The One That Started It All: A Telecaster History

[Garrison Hilliard]

by Jeff Owens

#fenderhistory
#telecaster


THE RUNDOWN
While Leo Fender and the staff of his small Southern California
instrument- and amp-making company knew that they’d built a
revolutionary new guitar when they introduced the Telecaster in early
1951, they had no idea of the size and scope of the musical revolution
their unusual new invention would start. They couldn’t possibly have.

It was not a foregone conclusion that such an instrument would
succeed; indeed, some scoffed and laughed at the Telecaster when it
was officially unveiled that year at the industry’s largest U.S. trade
show, mocking it as a “boat paddle” and a “snow shovel.” This kind of
derision didn’t last long, though.

That’s because players quickly realized that Fender had given them
something not only new and unusual, but something well-designed,
easy-playing, efficient, rugged, affordable and, above all,
great-sounding. Although electrified guitars had been around in
various forms since the 1920s, Leo Fender and his inner circle had
labored mightily throughout the close of the 1940s and the earliest
dawn of the new decade to design and perfect something that really
didn’t exist before—a mass-produced solid-body Spanish-style electric
guitar.
THE GUITAR
As innovative as it was, little if anything was fancy about the
Telecaster. Several of its features were carried over from the
Hawaiian steel guitars Fender had already been making since 1945, such
as the “ashtray” bridge cover, knurled chrome knobs, Kluson tuners and
combination of bridge and bridge pickup in one integral unit. If the
maple neck broke or became too worn, there was no complex luthiery
involved—you just screwed on a new one. It had a simple black
pickguard (of fiber or Bakelite) held on with five screws. Unlike many
existing guitars at the time, the Telecaster’s strings were pulled
straight over the nut, with all the tuners on one side of the
headstock—ideas that Leo himself said he borrowed from 19-century
Istrian folk guitars and Viennese Staufer guitars.

The controls were another matter. True, the layout was simple—two
knobs and a three-position switch, but their combined function was not
as simple as might be supposed at first. The front knob always
controlled master volume, but the rear knob was not always a master
tone knob. In 1951, putting the selector switch in the rear (bridge)
position delivered both pickups, with the rear knob serving as a blend
control that governed the amount of neck pickup sound mixed into the
bridge pickup sound. The selector switch in the middle position
delivered the neck pickup only with its “natural” mellow tone (its
chrome cover soaked up extra capacitance), and the switch in the front
(neck) position delivered the neck pickup only with extra capacitance
that produced a bassier tone; the rear knob affected neither of these
settings.

American Vintage '52 Telecaster

This control arrangement was “simplified” in 1952 to what became known
as the conventional Telecaster control layout. After this change,
putting the selector switch in the rear (bridge) position delivered
the bridge pickup alone, with the rear knob acting as a proper tone
control. The selector switch in the middle position delivered the neck
pickup alone, with the rear knob again acting as a tone control. The
selector switch in the front (neck) position delivered the neck pickup
alone with the preset bassier sound and a non-functioning rear knob
(as before). In this control scheme, there was no switch setting in
which both pickups were on at the same time, an arrangement that
lasted until the late 1960s. However, players were quick to discover
that the Telecaster’s three-position switch could be precariously
balanced in the two “in-between” switch positions to deliver in-phase
or out-of-phase sounds (depending on the polarity of the pickups) in
which both pickups were on (an unintentional design feature exploited
by players to even greater extent on the Stratocaster).

So there was quite a bit of tonal versatility there. Unlike any guitar
that came before it, the Telecaster had an incredibly bright, clean
and cutting sounding, with a piercing high end and thick midrange and
bass.

Even today, 60 years after its invention, a basic modern Telecaster
outwardly differs very little from its ancestors of 1951. Its
simplicity and efficiency as a solidly reliable workhorse guitar
remained hallmarks of its design throughout the 1950s, as indeed they
would throughout subsequent decades.


THE PLAYERS
Buck Owens
Steve Cropper
Eric Clapton
Jimmy Page
Luther Perkins
Jimmy Wyble
Charlie Aldrich
Jimmy Bryant
Roy Watkins
Bill Carson
Merle Haggard
Waylon Jennings
James Burton
Muddy Waters
B.B. King
Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown
Roy Buchanan
Pete Townshend
Syd Barrett (Pink Floyd)
Clarence White (the Byrds)
Albert Lee - Keith Richards
George Harrison
Joe Strummer
Ritchie Kotzen (Winery Dogs, Mr. Big, Poison)
Danny Gatton
Andy Summers (the Police)
Steve Howe (Yes)
Chrissie Hynde (Pretenders)
Graham Coxon (Blur)
Jonny Greenwood (Radiohead)
THE FULL STORY
The 1950s
Outside the factory, the western swing guitarists who helped Leo
perfect his new guitar were the first to fully understand how good the
Telecaster really was. Early players such as Jimmy Wyble, Charlie
Aldrich, Jimmy Bryant, Roy Watkins and Bill Carson took to the
instrument with missionary zeal, and Fender Sales chief Don Randall’s
carefully built sales network made sure the appeal of the Telecaster
slowly but surely radiated from Southern California all the way to the
East Coast.

It bears remembering that when the Telecaster was introduced in 1951,
rock ‘n’ roll was still a few years away; Leo Fender and his staff
were building guitars and amps mainly for the western swing guitarists
whose touring circuits often brought them near the company’s home in
sunny Southern California. Nonetheless, Fender’s innovative new
instruments fed the rise of the small, loud bands that, by the
mid-1950s, had largely supplanted the big bands of the 1930s and
1940s, a phenomenon that in turn fueled the concurrent explosion of
U.S. youth culture.

Fender and its new Telecaster guitar were ideally placed to take
advantage of all of this, because Fender didn’t belong to the stodgy
old world of high-end guitar craft. Fender was brash, young,
innovative and West Coast; not old, staid and East Coast. Fender
instruments and amps were fun, tough and affordable rather than
delicate and expensive. All those kids who found themselves with a
powerful new cultural movement of their own in the post-war mid-1950s
could get their hands on great-sounding, solidly built Fender guitars
easily enough.

