Dale Bozzio’s SSM.

The problem

The guitar had to fit Dale before it could fit the stage.

I spoke with Dale about making a guitar that fit both her personality and her image. Dale is 4 feet 11 inches tall. A normal guitar would have looked a little strange on her, so I reduced the proportions without turning it into a toy.

Then she asked whether I could put effects inside it.

I could. The guitar was already smaller than normal, which meant I had less room to do it. I told her I would come up with something unique that still felt completely like her.

The concepts

Some of the first ideas were completely bizarre.

I started drawing shapes that might fit her visually and physically. Some of them went pretty far off the road. Dale reviewed the ideas and said she wanted something closer to a Fender Jazzmaster.

I thought that was a weird direction at first, mostly because the rest of her image was not exactly known for restraint. But it gave me the boundary I needed. I took the offset idea she liked and pushed it until it felt like Dale and Missing Persons instead of a smaller copy of somebody else’s guitar.

If it is neon, it is right in my book.

Anyone who knows me knows I am completely 80s. This guitar was never going to be brown.

The body went neon yellow. The blue stripe came from the cover of Spring Session M, which is also where the SSM name came from. The pickguard was mirror. The combination had to say Missing Persons before anyone heard a note.

The final body was alder with a maple neck, ebony fretboard and turquoise markers. I installed a set of my 2359 humbuckers, which were designed to mimic the basic character of a Gibson PAF.

The electronics

The effects fit. Barely.

From what I remember, the effects were delay, reverb and chorus. They ran from a 9 volt battery. Getting all of that into a reduced body was not easy. A smaller guitar gives you less room for the normal wiring before you start hiding effect circuits and a battery inside it.

The controls were arranged along the mirrored lower plate so they looked intentional instead of like a pedal had been emptied into the guitar. That was the job: make it unusual without making it look accidental.

The delivery

I had to hide how big a fan I was.

I delivered the guitar to Dale in the green room at the Whisky a Go Go before her show. Her two sons were there, and they immediately started playing it. Dale was kind enough to sign all of my Missing Persons albums while they tried out the guitar.

I was a huge Missing Persons fan and a huge Dale fan. I had to keep that buried under professionalism and act as though this was a perfectly normal day.

About a year later, Dale called me out of nowhere. We ended up talking for more than an hour about Marilyn Monroe. One of her sons had given her a Marilyn painting that she hung over her couch, and that somehow turned into a long conversation.

That is a side story, but it says more about her than the specifications do. Dale was down to earth, easy to talk to and genuinely kind.