In 1969 I was playing guitar with a singer named Oliver who had a few records which were hits. I had met Aaron Newman, and he was talking about the new humbucking pickups Guild was making. Aaron was the guy who made the Guild amps in Elizabeth. Oliver was playing a Gretsch, which stunk, and I had a Starfire V. We went to see Aaron, and we outfitted the band with Guild Thunderbird (I think) amps, and a Starfire bass for Seth Evans, the bass player, and a Starfire for Oliver. I was looking for a solid body after I got fired from Oliver's band, and Aaron told me to wait until the new pickups came in. He also was interested in replicating an unusual setup which Gibson was trying, but it never took off, with a three-way on, off, and out-of-phase switch instead of the usual pickup switch, and a potentiometer knob to switch the pickups gradually. The guitar showed up in Hoboken and Neil Lillien, who was one of the executives at Guild, called me up and said, "Uh, your guitar is here, but I don't know if you're going to like it." I asked why. He said, "It's ORANGE." I told him I didn't care. When I went to pick it up, it was a weird reddish color Guild called Coral Red. I think it was one of the first prototype S-100's with the new pickups. The knob pickup selector was not possible, because it needed a double potentiometer, and the guitar wasn't thick enough for it. So it had a regular pickup switch, and Aaron put in an out-of-phase switch. Later, I had coil taps put in, and Paul Schwartz, at Peekamoose Guitars in New York also put in switches which took the pickups either into series or parallel modes. Some years later, the guitar fell off a bandstand, and over a few weeks, what I thought was a scratch in the finish turned out to be a crack in the body, and the neck was starting to pull away from the body. By then Guild was in Westerly, and I contacted Neil Lillien, and I took the guitar to Rhode Island to be fixed. When I was there, I wanted to get rid of the Hagstrom (I think) whammy bar, and get the ugly color stripped and leave it natural. This happened before Paul had put in the additional coil taps and series/parallel things. Before they did the work, the guys up there said that when they stripped the finish off, the wood in the body was so ugly (I think it was poplar) and they asked if I wanted a mahogany or walnut finish. I think I picked mahogany. When I went to get the guitar, I was really impressed with how great the mahogany finish looked, and when I looked closer I was amazed at how much it looked like the real wood, not just a finish. They told me that they thought the poplar body was so ugly, they simply replaced the whole body with a mahogany body. For $200. This was probably around 1978 or so. In 1982 I got the job as the guitarist in "Cats" on Broadway, and the S-100 did many years in the pit there. Later, when I got a Bluesbird (I posted something about that guitar in the Bluesbird thread here) I switched them back and forth. I tried to find the serial number, but it's been worn away.