Consequently, by mid-decade the Telecaster was finding its way into
the inventive hands of rock ‘n’ roll, R&B and country guitarists and
onto their recordings. In Nashville in July 1956, Johnny Burnette and
the Rock and Roll Trio recorded an energetic rock ‘n’ roll version of
1951 jump blues song “The Train Kept-A-Rollin”; lead guitarist Paul
Burlison used his Telecaster to play one of the first recorded
instances—if not the first recorded instance—of a contemporary fuzz
guitar sound. In July 1957, Dale Hawkins scored what was probably the
first Telecaster-fueled U.S. Top 40 hit with “Suzie Q,” a song built
on a catchy guitar lick by his band’s young guitarist, James Burton.

When Burton later joined teen idol Ricky Nelson’s band (at age 18),
thousands of U.S. TV viewers saw him play a Telecaster on The
Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet in the late ’50s and early ’60s,
performing songs such as “Just a Little Too Much,” “It’s Late,” and
"Believe What You Say".


And in what is widely regarded as the greatest rock ‘n’ roll film ever
made, 1956’s The Girl Can’t Help It, the Telecaster (in its
single-pickup Esquire version) puts in a pair of appearances. It’s
first seen in the hands of Little Richard’s guitarist (likely either
Ray Montrell or Ed Blanchard) during the hard rocking “Ready Teddy”
and “She’s Got It”; guitarist Russell Willaford plays one later in the
film during Gene Vincent and His Blue Caps’ smoldering “Be Bop a
Lula.”

In the R&B world, players such as B.B. King and Clarence “Gatemouth”
Brown took readily to the Telecaster. And when the great Muddy Waters,
the man who electrified Delta blues, first visited England in 1958, he
shocked audiences who were expecting folksy acoustic sounds by
blasting out loud, stinging blues on his Telecaster. For many young
players in the U.K., Waters’ October 1958 tour was the first time they
ever saw a Telecaster in real life. The dramatic effects of this would
become palpably evident in the decade that followed.


In the country world, Luther Perkins accompanied Johnny Cash from 1954
on by playing bright, catchy lines on a Telecaster and an Esquire.
Farther west, in Bakersfield, Calif., Buck Owens was discovering how
to put the Telecaster to work in a loud and stripped-down country
style that stood in stark contrast to the slick, string-heavy country
sound then in vogue in Nashville. The Telecaster would become the
foundation of the “Bakersfield Sound” pioneered in the later 1950s and
popularized in the 1960s by Owens and his band, the Buckaroos, Merle
Haggard and the Strangers, and others.

The Telecaster also made great inroads in the 1950s as a must-have
studio session instrument. It didn’t take long to become an essential
element in the arsenal of studio veterans nationwide and A-list
session veterans Barney Kessel, Howard Roberts and Tommy Tedesco all
got Telecasters.

Though largely unchanged during the 1950s, a few minor tweaks to the
Telecaster were implemented in the guitar’s first decade though. The
color of the pickguard was changed from black to white in 1954; its
pickup selector switch tip was changed from the original round type to
the “top hat” type in 1955. Perhaps the biggest change of the decade
came in 1958, when the once blonde-finish-only Telecaster first became
available with eye-catching custom color finishes for an additional 5
percent cost. The first significant new version of the model didn’t
appear until 1959, when the Custom Telecaster was introduced, with a
bound body and rosewood fingerboard.

All in all, the Telecaster was a great success story in the decade of
its birth. The 1950s saw it rise from regional obscurity to nationwide
indispensability (with worldwide acclaim looming) as rock ‘n’ roll
proved to be more than a passing fad and youth culture bloomed as it
never before had in the United States. The Telecaster had both the
style and substance; the form and function to endure indefinitely as
both a valuable tool and a potent symbol. It was a great idea whose
time had come, and it changed music in the ’50s-era United States.

In late 1959, with the decade rapidly closing, quite a few of these
English kids were eagerly soaking up every Telecaster-fueled note they
could get their hands on. These included 16-year-olds Keith Richards
and George Harrison, 15-year-olds Jeff Beck and James Page,
14-year-olds Eric Clapton and Peter Townshend, 13-year-old schoolmates
Roger “Syd” Barrett and David Gilmour, 17-year-old Andy Summers and a
great many more. They all immersed themselves in the sounds of the
Telecaster in the 1950s, and they all eventually got their hands on
Telecaster guitars.

The 1960s
In its first decade, the Telecaster had established and proven itself.
It debuted in early 1951 as an innovative new kind of instrument from
a small upstart Southern California maker that served the region’s
Western swing and dance band guitarists. The Telecaster, however,
quite separate from the intentions of its makers, fed the emergence
only a few years later of rock ‘n’ roll and the explosion in U.S.
youth culture that came with it, and by the end of the 1950s it was an
unqualified success as an indispensable workhorse instrument for
guitarists of many musical styles and genres nationwide.

Strangely perhaps, things got off to a slow start, because real rock
‘n’ roll had all but disappeared in the United States by 1960. Elvis
Presley was in the Army; Little Richard had traded his piano for the
pulpit; Jerry Lee Lewis, Chuck Berry and Alan Freed all but vanished
amid scandal and legal woes; Buddy Holly perished in a 1959 plane
crash and Eddie Cochran was killed in a 1960 automobile accident. The
ensuing vacuum was filled with schmaltzy ballads, reverb-drenched teen
idols and girl groups that, while they had a charm of their own,
weren’t especially guitar oriented. Apart from a few bright spots in
the forms of Motown and surf/instrumental music, things looked
somewhat bleak for the electric guitar in U.S. pop music in mid-1960.

