Bluegrass Legend, Tony Rice…and his love of Accutrons

Tony and I were friends and we discussed Accutrons numerous times. He once invited me to a concert performance backstage near me, but I was unable to make it and have regretted it ever since. I once supplied him with a case back for a gold-filled chapter ring he was working on. Hopefully, it became one he wore when he performed. He even put me in touch with John Carter Cash’s wife, Ana Christina, who purchased from me a white gold Alpha as a gift for her husband. She and he loved it. Tony truly loved working on Accutrons and the story by Mr. Kauzlarich below says it all.

MARK KAUZLARICH

JULY 15, 2021

Tony Rice had the most influential hands in bluegrass guitar. His right hand had the precision of a metronome. His left hand glided over the fretboard of his 1935 Martin D-28,  known as “the Antique,” playing elegant and intricate jazz and folk-inspired licks – music in the context of bluegrass yet never confined by it. And on his left wrist sat a Bulova Accutron Spaceview with a 214-movement playing its own song – an F#, flat by nearly a quarter step – at a steady hum. It was a watch that Tony Rice wore nearly every day for the last 45 years of his life, humming a note from the Accutron tuning fork that lulled him to sleep each night as he tucked his hand beneath his pillow, the watch still on.

At bluegrass festivals or jams today, you’ll still see Accutron Spaceviews on the wrists of a few attendees. For some, the Spaceview is a talismanic tribute to a bluegrass icon. Among his closest confidants (the ones he rarely, if ever, talked to about music), the watch is somehow even more storied. Only his closest circle knew the depths to which this idiosyncratic timepiece had become more than an accessory.

Rice died at age 69 on Christmas Day last year, and his passing led to tributes throughout the music world. But to the friends interviewed below for this story, he was more than an elegant musical master – he matched that level of mastery on the Accutron Spaceview, quietly becoming an expert watchmaker on a timepiece whose unique and futuristic construction mirrored both his guitar and the way he played it. 

The Antique was one part of Tony Rice; the Accutron was the other.

Unlike the folklore of his watch, the legend of “The Antique” is well-tread. A 2007 story by Art Dudley in Fretboard Journal is the encyclopedic reference tracing the guitar, serial number #58957, from its build in 1935 to its arrival in the hands of Clarence White in 1959 and beyond. When Clarence and his brother Roland found the guitar, it was barely salvageable. The original fretboard had been removed, its new one held on by tape, and someone had whittled away at the soundhole to enlarge it. But creative work from luthier Milt Owen made it playable, installing a workable fretboard from a Gretsch electric guitar, adding to its unusual look.

The White brothers were on the upswing, appearing in two episodes of The Andy Griffith Show on their way to huge commercial success as the bluegrass band the Kentucky Colonels. Clarence was following in the path of trailblazing North Carolinian guitarist Doc Watson, who had taken the guitar from a rhythm instrument to the forefront of the band with blistering lead-lines. But Clarence, with #58957 at his fingertips, brought a level of experimentation befitting an L.A. band.

“They realized that they could play and be playful,” says Chris “Critter” Eldridge, Grammy-winning guitarist with the band The Punch Brothers. “He was always stretching the beat and playing with time, superimposing tonal colors against really standard harmony to create excitement.”

By 1960, the Rice family had recently moved to Southern California where, at his first radio appearance, nine-year-old Tony crossed paths backstage with Clarence and his D-28. Clarence, only 16 at the time, let young Tony play it as long as he liked, as well as every time the two would cross paths over the next few years.

As the Kentucky Colonels found success, Clarence White began to feel too confined by bluegrass and by his D-28, which had become increasingly difficult to play. Clarence gave up the #58957 in 1965 as collateral to buy a Fender Telecaster for session playing and to pursue a new blend of folk and rock-and-roll, later joining The Byrds. Tragically, in 1973 while packing up from a gig, Clarence was struck and killed by a drunk driver, and the whereabouts of the guitar became a mystery.

The same year that Clarence White salvaged the Antique, a separate formative moment for Tony Rice was underway. Max Hetzel and William O. Bennett, engineers working for Bulova, had just completed the Caliber 214 after nearly a decade of research. Regulated by a tuning fork, it was the first wristwatch with a transistor and resonated with a steady hum. The Accutron was officially announced in October 1960 and touted as accurate to within 1 second per month and its tuning fork was used in 46 NASA missions.

The Accutron Spaceview, however, existed to solve a marketing problem. Early advertisements played up Accutron’s tuning fork and its use in satellites. But despite lacking a crown on the side, the Accutron looked remarkably similar to any other watch. So designers at Bulova etched the Accutron name, logo, and minute track into the underside of the crystal, replacing the dial and exposing the revolutionary and futuristic tuning fork.

