered the '70s as a bloated parody of the cool they had once embodied.
During the '70s, Baldwin began taking some of the sillier "features" off Falcons. Whether this was a good idea that actually came from the Baldwin offices or just another example of cost-cutting is open to debate, but Falcon's became increasingly stripped down and uncluttered. A single cutaway Falcon even returned beginning in 1974, but with a different model number. The classic 6136 White Falcon had came to an end.
White
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