Real salvation, as it turned out, came from across the Atlantic and
from seemingly unlikely saviors. Rock ‘n’ roll, it turned out, was
alive and well in the U.K.; rescued by skinny English kids who
couldn’t get enough of authentic U.S. blues and rock ‘n’ roll and who
eagerly devoured every James Burton solo, every Chuck Berry riff,
every Eddy Cochran lyric and every Scotty Moore chord voicing. They
mastered rock ‘n’ roll and made it their own on any third-rate guitar
they could get their hands on, never dreaming that in very short order
they would be the ones to re-introduce the form—explosively so—to the
land of its birth.

In late 1959, these English kids included 16-year-olds Keith Richards
and George Harrison, 15-year-olds Jeff Beck and James Page,
14-year-olds Eric Clapton and Peter Townshend, 13-year-old schoolmates
Roger “Syd” Barrett and David Gilmour, 17-year-old Andy Summers and a
great many more. They spent 1960-1962 continuing to absorb U.S. rock
‘n’ roll and furthering their mostly self-taught musical educations;
some were already performing publicly with their earliest bands.

Back in the United States, the Telecaster bided its time through
1960-1962 as its brothers, the by now well-established Stratocaster
(1954) and the Jazzmaster (1958), kept a tenuous hold on the charts by
fueling instrumental and vocal surf music by performers and acts such
as Dick Dale, the Beach Boys and the Ventures. Nonetheless,
interesting Telecaster sounds were in the works. Motown house
guitarist Joe Messina often used a Telecaster, and out west,
Bakersfield, Calif., singer/guitarist Buck Owens was pioneering a
loud, no-frills anti-Nashville country sound dominated by the sound of
his Telecaster.


Perhaps the first truly quintessential Telecaster album of the 1960s
arrived in October 1962 with the release of Green Onions by
instrumental Memphis R&B quartet Booker T. & the M.G.s. Its title
track was an enormous hit; both it and the album introduced the world
to the impeccable phrasing of Missouri-born
guitarist/producer/songwriter Steve Cropper. Throughout the remainder
of the decade, as a member of Booker T. & the M.G.s and as a house
guitarist for the Stax label, Cropper’s graceful Telecaster work
appeared on many seminal hits, including “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the
Bay” (Otis Redding, 1965), “In the Midnight Hour” (Wilson Pickett,
1965) and “Soul Man” (Sam and Dave, 1967).

In California, meanwhile, Buck Owens’s career had taken off. He first
hit the Billboard country chart in 1959 with his tenth and eleventh
singles, “Second Fiddle” and “Under Your Spell Again,” and 1960’s
“Above and Beyond” reached number three. Owens rebelled against the
slick, string-laden Nashville “countrypolitan” sound so popular at the
time by championing a loud, raw and stripped-down sound fueled by the
brash twang of his Telecaster—what came to be called the “Bakersfield
Sound.”


Owens and his band, the Buckaroos, recorded Johnny Russell-penned song
“Act Naturally” in Los Angeles in February 1963 at a session marked by
Buckaroos fiddle player Don Rich’s first appearance on lead guitar
(Owens’s Telecaster). With its infectious Telecaster riff, “Act
Naturally” was released that March, hit the Billboard chart in April
and made Owens a star when it became his first number-one hit in June.
Thus firmly established, the Telecaster-driven Bakersfield Sound would
rival Nashville throughout the decade as its other hit-making artists
ascended the charts.

The British Invasion of 1964 needs little introduction. In the wake of
the Beatles’ phenomenal success first at home in the U.K. and then
worldwide, mainstream rock music became intensely (and at times
wildly) guitar-driven as it never had before. Fender guitars made
their way to England in ever-greater numbers and began making
appearances of great portent in the hands of those kids—now young
men—who so rabidly devoured the U.S. sounds of the 1950s.

In July 1964, a London quintet called the Yardbirds appeared on
Granada Television program Go Tell it on the Mountain, playing
“Louise” and “I Wish You Would.” What was noteworthy about the
appearance is that while so many British groups at first played
guitars by makers other than Fender, the Yardbirds’ 19-year-old
guitarist, Eric Clapton, tore up both songs on a red Telecaster.


Elsewhere in London, in 1965, Who guitarist Pete Townshend faced a
vexing issue. The Who had become known not only for their visceral
sound, but also for their violent stage act, which by late 1965
regularly culminated in Townshend smashing his guitar at the end of
set-closing anthem “My Generation.” Smashing up the delicate
Rickenbacker guitars Towshend was known for playing had become
prohibitively expensive, however, and in a money-saving move he began
switching to Telecasters for “My Generation,” as they were less
expensive and certainly easier to repair.


Also of note in 1965 is Clapton’s departure from the Yardbirds that
March.

Clapton recommended his friend Jimmy Page as a replacement, but Page
was reluctant to give up his lucrative session career and in turn
suggested his friend Jeff Beck, who then joined the group. Beck’s
innovative and experimental guitar work typified the Yardbirds’ most
successful period; his 18-month stint featured hits such as “Heart
Full of Soul,” “I’m a Man,” “Shapes of Things” and “Over Under
Sideways Down,” most of which he played on a battered 1954 Esquire.
Back in the United States in the mid-1960s, the Telecaster-bred
Bakersfield sound continued to grow in popularity. Nearly every album
and single Buck Owens released from late 1963 to early 1968 hit number
one on the Billboard country chart. A fellow Californian and early
Bakersfield Sound devotee also started racking up impressive chart
successes, too—in late 1966, Merle Haggard and the Strangers hit
number one with their seventh single, “I’m a Lonesome Fugitive.”

Perhaps no single 12-month period during the 1960s testified to the
Telecaster’s amazing workhorse versatility more than the musically
explosive year of 1967. Muddy Waters, the lion of Delta blues, played
his ever-present Telecaster on the Super Blues album with Bo Diddley
and Little Walter. At London’s Abbey Road Studios on March 28, Paul
McCartney used an Esquire to record guitar parts in “Good Morning Good
Morning” and “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite” for the Beatles’
momentous eighth album, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. In the
same building at the same time, Syd Barrett used his Telecaster and
Esquire models to record Pink Floyd debut album The Piper at the Gates
of Dawn.