These Spaceview watches, cased in 14K gold, were meant as window displays to draw in customers for the otherwise “normal-looking” watches with traditional dials. But customers mistakenly thought that the Spaceview was a normal model. Afraid of losing sales, jewelers started selling these display models in droves and Bulova raced to keep up. The company pivoted to steel cases (some with a thick gold cap) and a chapter ring with a simplified crystal, releasing this more affordable option in 1963. The Spaceview flew off the shelves, selling over 250,000 watches over the next two years.

One person captivated by the Spaceview was folk and bluegrass legend John Hartford. A few years out from winning four Grammys for his song “Gentle on my Mind” and deep into his “newgrass” experimentation, Hartford was in England in 1973 when he purchased an Accutron Spaceview 214, a Swiss-made chapter ring model. Returning home, Hartford crossed paths with Rice backstage at a show, who was at that time unknowingly on the verge of becoming “the man” in bluegrass. Rice’s discriminating ear for artful musicianship had led to an easy and ongoing friendship with Hartford, and after a short time catching up conversation turned to John’s new watch.

“Tony was just intrigued by the whole look of the watch and the fact that it was operated by a tuning fork,” says Richard Bennett, a bluegrass guitarist whose playing and Accutron collecting, and repair work was influenced heavily by his friendship with Rice. “He carried a tuning fork with him everywhere when he was playing,” so it naturally caught his eye. But then there was the accuracy of the watch.

“He was all about precision in every facet of life,” says Jason Burleson, a banjo player and founding member of the bluegrass group Blue Highway. That dedication to precision couldn’t be overstated, especially in Rice’s playing.

At the time, he was a talented 22-year-old bluegrass guitarist who had moved to Lexington, Kentucky to join his brother Larry in what would become one of the most influential bluegrass bands of all time. The group, eventually called J.D. Crowe & the New South, played six nights a week, nine months out of the year, as the house band in the often-packed local Holiday Inn lounge. Rice was at the forefront, his experimental repertoire and iconic baritone voice leading the band. But importantly and unusually for a young bluegrass musician it was a gig that came with a stable and decent paycheck.

While wandering the streets of Lexington one day in 1973, Rice peered through a store window and saw an Accutron that matched John Hartford’s. For the steep price of $135, about a week’s wages, he bought his own Swiss chapter-ring Accutron 214. It was an M3 model (designating its production in 1963), with gold-capped steel case, reference number 2531.

That night, Rice walked into the Holiday Inn and, like any collector, he started talking about his new find. In his biography, Still Inside, The Tony Rice Story, he recounted Crowe’s bewildered response: “‘Tony, what in the world are you thinking? Have you lost your mind? A hundred and thirty-five dollars for a watch?'”

Regardless of how much hell Crowe gave him, that very Accutron 214 would become his go-to watch on the road for the rest of his career.

In 1975, shortly after getting his watch, Rice was talking with bandmate Bobby Slone about the late Clarence White, who Slone had played with in the Kentucky Colonels, and conversation soon turned to White’s old guitar. While Rice was certain the guitar had been lost, Bobby knew where to find it. He gave Rice the name of the man who had taken Clarence’s D-28 as collateral and with one phone call to directory assistance and then to the man’s business in California, Rice found the guitar. Within days, Rice flew to Los Angeles with $550 and was reunited with #58957, which he took to calling “the Antique.”

In just over a year the two objects that would become an inseparable part of Tony Rice had come back into his life.

“Everybody played their best when they played with Tony,” Eldridge says. “The people who are on Mount Rushmore of this form, they played their best with Tony and it’s not an accident. Everybody said it was joyful and easy.”

Everywhere Tony went his fame grew and audiences took notice of his every move, from his revolutionary playing style to his sartorial flair, his thin frame supporting tailored Yves St. Laurent suits, silk ties, and often lizard or caiman Lucchese boots.

“The way he carried himself, it was like a gunfighter,” says his good friend and talented flatpicker, Zane Fairchild. “Some people try to be cool, and some people are cool. I don’t know if he got that from his jazz heroes like Miles Davis or John Coltrane, but I remember seeing that watch and thinking, ‘That’s cool.'”

Seeing Tony Rice live was often a transformative experience for young musicians. And just as Rice had noticed the Spaceview on the wrist of John Hartford, his watch caught the eye of admirers studying his playing, which had the swing and drive of famed bluegrass rhythm guitarist Jimmy Martin and machine-gun propulsion of Doc Watson, a genre-bending style that brought new listeners to bluegrass and inspired even the greats like Alison Krauss, with whom he eventually collaborated with on her double platinum album, now that I Found You. Matthew Tessier, a banjo player from Louisiana, remembers the date he first saw Tony Rice’s Accutron.

