Boulevard of Broken-In Dreams

Billy Rowe’s Rock N Roll Relics look, play and sound like much-loved and well-traveled treasures.

- By Richard Bienstock

ASK BILLY ROWE when his love for building guitars began and he’ll take you all the way back to his San Francisco high school in 1980. “I was a big Van Halen fan,” Rowe explains. “And Eddie was the guy of my generation who took guitars and reconfigured them to what he wanted or what he thought was cool. So I was always into tinkering with guitars, ever since I started playing.

“Then, in woodshop class, I decided to make one. I bought a block of wood at a hardwood shop in the East Bay, cut it, did the whole nine yards. I built a star guitar out of swamp ash. And that’s where it started.”

Still, it took many years before Rowe became a guitar builder. First, he had to become a rock star. In the early ’80s, he co-founded Jetboy, who relocated from the Bay Area to L.A. and quickly established themselves as one of the leading acts of the Sunset Strip’s mid-decade glam-rock explosion, alongside up-and-coming peers like Poison, Faster Pussycat and, most significantly, Guns N’ Roses. Over-the-top looks and attitude were the calling cards of the day, and that extended to guitars as well. “I painted my Strat hot pink during the band’s super-early glam era, put a mirrored pickguard on it and scratched it up,” Rowe recalls. “It looked like Paul Stanley’s cracked-glass Ibanez.”