Two noteworthy Telecaster technical developments also marked 1967.
First, Fender (sold by Leo Fender in 1965 and now under the corporate
banner of CBS) reconfigured the guitar’s controls so that the
three-way switch delivered neck pickup/both pickups/bridge pickup
operation. This meant that, for the first time since 1952, the
Telecaster once again had a switch setting that activated both pickups
simultaneously. Second, musicians Gene Parsons and Clarence White (the
Byrds) invented the Parsons/White String Pull, later known as the
B-Bender, and equipped White’s 1956 Telecaster with it (Fender would
release its own B-Bender-equipped Telecaster 33 years later).


Equally major artistic and technical developments were in store for
the Telecaster in 1968. Indeed, it was the year that saw the first
truly significant design departure for the model in the lightweight
form of the Thinline Telecaster. Renowned German luthier Roger
Rossmeisl, who arrived at Fender in early 1962 after an enormously
influential career at Rickenbacker and successfully engineered
Fender’s entry into the world of acoustic guitars basically hollowed
out a Telecaster body, routing sections on both sides from the rear
and gluing a thin panel over the back. The Telecaster Thinline debuted
in 1968 and became an enduring success.

Also introduced in 1968 was the psychedelic “Paisley Red” and “Blue
Flower” Telecaster models, so named for the color and pattern of the
self-adhesive wallpaper (!) used to decorate their tops (each guitar
had a clear pickguard). Although James Burton became closely
associated with the Paisley Red guitar, neither model lasted long.

Artistically, the Telecaster served as the main musical voice of two
monumental debut albums recorded in 1968, both by U.K. artists. The
first was Black Claw & Country Fever, by virtuoso
country/rockabilly/rock/R&B guitarist Albert Lee, subsequently widely
known to many as “Mr. Telecaster.” The second was the eponymous debut
album by Led Zeppelin, which Jimmy Page had formed from the ashes of
the Yardbirds. On Led Zeppelin, Jimmy Page played a
psychedelic-painted Telecaster (given to him by Jeff Beck) on tracks
including “Dazed and Confused,” “Good Times Bad Times,” “Communication
Breakdown,” “How Many More Times,” “You Shook Me” and more.


No group epitomized the 1960s more than the Beatles, however, and as
the decade wound to a close, so did the band’s phenomenal career. Ever
since recording “Ticket to Ride” in February 1965 with a droning
Stratocaster part, the Beatles had made steadily increasing use of
Fender gear, and it was in the group’s final chapter that the
Telecaster came into significant play.

George Harrison received a prototype custom all-rosewood Telecaster
built by Fender’s Philip Kubicki. Harrison played this guitar on the
final Beatles album, Let It Be, and played it atop the London
headquarters of the Beatles’ company, Apple, during the famous Jan.
20, 1969, rooftop concert that would be the Beatles’ final live
performance (as seen in 1970 documentary Let It Be). Fender briefly
put the guitar into production, but its unusual tonality and
considerable weight made it a short-lived addition to the line. Soon
after the rooftop concert, Harrison gave his rosewood Telecaster to
Delaney Bramlett of Delaney & Bonnie (Delaney put the guitar up for
auction in 2003; it was bought by actor Ed Begley Jr. on behalf of the
Harrison estate).

And so the 1960s closed with Fender’s original electric guitar
enjoying wider and more varied use than ever, with the company
starting to explore innovative new takes on the Telecaster that would
continue well into the decade to come.

The 1970s
The 1970s began for the Telecaster with its two most acclaimed U.S.
masters making some big changes. First, James Burton had just joined
Elvis Presley’s band the year before, playing a red Telecaster; now he
was using the paisley Telecaster that would thereafter become so
closely identified with him. Second, Steve Cropper left Stax Records
in the fall to establish his own studio, TMI, where he would play with
and produce artists such as Jeff Beck, John Lennon, Ringo Starr, Tower
of Power, Rod Stewart and many others. The decade would later see
further big changes and even more acclaim and success for both men.

As 1970 drew to a close, an article appeared in the Dec. 9 edition of
the Washington Post in which writer Tom Zito described a visit to a
dark suburban tavern in Bladensburg, Md., called the Crossroads
Restaurant and Supper Club, where he caught a set by house band Danny
Denver and the Soundmasters. Although the venue itself was wholly
unimpressive, Zito wrote that “What makes the Crossroads remarkable is
the presence of one man, Roy Buchanan, who provides what may well be
the best rock guitar picking in the world.”

Zito’s Post piece was reprinted in Rolling Stone two months later in
February 1971, and eccentric and phenomenally talented Arkansas-born
guitarist Roy Buchanan, 31, suddenly found himself the object of much
attention after toiling more than 15 years in relative obscurity (he
briefly succeeded Burton in Dale Hawkins’ band in the late 1950s).

It’s difficult, in writing, to do justice to what it was that Buchanan
was able to do with a guitar. He simply worked on another level,
coaxing jaw-dropping solos, haunting cello-like volume swells, and
otherworldly harmonic and feedback sounds from his main instrument, a
1953 Telecaster he nicknamed “Nancy.” Many who saw him came away
convinced that they’d just seen the world’s greatest guitarist.

The Rolling Stone reprint led to interest from public television
station WNET, flagship of the then-new PBS network, which produced an
hour-long documentary, Introducing Roy Buchanan, which aired that
November and shifted his career into high gear. With his band, the
charmingly named Snakestretchers, he release indie solo debut Buch and
the Snakestretchers late in 1971 before inking a deal with Polydor
Records, for which he recorded five solo albums before moving to
Atlantic Records in 1976. A quietly enigmatic figure who amassed
enormous acclaim, Buchanan nonetheless seemed to flee the spotlight,
apparently uninterested in achieving the kind of major-league stardom
that otherwise seemed due to an artist of his astounding ability.

Roy Buchanan, however, was not the only reason that 1971 was a big
year for the Telecaster.