“It was in Argyle, Texas at the Argyle Bluegrass Festival on March 12, 2009,” he says. “We walked out a side door, through security, and Tony was there in his suit and tie with a Coke and a cigarette. We sat with him for two hours, four or five of us, talking about any kind of common conversation, like we knew him our entire life. He couldn’t walk around before the show because he would have just been mobbed. It was like Paul McCartney if he walked down the street.

“But here I was, in the room with the hero of bluegrass music. It was Earl Scruggs and Tony Rice, in my mind. And I remembered thinking, ‘What in the hell kind of watch does he have on?'”

When Jason Burleson saw Rice in the mid-’80s at The Down Home in Johnson City, Tennessee, he asked himself the same question. He later got his first Accutron from dobro player Phil Leadbetter – and when he ran into Rice backstage in the early 2000s, they connected over that watch and exchanged numbers.

“A couple months later I was in the parking lot at Home Depot and my phone rang,” remembered Burleson. “It was Tony, just checking on how my watch was running.”

It was a variation of a story that took place hundreds of times across the bluegrass scene. But Rice’s passion for the 214 movement ran deeper than most knew and had quickly grown into an obsession. Fairchild remembers that when the Rubik’s Cube first came out, Rice took it apart to learn how it worked, then obsessed over them until he could do them at lightning speed. For a while, he just collected the watches but eventually he took to Accutron 214s in the same way.

One morning in the 1980s, he told Burleson, “I got up and looked at it and thought, ‘I have no idea how this sonofabitch works but I’m gonna find out.'”

There was a limited amount of information available on the watch, which had stopped being made in 1977, and it was no small feat to learn the intricacies of a timepiece that was far more electric than mechanical. Rice sought out factory-certified technicians and hunted down the only available manual.

The manual is basic, says Kenny Smith, the International Bluegrass Music Association’s two-time Guitar Player of the Year. “It’s vague, at most. But what’s really incredible about what he did, he took that book and learned everything.”

Bennett recalls Rice memorizing every individual part number: “Instead of calling me and saying, ‘can you get the pawl jewel for an index arm’ he would call and give me the part number.”

Rice was a night-owl, so those calls would often come at 2 or 3 in the morning as he worked out of his “listening room,” housing his collection of thousands of albums, top-of-the-line Marantz, Urei, and Ortofon audio equipment, and countless mementos from his career. Rice eventually created a full-fledged watch repair shop in the space, with an oscilloscope and stereo microscope, a digital atomic clock, and any piece of equipment he might need to resurrect an old 214 movement.

He would drink two pots of coffee a day, starting the second one at 9 PM and finishing it around 2 AM, all while working on one of the dozens of watches in various states on his workbench, sometimes for 24 hours at a time.

“Occasionally, I would get a voicemail from 2 AM when he was working on one of my watches,” Burleson says. “Eventually, I made a CD of all the voicemails he left, and the day after he died, I pulled it out again and listened to it.”

“He’d get up when everyone else was in bed and it was like he was the only person in the world,” says Terry Baucom, a bluegrass singer and banjo player nicknamed “The Duke of Drive” for his style of playing. “He’d work on those watches with the same gusto that he played his guitar. He would stay up all night, drink coffee, have a cigarette, and do the two things he loved: Work on watches or play guitar.”

Unbeknownst to all but his closest friends, Rice secretly was becoming one of the most respected repairmen on the Accutron 214 worldwide. He became a fixture on a number of message boards, including a massive Yahoo! Group where he wrote under the name “Thunderbeing2007” (a reference to his 2005 Ford SVT F-150 Lightning pickup), sourcing parts and sharing advice as just another Accutron fan.

“I got on some of the watch forums that he was in and there were people from all over that didn’t know he was a world-class guitar player,” Tessier says. “They just knew him as the expert on these things. There were guys from Sweden that would ask him questions about these watches.”

It seemed like fate that Rice’s two most important objects in his life, the Antique and his watch, were incredibly temperamental – and it’s possible that his patience with one helped in tackling the other. The temperamental nature of the Antique has led to debate over whether it is “the Holy Grail” many people say.

“I think it’s one of the most extraordinary instruments in the world, one of the most singular instruments, and one of the most misunderstood instruments because it’s got the Excalibur like mystique,” says Eldridge, who played the guitar many times over the years while mentored by Rice, even being dubbed “Critter” by Rice when he was a child. “It’s the most responsive instrument I’ve ever played. You could touch that thing with a feather, and you’d get a beautiful full-range tone out of it. If some guy off the street picked the guitar up and played a G chord it would sound like a box of nails. But if you played it the way it wanted to be played, with finesse and touch, it was the best guitar.”

