We all know that John Hall has always been VERY diligent in protecting Rickenbacker intellectual property. So how do you explain this?
Sure looks like a 325/350 body to me! Flip it over, and this is what you’ll find on the back of the headstock:
Huh! There must be some kind of story there! Well, we’ll probably never know what it is. Here’s what the ultimate authority, John Hall, has to say about how that authorization was granted:
“Begrudgingly. It's a long story that I'm not going to tell.”
OK then! So it’s legit, if begrudgingly so. So what is it?
What WAS it is a more appropriate question. It was built by Chandler Guitars of San Francisco from roughly 1992-2005. Chandler appears to have gone out of business in the late 2000s. Most of the 555 examples you will find are from 1992-1994.
Chandler Guitars was founded by brothers Paul and Adrian Chandler in 1980. They made a wide variety of guitars from Fender copies to Super Strats to lap steels—generally very well regarded quality wise, but never in high quantities.
Unlike a 325/350, the early 555s were made of solid alder with a set maple neck with a rosewood fingerboard. The bridge was a string-through hardtail Strat copy. Guitars from this period came with either three Firebird-style mini humbuckers or two splittable humbuckers.
Tuners were sideways mounted like on a classical guitar, another nod to the design’s Rickenbacker origins.
Over the years other variations appeared, like a special run of 25 in 1995 with a quilted maple top.
Later versions, like the 2005 example below, got a more contoured body—including a belly carve on the back, and a redesigned headstock. Other woods were also used, like the mahogany we see below.
I’m not exactly sure when Chandler Guitars ceased to exist—the website appears to have gone dormant in 2009, but a cursory search didn’t find ANY guitars made by Chandler after about 2006.
There are more “Rickenbacker-adjacent” guitars, and we’ll add them to the archives as we come to them. But this is the only “officially licensed” Rickenbacker design used and modified by another manufacturer to date (the Paul W acoustics fall into a different category!), and will probably be the only one ever.