Out on the U.S. West Coast, Fender continued the successful
experimentation with the Telecaster that began with 1968’s
hollowed-out Thinline model, introducing a new version on which both
single-coil pickups were replaced by the company’s first-ever
humbucking pickups. These were the Fender Wide Range humbucking
pickups developed by Seth Lover, who had pioneered hum-cancelling
pickups at Gibson in the mid-1950s (the PAF, most famously) and had
joined Fender in 1967. This model proved reasonably popular, as
several prominent guitarists had started modding their Telecasters
with humbucking pickups (especially at the neck position) in the late
1960s.


In the U.K., Keith Richards got his hands on a butterscotch 1953
Telecaster in 1971 that soon became his number-one instrument for many
years thereafter. He made a few notable modifications, including the
backwards installation of a PAF humbucking pickup at the bridge (as
noted, a popular mod of the era), a six-saddle bridge with the low-E
saddle removed to accommodate his preference for a five-string open-G
tuning, and a white Stratocaster-style switch tip in place of the
original “barrel” tip. Like Buchanan, Richards bestowed a nickname on
this guitar—“Micawber,” after a character in Dickens’ David
Copperfield.

Richards, in fact, became something of a Telecaster connoisseur during
the 1970s, acquiring and further nicknaming instruments of various
vintages, including a blonde 1954 model (“Malcolm”) and a sunburst
1966 model (“Sonny”). He uses his Telecasters extensively to this day.

Finally, any survey of the Telecaster in 1971 isn’t complete without
noting that early in the year, Jimmy Page used his ’58 model to record
the solo on quintessential Led Zeppelin epic “Stairway to Heaven”—one
of his most famous guitar solos, if not his most famous solo.

Back at Fender headquarters, Telecaster experimentation continued
apace by institutionalizing the most popular mod players had been
making for a few years already—replacing the single-coil neck pickup
with a fatter-sounding humbucking pickup. With Lover’s Fender Wide
Range humbucking pickups successfully in place on the Thinline model,
Fender simply stuck one in the neck position on a solid-body
Telecaster, added a new pickguard design, upper bout pickup toggle
switch and a new four-knob control layout, and there it was—the
Telecaster Custom, introduced in 1972.

At Fender, 1973 saw the last of the three major design revisions to
the Telecaster. The Telecaster Thinline and Telecaster Custom were now
joined by the Telecaster Deluxe, which featured two humbucking
pickups, a Stratocaster-style headstock and a choice of hard-tail or
tremolo bridge.

The mid-1970s saw some of the most diverse use the Telecaster has ever
been put to. From prog to punk, rockabilly-inflected jazz to FM rock
and an unexpected blues revival to chart-topping pop, Fender’s first
guitar—still largely unchanged—was more ubiquitous than ever in the
middle of its third decade.

An archetypal Telecaster moment came in 1975 when Long Branch, N.J.,
native Bruce Springsteen achieved breakout success with his third
album, the epic Born to Run. The album established Springsteen as a
major star, and its famous black-and-white cover showed him leaning on
Clarence “The Big Man” Clemmons’ shoulder and slinging his … Esquire?
Telecaster? The guitar is often said to be the former, but has two
pickups like the latter. So which is it?

An Esquire. On the Born to Run cover photo, it still has its original
three-saddle 1950s bridge with a stamped steel base plate
(subsequently replaced by Petillo with a six-saddle titanium bridge),
although it does have a set of replacement tuners.

1975 is also notable in the Telecaster story because of the release of
a relatively obscure debut album, American Music, by a Washington,
D.C., trio called Danny and the Fat Boys. “Danny” in this case being
Danny Gatton, a stylistically eclectic guitar virtuoso regarded
throughout the remainder of his career as one of the most technically
dazzling players ever to wield a Telecaster.


As the mid-1970s gave way to the latter part of the decade, Burton and
Cropper remained busier than ever. Burton gigged extensively with
Presley until the star’s death in August 1977; he’d also found time to
record and perform with Emmylou Harris and John Denver. Cropper once
again found himself in the spotlight with the unexpectedly successful
1978 formation of blues/soul revival outfit the Blues Brothers by
Saturday Night Live *alumni John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd. As a member
of the duo’s backing band that year, Cropper appeared with them on
*Saturday Night Live and on chart-topping debut album Briefcase Full
of Blues.

Across the Atlantic, sweeping change had struck the U.K. music scene
in mid-decade. Punk reared its reactionary spiky-haired head, thumbing
its safety-pinned nose at the establishment and at the lumbering
blues-based, psychedelic and prog giants who ruled the first half of
the 1970s. But the ever-ubiquitous Telecaster found itself right at
home there, too.

After the Sex Pistols opened an April 3, 1976, show at the Nashville
Rooms in London for his band, the 101’ers, pub rocker John
Mellor—better known by the stage name he’d taken the year before, Joe
Strummer—switched from pub to punk. Strummer accepted an invitation to
be lead singer in a new band with guitarists Mick Jones and Keith
Levene, bassist Paul Simonon and drummer Terry Chimes. Strummer
brought his battered 1966 Telecaster along with him. The new band, the
Clash, made its live debut three months later, opening for—as fate
would have it—the Sex Pistols at the Black Swan in Sheffield, England,
on July 4, 1976.

Elsewhere in London of that era, another band coalesced that would
achieve even greater heights; the very loftiest heights, in fact.
Veteran U.K. guitarist Andy Summers (Dantalian’s Chariot, Soft
Machine, the Animals) returned to England in 1977 after a few years in
United States during which he studied music at California State
University, Northridge. During his years in California, he bought a
battered 1961 Custom Telecaster from one of his guitar students; the
instrument was heavily modified with a humbucking neck pickup, phase
switch, onboard preamp and overdrive unit, maple fingerboard and more.

