Accordo: Thunderbolt: the mystery of Flying Z

In its long history, Hamer has chalked up a series of success stories and a discreet number of curiosities and rarities, at times encroaching on metropolitan legends. Which is the case of the so-called Flying Z, officially the Thunderbolt, a guitar around which Hamer helped build up a myth that still manages to whet the curiosity of fans of six-string oddities, and around which flutter various more or less believable tales.

The happiness of lovers of reverse designs and the more audacious experiments with which Gibson wanted to usher in the '60s, the terror of traditionalists bound to the soft curves of a Les Paul, the guitar known as the Flying Z first appeared in the early '90s, quickly ending up on the lips of collectors and even on the stages of professionals.
Its history, however, is not one of the simplest.

Birth
The Flying Z was presented in the April 1992 edition of the UK monthly, The Guitar Magazine. Various sources refer to this publication also under the name Guitar Magazine, The Guitar, or simply Guitar. Today it seems that the magazine no longer exists, but going by what those who claim they owned the original issue, this is the magazine that became Guitar & Bass Magazine.
Shown under its official name of Thunderbolt, the guitar appeared as the star of a double-page special about an elusive prototype by Ted McCarty dating to the end of the '50s, the period of the trio of the Flying V, Explorer and Moderne.

Many fans welcomed the discovery with excitement, struck by the accompanying photographs that show an instrument similar to a Flying V in a semi-transparent cherry mahogany with the left wing reversed and the tailpiece modeled accordingly, all forming a large Z.
The article, by Richard Chapman and Dave Burrluck also spoke of an auction for the guitar, which was to take place on April first 1992 in London. Dazzled by the guitar’s quirky design, few paid attention to the date of the auction or that particular issue of the magazine: the whole story was none other than a huge, well-devised April Fool gag.
Even if the magazine denied the story in a successive issue, for a long time there were those who swore they had seen, embraced or even possessed a rare Gibson Thunderbolt. Among them, even Billy Gibbons would later declare he had one.

In 1992 there were two magazines that answered to the name of Guitar Magazine, both distributed in the UK, however one of the pair is native to the United States, so there is good reason to believe that the April 1992 edition of Guitar Magazine containing the Gibson Thunderbird hoax is the one shown in the photo.

The joke was planned right down to the minimum particulars, and a guitar actually was built for the occasion; however, for this part of the story there are two versions.
One, more accredited and widespread for the most part online, tells that the editors of The Guitar Magazine commissioned, with the collaboration of Hamer retailer Dave Kenney, the guitar from maker Chris Lukasik, who built it using original Gibson parts.

The other didn’t come until 2010 from user Paul-T, who, on the official GIbson forum, explains that he was working at Guitar Magazine at the time of the occurrence and personally commissioned the work from guitar maker Tim De Whalley, denying that the retailer Kenney had anything to do with the genesis of the Flying Z. It must be specified that there are no other sources to confirm these theses and that the user Paul-T has never revealed his full name nor continued to take part in the life of the forum, so the story should be taken with a pinch of salt. Excluding the detail on the paternity of the guitar, his version nonetheless does match the most widespread one, already mentioned. In addition, in the users’ forum he specifies that the original Gibson parts used for the Thunderbolt were "old". The provenance, value or age of the woods have never been clarified.

The book
Searching for news on the Gibson Thunderbolt phantasm, one of the recurring pieces of information concerns the inclusion of the guitar in a well-known historical book that deals with solid body Gibsons from the early years to the '90s. This book is Gibson Electrics: The Classic Years, written by A. R. Duchossoir, and first published in 1994. In various forums users can be found who take the mickey out of the author (who happens to be the illustrious creator of a number of volumes on the history of the guitar), for having fallen into the trap set a few years earlier by Guitar Magazine, and yet, going on the extracts from the book in English offered by Google Books, quite another story emerges.
In both the 1994 and 1998 editions, both in English, the scansion of the book provided by Google shows a paragraph in which the Thunderbolt is cited, and in which the author refers to it as an acknowledged fake.
With reference to the numerous experiments carried out by Ted McCarty on the basis of Modernistic Guitars (Flying V, Explorer and Moderne), Duchossoir explains: "an example similar to a Flying V with the upper wing reversed was jokingly shown under the name of Thunderbolt in a British magazine not long ago as an incarnation of the mysticism that surrounds these experimental samples".
That this is a correction relating solely to the 1998 edition duplicated erroneously by Google in the preview of the 1994 edition, or that once again online gossip has twisted the facts, we cannot know without getting hold of an original edition of Gibson Electrics: The Classic Years.

The clones
From here on the story gets more and more hazy.
In 1995 Rick Nielsen, guitarist with Cheap Trick, stated that he had managed to borrow the original guitar, taking it with him on tour. The guitar was entrusted to Hamer’s guitar makers for a set up (or repairs following continual mistreatment on-stage), and was carefully examined by the professionals in the Custom Shop who made a one-off perfect replica to be given to Nielsen. Nowadays some fans still declare that they applied to the same guitar makers that the Hamer Thunderbolt was commissioned from to get new copies.
The guitar is visible in many photos and various videos of the time, including the performance on Late Night TV by Conan O’Brien indicated below.

During the Japanese tour that followed soon afterwards, the Japanese company Kid's Guitars of guitar maker Hiroshi Kido produced its own copies in korina wood. The precise number is not certain, but the production period was between 1995 and 1997. It seems that one of these examples is currently travelling the USA with a Gibson logo on it, added later by a private owner.
In the meantime, Fernandes was not standing by idly, and made a new version for Rick, using korina, revising its shape slightly and replacing the pickguard with a Les Paul style one, as well as redesigning the inlays to make them more striking.
After touring around the world, the Flying Z model finally came home when Gibson at last became aware of it. In 1999, the Custom Shop produced two Thunderbolts with a Gibson logo for the NAMM Show. One was in korina, the other in mahogany finished in cherry. This is explained by Zachary R. Fjestad and Larry Meiners in a brief note in their 2001 book Gibson Flying V.

In the absence of proof or statements to the contrary, we must suppose that the Thunderbolt Billy Gibbons claims to be the lucky possessor of is one of the Gibsons in question.

The Hamer legacy
Now that the curtain is coming down on the historic Californian company, the guitar makers wanted to have the last word on the long, much-discussed myth of the Thunderbolt, creating a last official example that almost reinstates the instrument’s paternity.
Last April, with the hope that this is not a twentieth anniversary April Fool, the Hamer Custom Shop created a Flying Z in Limba wood. Once again a one-off item, the last of its breed.