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Built in 1981, this Kramer Voyager Lightning is a rare survivor from the very beginning of Kramer’s wood-neck era, when the company was making the transition from its aluminum-neck guitars into the instruments that would soon define the brand.
Finished in black with the original silver-gray lightning bolt graphic, it features the wonderfully outrageous early Voyager “Star” body, a one-piece maple neck and maple fingerboard, and Kramer’s short-lived Strat-style headstock. That headstock places the guitar in a particularly interesting period before Kramer abandoned the Fender-like design and developed the headstock shapes most associated with its 1980s guitars.
Serial number A9437 fits squarely into this early group, and the surviving Kramer registry actually lists another Voyager Lightning, A9397, just 40 serial numbers earlier. This guitar is also equipped with the early West German Rockinger locking tremolo, an important evolutionary step between conventional tremolos and the Floyd Rose systems Kramer would soon become famous for.
Kramer was already experimenting with Rockingers during this transitional period, and the registry documents a Rockinger-equipped Vanguard at A9398, immediately following the known A9397 Voyager Lightning. It also records B0001, a black Strat-headstock Voyager with a Rockinger and potentiometers dated to the 49th week of 1981.
With its single humbucker, maple neck, early headstock, Rockinger tremolo and lightning graphic, A9437 captures Kramer at a pivotal moment, just before Eddie Van Halen, Floyd Rose and the explosion of the superstrat turned the company into one of the biggest guitar brands of the decade.