Having returned to London in ’77, Summers recorded and performed with
several acts before accepting a mid-year invitation by musician Mike
Howlett (ex-Gong) to join a new act called Strontium 90. That’s when
Summers met Howlett’s other recruits, bassist/vocalist Gordon “Sting”
Sumner and drummer Stewart Copeland, who had already formed a trio of
their own earlier that year called the Police. Strontium 90 only
lasted a few gigs and several furtive demos, but the
Sting-Copeland-Summers combination showed fantastic chemistry, and
Summers replaced original Police guitarist Henry Padovani that August
and the rest is history.

Northwest of London in March 1978, in Hereford, Ohio-born singer,
songwriter and Telecaster-wielding guitarist Chrissie Hynde assembled
a four-piece band with a lineup that quickly settled on her, guitarist
James Honeyman-Scott, bassist Pete Farndon and drummer Martin
Chambers. Hynde named the band the Pretenders, and they recorded their
first single, a cover of the Kinks’ “Stop Your Sobbing,” later that
year.

And so the Telecaster struck the final notes of its third decade, put
to greater use than ever by U.S. and U.K. guitarists, veterans and
newcomers alike. In the 1970s, as always, the guitar itself had
changed hardly at while music had mutated wildly. As the 1980s dawned,
Fender itself was in for seismic change—for the better,
fortunately—and its first electric guitar once again found itself in
the hands of seasoned pros who now revered it with a newfound sense of
history and a fresh young generation of imaginative newcomers who
would chart new musical territory and define their own new decade with
it.

The 1980s and Beyond...
The Telecaster charged into its fourth decade of indispensability on
the crest of a wave of revitalized U.K. rock and pop. Tight, focused
punk- and new wave-based Davids of the late 1970s and early 1980s
wrested the charts and the critical acclaim from the blues-based
Goliaths of the early- and mid-’70s using the very same
instruments—the Telecaster chief among them. Thus, ’70s-dominating
U.K. giants such as Led Zeppelin, Yes and Pink Floyd segued into
’80-dominating U.K. giants of an entirely new and different kind, such
as the Police, the Clash and the Pretenders.

Especially the Police. The famously blonde trio became the biggest
band in the world in the first half of the 1980s, turning out hit
after hit and achieving unprecedented visibility thanks to the arrival
of MTV, which trumpeted their captivating sound and photogenic looks
24 hours a day. To say nothing of looks and marketing, however, the
Police had formidable musical substance to back it all up, and their
empire was founded on solid songcraft fueled by the startlingly
original Telecaster work of Andy Summers.


The Clash was also at its artistic and commercial peak in the first
half of the 1980s. Like Summers, leader Joe Strummer also wielded a
battered ’60s-era Telecaster, which he continually plastered with
slogans befitting his group’s early-’80s status as “the only band that
matters.” Stylistically sprawling epic double album London Calling was
released in late 1979, but was truly an album for the 1980s and
included the band’s first U.S. Top 40 hit, “Train in Vain.”

Strummer wielded his 1966 Telecaster with authoritative swagger
through two other hit Clash albums of the period, Sandinista! (1980)
and Combat Rock (1982) before the band started to disintegrate.
Nonetheless, he remained a revered post-punk figure as the Clash
soldiered on until 1986, and he too was honored (posthumously;
Strummer passed away in 2002) by Fender in the late 2000s with a
tribute Telecaster model that reproduced his battle-hardened guitar
down to the last detail.


In the United States, the main Telecaster triumph of the first half of
the 1980s took place in 1984 with the release of Bruce Springsteen’s
seventh studio album, Born in the U.S.A. The album was a massive
commercial and critical blockbuster, eclipsing even the success of
Springsteen’s 1975 breakthrough, Born to Run. The album catapulted
Springsteen to worldwide superstardom and, like the Police, he too
benefitted immeasurably from the around-the-clock exposure afforded by
heavy MTV airplay.

New talent also reinvigorated mainstream U.S. country music. While
old-school Telecaster masters such as Merle Haggard and Waylon
Jennings continued to score hits in the ’80s, a new generation of able
Telecaster players took their first solo steps. These included former
Pure Prairie League member Vince Gill, a truly formidable guitarist,
who released debut solo album Turn Me Loose in 1984, and Marty Stuart,
who left Johnny Cash’s band mid-decade and released his eponymous solo
album in 1986.


At home at Fender, however, all was not well. After nearly two decades
of general neglect, quality control problems and budget cuts under
CBS, the Fender of the early 1980s had fallen far from its former
greatness. It now suffered from a bleak reputation for producing, as
noted guitar author and historian Tom Wheeler put it in his 2011
history of the Fender Custom Shop, The Dream Factory, “boat anchor”
guitars, and revenues were starting to decline along with quality. A
late ’70s Telecaster may have looked like its 1950s or early 1960s
ancestors, but that was about it, and it was around this time that
word began to circulate that if you wanted a really good Fender
instrument, you needed an old one (this is when the oft-heard term
“pre-CBS” originated).

To remedy this situation, CBS enlisted former Yamaha executives
William “Bill” Schultz as president of Fender and Dan Smith as
director of marketing for electric guitars. Both men set about
improving Fender’s fortunes; and one of the first things Smith did was
restore the original body shape of the Telecaster, which had changed
slightly and none too elegantly in the 1970s to accommodate the
abilities of computer-controlled body cutting machinery.

Schultz, seeing that his recommendation for modernizing Fender’s U.S.
manufacturing facilities largely meant halting production while
machinery was updated and staff was re-trained, suggested building
Fender guitars in Japan for the large Japanese market. This would keep
Fender instruments in production and combat the cheap copies that were
voraciously eating away at Fender’s Far East sales.

Accordingly, Fender Japan was established in March 1982 and began
building quality Fender instruments while U.S production was
reorganized. One of the earliest results was the Vintage Reissue
series, a high-quality new family that appeared in 1982 and featured a
well-built and largely historically accurate ’52 Telecaster model.
These Vintage series Japanese instruments were soon introduced into
the European market under the Squier name.

