But in 1979, Ed went back to Charvel again, and started working with them on a more "refined" custom guitar - the "Bumblebee" (Right) as it was called because of it's yellow and black stripe paintjob, professionally done, rather than rattle-canned by Ed himself. The guitar is often referred to as the "VH II" Guitar, because it appears on the back in Ed's shots for the back of the Van-Halen II album (again, right) that came out in 1979, but wasnt even in service at the time of Recording. At that time, Edward was using the Shark (newly cut up), the Frankenstrat in it's original Van-Halen one livery (black/white stripes, PAF pickup, Strat trem, CBS style neck), some kind of Danelectro thing, and a regular stratocaster that appears to have Danelectro pickups in it as many of the session photos from the 1978-1979 VHII Sessions suggest.

The guitar Edward had built, was very close to frankie by design, but had some key differences. For starters, the body was "Rear Routed" for the controls, to allow the guitar to not have a pickguard on it with no visible routes on top. IT had a single, straight, humbucker at the bridge position, a gold Gotoh or Strat style Tremolo on it (initially), 1 volume knob, a transparent Mighty Mite humbucker was slapped in it right before the photoshoot for Van-Halen II. It had a maple strat neck with a black headstock and 22 frets, and it's namesake, a black paintjob with yellow stripes.

So this is going to be a W.I.P. because as much as I liked this guitar, I never researched it. My own personal research tends to veer toward the obscure, and difficult to find. That's a reason why I never explored classics as heavily like The Beatles or Led Zeppelin, or even Van-Halen as influential as Ed was as a guitarist, because finding the information was bloody easy, because it's an easy find.

Bumblebee toured with Ed on the 1979 tour, but it seems it was not used as much, as it seems, based on interviews, and information I've gathered over the years, Ed was having trouble getting it to sound right. The clear pickup was swapped sometime before or during VERY early in the toure, with a white Mighty Mite or a DiMarzio pickup of some kind. Sometime later in the tour, or around 1980, there have been pictures of the Bumblebee with a tone control hanging out of the back cavity - very unusual for Edward Vna-Halen. This suggests maybe Ed was using the tone control to thicken up the Bumblebee's tone. You'll notice on 1979 tour footage, Ed was using Frankie and some other Explorer-like guitar a lot more often than the Bumblebee.

Sometime in 1979, Frankie's original neck was destroyed from "tour induced stress" and replaced with the original neck from Bumblebee. I had a poster of this in High School. AT that point, Frankie also had Bumblebee's white humbucker as well. We can see Bumblebee with it's incarnation prior to the left here with Ed in what would probably still be 1979 or early 1980. You have to understand something, Ed was a relenetless tinkerer with guitars, gear, and apparently other stuff, so nothing stayed the same for very long. Guitars could evolve as much as 4-5 times in a single tour with Van-Halen.

Charvel's Falling Out - Bumblebee was the guitar that I believe was the reason for Ed's falling out with Charvel. Starting not long after he got the BUmblebee, other people started to show up with Ed's guitar, two guys I know who professionally used such an axe were Don Dokken (yes, THE Don Dokken of Dokken) - who had a Bumblebee paintjob on a guitar similar to Frankie with a custom Mighty Mite Preamp in it, and a big chrome pickguard, which was filmed for Zimm's Guitars a couple years before I wrote this.

Another well known example, was Tom McDermott of Rick James' band. If you've watched any Soul Train, American Bandstand, Solid Gold, or other performances from the early 80's with McDermott in Rick's band, you'll notice he has a guitar pretty much IDENTICAL to Bumblebee. And there have been other non-famous examples cropping up on other parts of the internet over the last 20-30-40 years including some on Ed Roman's "World Class Guitars" website.

This understandably upset Ed because he had no endorsement deal with Charvel, had not given them permission to use his design on other people's guitars, and did not like having copycats (one fo the motivations of Edward's relentless tinkering besides just improvements, including being the reason Frankie got a coat of Red Paint sometime in 1979 added to it). They were, in a effect, ripping Ed off. I don't think the copying was the full reason that bugged him, I think also the fact they didn't include him in the business side of it, no negotiations or anything, likely really pissed him off. You make this unique guitar that nobody else has seen before, and now there's some guy up the street making them for other people and you're not involved. That's the kidn of shit that pisses us guitarists off a lot.

So I think between that and the fact that he appears - based on what is seen in photos and what little I've seen from interviews, - to have had a lot of trouble getting Bumblebee to sound the way he wanted (resulting in a LOT of other home built guitars of his own around that time between 1979-1983 when he hooked up with Kramer), that's why this guitar doesn't get the massive fanfare that the Shark, Rasta, Frankenstein, 5150, 1984, MusicMan, or any iteration of Wolfgang gets.

It seems Bumblebee toured in 1980, 1981, and 1982, and may have had some parts on "Women and Children First" and "Fair Warning", but never really was seen out as much. It was mroe of a backup, like the row of 5150 Lookalikes Ed had on the 1984 tour (including 5150 itself as-of-yet-unnamed or un-labeled). IT is seen in photos of his green room above 5150 where all his guitars were stored, and it does have one last photo in the 1980's that we see of the guitar where it has a full featured fine tuner Floyd Rose, a Black Humbucker, and an unlabled neck with black electric tape creating stripes on top of it. (right)

However, it seems the Bumblebee guitar's final claim to fame was when it was buried with Dimebag Darrel Abbott of Pantera and Damageplan in 2004. He was shot to death on stage in Decemeber of 2004 while playing with Damageplan by some soldier shithead name Nathan Gale. When they held Dime's funeral, Edward brought the Bumblebee to the funeral and put it in the casket with Dime stating "an original deserves an original". So Dime has her now, may he rest in peace.

