Cheap Trick's hometown of Rockford, Illinois is to be home to a brand-new, 62-foot electric guitar monument in tribute to the band's guitarist, Rick Nielsen.
Set to be erected outside the city's Hard Rock Casino, the enormous construction will take the form of Nielsen’s checkerboard Hamer, which has been one of his go-to guitars for much of his career.
It’s a more sensible move than recreating one of his three five-neck Hamers, although it would have certainly caught the eyes of passersby.
Either way, the 62-foot-by-38-foot monument is a sizable one – roughly the equivalent of nearly four stacked giraffes, or a four-story house.
Its placement also represents a full circle moment for Nielsen, who backed the Hard Rock brand’s venture into Rockford, with the rather ridiculous scale length guitar a tribute to his work establishing the venue on his native soil.
Nielsen told GP a number of years ago that the actualization of his “backbreaking” five-neck guitar wasn’t an easy one.
“Building this monster was a bit of a chore,” he reflected. “I wanted a 12-string and a fretless, and one that sounded like a Stratocaster and one that sounded like a Junior. But Hamer, never to be daunted, managed to put all the ideas together and made it work.”
Hamer’s Frank Untermeyer, tasked with turning the monstrous vision into a reality, called Rick “out of his mind” for dreaming up the guitar.
“We had already done some pretty wacky stuff for him and Cheap Trick, like the checkerboard Standard, an electric mandocello, and a 12-string bass, so we were used to the fact that they set all standards for going to the limit,” he said.
“For this guitar, we cut apart five double-cutaway Hamer Special bodies and laminated them together, and then sanded in between the necks to get that sort of swoopy look. As I recall, routing the wires through this thing was also a huge pain in the ass.”
Despite its four-story size, the checkerboard monument is dwarfed by the tallest Hard Rock guitar replica – a Peavey HP signature found in Biloxi, Mississippi, which stands at a dizzying 112 feet tall.
The Hollywood Hard Rock Casino, built in 2019, took things even further, with architects shaping the 450-foot building after a guitar.
The Rockford Hard Rock will host a “guitar smash” weekend to celebrate its arrival starting on August 29, with performances from Joan Jett and the Blackhearts and Brad Paisley confirmed.
Head to Hard Rock to find out more.
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