When I first met Carl Thompson, circa 1989 or 1990, he was working out of his apartment at the time. He was between shop spaces and had set up a makeshift shop in part of his kitchen (He wasn't doing much building then, mostly repairs - until Les Claypool brought him a lot of renewed attention and he reopened a shop in Brooklyn and started building again). Leaning in the corner of his kitchen/shop was the first bass he ever built. It was battered and scarred with assorted holes that had been drilled or chiseled out of the thing and then filled - sometimes with unmatched wood. He had been using that bass as a test bed for pickups, hardware, new ideas, etc... since he built it around 1972. He never thought of that first bass as much of a success; there was a lot about the design he improved upon later, but it served him well as a tool in his shop for many years.
One of the more recent times I ran into him, I think he told me that he ended up cleaning up that bass and selling it to a Japanese collector for a boatload of money. Good on ya, Carl!
