I may be able to shed some light on the photos Tom sent. I started at Alembic in 1975 and worked there for 4 years. The guy in the topmost photo is Frank Fuller, one of the original Alembic builders. He and Rick Turner met at Satterlie and Chapin's music store in San Francisco, both doing instrument repairs. When Rick met Ron Wickersham and Alembic got going on Judah Street, the wood shop was downstairs and there was an affiliated recording studio up above called His Masters' Wheels, run by Bob Matthews and Betty Kantner, evidently with Owsley there a lot of the time too, as well as Jim Furman. After about a year of just Rick and Frank building the guitars together, Doug Irwin showed up and started working there too. Frank says there was a kid named Billy Rose, a Hogfarmer who was married and had a kid at 13, who was working there off and on, cutting shell and doing minor (no pun intended) jobs.
As far as the photos in the Rolling Stone, Frank is working in the Cotati shop in the top one. That's where I started my stint there two years later. Michael Dolan showed up about a year after I did I think. I remember there being about a dozen guys in that production line. We started out switching around so no one would get too bored, but eventually had to settle into one phase of the building or another. Everybody had to sand though. I was lucky and replaced Brian Smith who had dust allergies. He was the setup guy at the end of the line. That meant that I got to put 1200 instruments together, do the fret mills, set action, intonation, and preamp levels, and play each one for awhile before packing them up for shipping to the distributor. Talk about fun.
Another notable luthier who worked there when I got there was Bruce BecVar, who managed to get one of his guitars into the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, no small feat, and now is a professional musician with about 13 albums to his credit.
The photo on the lower right is Rick T. working on his pretzel guitar in the store on Brady Street. Frank says you can tell because the guitar is on a glass topped case. This is where the recording studio and Alembic store moved after Judah Street, and the manufacturing facility moved up to Cotati in Sonoma County.
I'm not sure where the photo with all the people in it was taken, and the image is small and somewhat fuzzy, but that's Doug Irwin on the extreme left and Rick Turner in the foreground on the right. Ron, with the beard, is holding his firstborn, Mary, and next to him is probably Rosie, the keeper of the gate and receptionist. Next to her is susan, Ron's wife, and leaning back in the chair with the Mark Twain suit is Robert "Gumby" Poor, another electronics wizard. He was father to the Pluto pedal and various other cool guitar effects, as well as much of what you see inside the open back of Phil's quadrophonic bass. Most of the others are unrecognizable to me, but it looks like Peter Mundy, Gumby's younger brother, in the shop apron in the back.