With U.S. production resumed but not up to full steam by late 1983,
Japanese-made Fender guitars—including a’70s-style Squier
Telecaster—became available in the United States, too. The U.S.
factory did produce the short-lived Elite Telecaster of 1983-1984,
which was intended as a high-end model with humbucking pickups and
active circuitry.

1984, however, was also the year that CBS decided to sell Fender.
Schultz and a group of investors bought Fender in a sale that was
completed in March 1985, ending 20 years of unpopular CBS rule. Owning
very little in the way of resources—only the name, distribution and
some leftover inventory and machinery (no U.S. factory)—Schultz set
about rebuilding and revitalizing Fender. While Fender Japan now
became the world’s main producer of Fender instruments, Schultz and
his staff established headquarters for the newly renamed Fender
Musical Instruments Corporation in Brea, Calif., and acquired a
14,000-square-foot factory in Corona, Calif., in October 1985. It is
at this point that the modern-era history of the Telecaster begins.

With that new mid-’80s beginning under Bill Schultz, Fender started by
concentrating on quality rather than quantity, beginning with a small
number of vintage reissue guitars and redesigned back-to-basics modern
instruments dubbed American Standard models. The American Standard
Telecaster appeared in 1988, updated with 22 frets, a more
robust-sounding bridge pickup and a six-saddle bridge.

Meanwhile, the Fender Custom Shop had been established in 1987, and
one of the very first orders it took was for a custom left-handed
Telecaster Thinline for Cars guitarist Elliot Easton. From that year
onward, the Custom Shop would repeatedly elevate the Telecaster from
mere utilitarian workhorse to work of art.

Since that late-’80s resurrection, the Telecaster once again reigns
supreme as a must-have instrument for guitarists of all types and
styles worldwide. Many variations have been offered ever since, but at
it its heart the Telecaster very much remains the same great
instrument it was when the world first heard it in the early 1950s. It
continues to embody the spirit of Fender innovation and dedication to
tonal and performance excellence. And it can still take a beating.

And in its modern era, new masters have discovered the Telecaster
while stalwarts have stayed with it and still others, sadly, have
departed.

The modern Telecaster was seen in the early 1990s being wielded by
many a grunge guitarist for the intensely meteoric few years when that
genre dominated rock. In the mid-1990s in the U.K., inventive Britpop
guitarists such as Blur’s phenomenally talented Graham Coxon and
Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood put the Telecaster to remarkably creative
(and hit-making) use.


In the 2000s, the Telecaster was positively everywhere, from modern
country (Brad Paisley, Keith Urban, Dierks Bentley) to modern metal
(Fender signature artists John 5 and Jim Root) to modern alt-indie
(Frank Black, Franz Ferdinand, Bloc Party, Jimmy Eat World and
countless others) and a great deal more.

As the 50th anniversary of the Telecaster approached, the Fender
Custom Shop celebrated by introducing a limited edition run of 50 Leo
Fender Broadcaster models in 2000 that featured Leo Fender’s signature
on the headstock in place of the standard logo. That year also saw the
introduction of the American Nashville B-Bender Telecaster, which uses
a mechanical device that raises the pitch of the B string by a whole
tone (up to C#), producing plaintive, sinuous bends very much like
those produced on a pedal steel guitar.

Since then Fender has offered a wealth of modern Telecaster models
designed to suit the playing, personality and pockets of any
guitarist. In addition to many artist models and the ongoing American
Vintage series Telecaster guitars, Fender has introduced a variety of
Telecaster variations, from authentically traditional to distinctively
modified, from pristine to battered and from high-end to
budget-conscious. Some of these models include Classic Player (2006),
Road Worn (2009) and American Special (2010), all of which have kept
the Telecaster at the forefront of modern electric guitar. In 2017
Fender released the American Professional Telecaster (also available
for lefties) and the Telecaster Deluxe Shawbucker featuring classic
design and innovative new features.

Much of the history of modern popular music owes a great deal of its
sound to the Telecaster, and to the spirit of innovation and design
excellence embodied in its elegantly shapely form. Its look and sound
are still instantly identifiable, and it is still the workhorse
instrument of countless musicians worldwide who praise its form and
function as much or more today than they did in the 1950s and every
decade since. The Telecaster is an original that remains, simply and
more than ever, indispensable.



https://fender.com/articles/gear/the-one-that-started-it-all-a-telecaster-history/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=02-20-17&utm_term=Weekly-Content&ajs_uid=***@efn.org&ajs_trait_name=Garrison&ajs_trait_email=***@efn.org

[Garrison Hilliard]

The story behind the versatile guitar that conquered country, blues, rock and punk.