Rice found a similar delicate touch was required to work on the 214 movement, referring to needing a “stillness like a brain surgeon,” in his biography.

“I think that he was a better watchmaker than a guitar player – and he was a master at the guitar,” says Smith, who eventually learned how to repair 214 movements, with guidance from Tony.

Over the years, the list of famous musicians with Accutrons eventually grew to include nearly every member of J.D. Crowe & the New South’s eponymous record except for bassist Bobby Slone, including the once-incredulous J.D. Crowe. By 1993, when Kenny Smith got his first Accutron, it was an open secret in the bluegrass world that Rice both wore and fixed Accutrons, even if people didn’t know how extraordinary he was at it, and people had started to bring him watches to repair just to have some small connection to their hero. And for friends, Rice wouldn’t take money for repairs, only occasionally either asking for a donor watch or parts if they had them.

As time went on, it wasn’t enough for Rice to spend long nights in his listening room working on his Accutrons. When he hit the road, Rice started bringing his stereo microscope and watches to refurbish in his hotel room. And at times his enthusiasm for watches sometimes overtook his passion for bluegrass.

“We were at the IBMA [International Bluegrass Music Association] award show in 1992, sitting in the auditorium while the award show was going on, and he asked if I had any new watches on me,” Bennett says. “I said, ‘Yeah I got a couple stainless chapter rings.’ He was sitting in front of me and was trying to talk to me in the middle of the award show. And some woman shushed him and so he pulled out a little piece of paper and wrote down his room number and said, ‘Be there right after this.'”

Occasionally in the bluegrass music scene, the legend of Tony and the Accutron even grew larger than reality. In the tiny, small town of Rugby, Virginia lives Wayne Henderson, described by many as a living Stradivari of guitars. As he works away, shaving braces for a reproduction of a Martin guitar from the same era as the Antique, his wrist sports an Accutron Railroad, which many assume to be there because of Rice. But it, like many things in the world of a man whose waitlist stretches over ten years for a guitar, had just shown up one day. “I didn’t know about Tony and the watches,” he says, “until years later.”

For the next two decades, Rice continued to tour, his microscope and watches in tow. After driving thousands of miles between shows, he would often immediately set to work on his watches when he returned home, giving him a sense of stillness and focus and another outlet to his passion for precision. Tessier said Rice remembered every watch that passed through his hands and was his own worst critic. But one watch he never forgot was Hartford’s, which had become his favorite model.

In the late 1990s, around Rice’s birthday, he crossed paths with Hartford at a festival. John beckoned Tony over to his car and told him to close his eyes and put out his hands. John laid in Tony’s hands the watch that started it all, the same one Rice had seen on his friend’s wrist over 25 years prior. Rice cherished that watch for years, until quietly gifting it to a close friend where it remains in their collection.

In 1994, Rice withdrew from singing live after his voice had failed him, later being diagnosed with muscle tension dysphonia, which left him with a deep, gravely, and painful-sounding speaking voice. “I never liked to sing anyway, man,” he said in his biography. “I always saw it as a distraction from what I wanted to do best, which was play the guitar.”

As the number of people who wore Accutrons within the bluegrass scene grew, it became tradition for people to take photos of their wrists, especially at Rice’s shows. But in the early 2010’s Rice’s hands started to fail him, too, as severe arthritis stripped him of his ability to play. Watches “filled the void as best it could be filled,” according to Tessier, but he became that much more reclusive. Still, Accutrons seemed to be the gateway through to him.

“It was funny, you could text him about anything and he’d never respond,” said Burleson. “But if you texted him about an Accutron he’d get back to you right away.”

As long as he could, Rice continued building watches for friends who had yet to be brought into the Accutron fold, like his friend Zane Fairchild, for whom he built a model 214 from the ground up. Shortly before Rice died, Fairchild decided he needed a Railroad model Accutron, as well.

“Tony took the one that he was wearing and said ‘I’d just like to give you this one, since I rotate watches every six months.’ But he insisted he was going to buff the scratches out of the crystal and case,” Fairchild says. “But I wanted the watch, scratches and all. They were scratches Tony had put into the watch himself. They were a part of its story and his, as well.”

A cursory list of professional bluegrass musicians wearing Accutron watches numbers over 30 – and the number of fans wearing Accutron is likely well in the hundreds. He once told Tessier that like his music, “my work is well-documented” with his watches. Multiple Facebook groups relating to Accutron watches make reference to Rice and one, with over 1,500 members, has a memorial to him as its cover photo. Just over a month after his death, Cindy Baucom, a broadcaster and bluegrass producer and wife of Terry Baucom, remembered their long conversations about the Accutron 214.

“If there was anything that Tony would want to be remembered by,” she said, “it would be his love of Accutrons.”