I think the fisrt bit of influence was my first guitar. In 1994-1996, I wanted a Jaguar, was willing to settle for a Jazzmaster, but wound up going for a Kramer because I got sick of having every JAzzmaster that came into the store bought out from under me 5 minutes before I came to stake my claim. A big part of getting that Kramer was the fact I knew Edward Van-Halen played Kramers. That's about all I knew at that point.

However, that Kramer was kind of a basketcase early on and I spent a lot of time getting it fixed. Eventually the shop tech, Curtis, gave me a Stewart MacDonald Catalog. This was around 1997 or so. Right around the time I bought my first Van-Halen tape (1984), first Loverboy record (the first one), first Journey record (Frontiers), and first Night Ranger Record (Midnight Madness). In that group of guitarists (Edward, Paul Dean, Neal Schon, and Brad Gillis) - they all tinkered with their guitars to some degree, ranging from mere tweaks (Schon) all the way to building the whole thing from scratch (Paul Dean). Van-Halen intimidated me because of all the fretboard pyrotechnics, and I was fresh off just barely being able to call myself a lead guitarist because of learning ZZ Top's Elminator album note for note (an all night session with the Kramer and a Cassette Deck). So I needed a way to boost my skills and well....my evolution went from Loverboy, to Journey, to Night Ranger, and THEN to Van-Halen. So yeah, you're getting a tour of my influences via this section...fun huh.

So my introduction to Van-Halen was the 1984 album in 97' on a high school band trip. Van-Halen kinda' became the signature school band trip band for me. The next year, I went on a trip where we went to Myrtle Beach, and that's where I bought the Curt Mitchell guitar method for Van-Halen. I also went on a deep dive via the old World Class Gutiars Website. Say what you will about Ed Roman but the site itself had some pretty cool stuff, and was one of the first stomping grounds for me learning 80's guitar in a time when most people were calling you some pretty nasty names for being into that style of guitar at the time.

I then started buying the other records. I bought the first record, then I got a CD Player, and bought Van-Halen II, FAir Warning, and then Women and Children First, as well as a used copy of Balance from the Guitar Shoppe (and a mint copy of OU812 on cassette). I would spend my nights now, copying Ed's playing style, and using my limitations of execution as a opening to create a pathway of my own to sound like myself instead of being yet another carbon-copy of Eddie, we already have enough of those already.

Van-Halen II was pivotal, because by then I'd been perusing Ed Roman's site, and Vintage Kramer had started to become a thing as well, and I started noticing this black and yellow guitar he had that almost nobody was talking about. It's crazy to think the kids who were into Pantera calling Van-Halen gay slurs were supporting a band whose lead guitarist was BURIED with the very guitar I'm talking about on this page. Seriously, people wonder why I'm not fond of Millennials and refuse to be associated with them.

I mean, the main gutiars you learn about in the Van-Halen catalog are the Shark, Frankenstrat, 5150, Ernie Ball Music Man, Peavey Wolfgang, and the EVH guitars, with the Bumblebee and Steinberger being left as a footnote, and the rest like the Rasta and the mini Les Paul used on "Little Guitars" left as kind of "deep dive" material.

Apparently me and Dime have simliar taste because I wanted to build my own guitar at 15, and I wanted to make it something simple. I was obsessed with Van-Halen guitar stuff at the time, and knew the simplest thing I could build, was something like the Bumblebee, 5150, or Frankenstrat. But because of Paul Dean, I wanted to make my own body. So I decided I would build a Fender Jaguar shaped Bumblebee with a strat trem, and two Harmony STrat pickups wired in series as even the cheapest humbucker at the time was financially out of my reach. THis was the TRUE spirit in how Ed did stuff. The Frankenstrat was born in similiar situations. I wish I still had the first body as a wall-hanger.

So I went to Lowes and tried to "buy" some lumber from their "Cut off stack" out by the lumber yard out back. THey said I could "have" it, so that was awwesome, free body wood. 4 pieces, 3 pieces of Southern Yellow Pine, and one piece of pressure treated pine. The body was routed with a Dremel Router attachment, the pickups, neck, and initially tremolo all came from my Harmony H80T strat copy, and I had a pot and knob sitting around, and made my own Jack Plate out of leftover B/W/B pickguard material with my Kramer...and did so rather hastily.

The guitar was painted the inverse of the original Bumblebee though, with me painting it black first, so it was yellow with black stripes, instead of the other way around. The Strat trem ripped out of the top because I had not learned yet enough about structural integrity in routing, so I swapped in a 1980's Kahler 2300 GIbson branded tremolo instead, and screwed it to the guitar with 2 Briggs and Stratton Lawn Mower cylinder head bolts from a 3.75 HP Briggs Sprint engine. The stripes were rough because I ran out of masking tape and had to resort to Duc-Tape part of the way through. Despite the setbacks, the guitar SOUNDED amazing, it really had that whole "Van-HAlen" sound to it.

Later I turned it into a six string bass and used it till the body and neck fell apart, as I had to use the parts on another guitar, not unlike Ed and his guitars. AS a teenager, in part due to Ed, I was constantly swapping parts out and moving parts between guitars in my collection, especially before the Jag-Stang came along. You'd never know what I'd turn up to Mr. Orr's guitar class with tomorrow....I might be up at 2 a.m. throwing some dejected old Hondo X14 humbucker in some old crusty pawn shop fodder before school becaujse I just felt like it. Welcome to this world. While Paul introduced me to building from scratch, Ed made it okay to relentlessly tinker with the things.

I reprised that build again in 2020 when Edward passed away. That version of the Bumblebee Jaguar I still have, and it's much the same guitar as the first, except with a proper B.C. Rich Humbucker in it, and a much better (and faster) Warmoth neck. I'll link to that project here.