Post by Garrison Hilliard
by Jeff Owens
#fenderhistory
#telecaster
THE RUNDOWN
While Leo Fender and the staff of his small Southern California
instrument- and amp-making company knew that they’d built a
revolutionary new guitar when they introduced the Telecaster in early
1951, they had no idea of the size and scope of the musical revolution
their unusual new invention would start. They couldn’t possibly have.
It was not a foregone conclusion that such an instrument would
succeed; indeed, some scoffed and laughed at the Telecaster when it
was officially unveiled that year at the industry’s largest U.S. trade
show, mocking it as a “boat paddle” and a “snow shovel.” This kind of
derision didn’t last long, though.
That’s because players quickly realized that Fender had given them
something not only new and unusual, but something well-designed,
easy-playing, efficient, rugged, affordable and, above all,
great-sounding. Although electrified guitars had been around in
various forms since the 1920s, Leo Fender and his inner circle had
labored mightily throughout the close of the 1940s and the earliest
dawn of the new decade to design and perfect something that really
didn’t exist before—a mass-produced solid-body Spanish-style electric
guitar.
THE GUITAR
As innovative as it was, little if anything was fancy about the
Telecaster. Several of its features were carried over from the
Hawaiian steel guitars Fender had already been making since 1945, such
as the “ashtray” bridge cover, knurled chrome knobs, Kluson tuners and
combination of bridge and bridge pickup in one integral unit. If the
maple neck broke or became too worn, there was no complex luthiery
involved—you just screwed on a new one. It had a simple black
pickguard (of fiber or Bakelite) held on with five screws. Unlike many
existing guitars at the time, the Telecaster’s strings were pulled
straight over the nut, with all the tuners on one side of the
headstock—ideas that Leo himself said he borrowed from 19-century
Istrian folk guitars and Viennese Staufer guitars.
The controls were another matter. True, the layout was simple—two
knobs and a three-position switch, but their combined function was not
as simple as might be supposed at first. The front knob always
controlled master volume, but the rear knob was not always a master
tone knob. In 1951, putting the selector switch in the rear (bridge)
position delivered both pickups, with the rear knob serving as a blend
control that governed the amount of neck pickup sound mixed into the
bridge pickup sound. The selector switch in the middle position
delivered the neck pickup only with its “natural” mellow tone (its
chrome cover soaked up extra capacitance), and the switch in the front
(neck) position delivered the neck pickup only with extra capacitance
that produced a bassier tone; the rear knob affected neither of these
settings.
American Vintage '52 Telecaster
This control arrangement was “simplified” in 1952 to what became known
as the conventional Telecaster control layout. After this change,
putting the selector switch in the rear (bridge) position delivered
the bridge pickup alone, with the rear knob acting as a proper tone
control. The selector switch in the middle position delivered the neck
pickup alone, with the rear knob again acting as a tone control. The
selector switch in the front (neck) position delivered the neck pickup
alone with the preset bassier sound and a non-functioning rear knob
(as before). In this control scheme, there was no switch setting in
which both pickups were on at the same time, an arrangement that
lasted until the late 1960s. However, players were quick to discover
that the Telecaster’s three-position switch could be precariously
balanced in the two “in-between” switch positions to deliver in-phase
or out-of-phase sounds (depending on the polarity of the pickups) in
which both pickups were on (an unintentional design feature exploited
by players to even greater extent on the Stratocaster).
So there was quite a bit of tonal versatility there. Unlike any guitar
that came before it, the Telecaster had an incredibly bright, clean
and cutting sounding, with a piercing high end and thick midrange and
bass.
Even today, 60 years after its invention, a basic modern Telecaster
outwardly differs very little from its ancestors of 1951. Its
simplicity and efficiency as a solidly reliable workhorse guitar
remained hallmarks of its design throughout the 1950s, as indeed they
would throughout subsequent decades.
THE PLAYERS
Buck Owens
Steve Cropper
Eric Clapton
Jimmy Page
Luther Perkins
Jimmy Wyble
Charlie Aldrich
Jimmy Bryant
Roy Watkins
Bill Carson
Merle Haggard
Waylon Jennings
James Burton
Muddy Waters
B.B. King
Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown
Roy Buchanan
Pete Townshend
Syd Barrett (Pink Floyd)
Clarence White (the Byrds)
Albert Lee - Keith Richards
George Harrison
Joe Strummer
Ritchie Kotzen (Winery Dogs, Mr. Big, Poison)
Danny Gatton
Andy Summers (the Police)
Steve Howe (Yes)
Chrissie Hynde (Pretenders)
Graham Coxon (Blur)
Jonny Greenwood (Radiohead)
THE FULL STORY
The 1950s
Outside the factory, the western swing guitarists who helped Leo
perfect his new guitar were the first to fully understand how good the
Telecaster really was. Early players such as Jimmy Wyble, Charlie
Aldrich, Jimmy Bryant, Roy Watkins and Bill Carson took to the
instrument with missionary zeal, and Fender Sales chief Don Randall’s
carefully built sales network made sure the appeal of the Telecaster
slowly but surely radiated from Southern California all the way to the
East Coast.
It bears remembering that when the Telecaster was introduced in 1951,
rock ‘n’ roll was still a few years away; Leo Fender and his staff
were building guitars and amps mainly for the western swing guitarists
whose touring circuits often brought them near the company’s home in
sunny Southern California. Nonetheless, Fender’s innovative new
instruments fed the rise of the small, loud bands that, by the
mid-1950s, had largely supplanted the big bands of the 1930s and
1940s, a phenomenon that in turn fueled the concurrent explosion of
U.S. youth culture.
Fender and its new Telecaster guitar were ideally placed to take
advantage of all of this, because Fender didn’t belong to the stodgy
old world of high-end guitar craft. Fender was brash, young,
innovative and West Coast; not old, staid and East Coast. Fender
instruments and amps were fun, tough and affordable rather than
delicate and expensive. All those kids who found themselves with a
powerful new cultural movement of their own in the post-war mid-1950s
could get their hands on great-sounding, solidly built Fender guitars
easily enough.
Consequently, by mid-decade the Telecaster was finding its way into
the inventive hands of rock ‘n’ roll, R&B and country guitarists and
onto their recordings. In Nashville in July 1956, Johnny Burnette and
the Rock and Roll Trio recorded an energetic rock ‘n’ roll version of
1951 jump blues song “The Train Kept-A-Rollin”; lead guitarist Paul
Burlison used his Telecaster to play one of the first recorded
instances—if not the first recorded instance—of a contemporary fuzz
guitar sound. In July 1957, Dale Hawkins scored what was probably the
first Telecaster-fueled U.S. Top 40 hit with “Suzie Q,” a song built
on a catchy guitar lick by his band’s young guitarist, James Burton.
When Burton later joined teen idol Ricky Nelson’s band (at age 18),
thousands of U.S. TV viewers saw him play a Telecaster on The
Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet in the late ’50s and early ’60s,
performing songs such as “Just a Little Too Much,” “It’s Late,” and
"Believe What You Say".
And in what is widely regarded as the greatest rock ‘n’ roll film ever
made, 1956’s The Girl Can’t Help It, the Telecaster (in its
single-pickup Esquire version) puts in a pair of appearances. It’s
first seen in the hands of Little Richard’s guitarist (likely either
Ray Montrell or Ed Blanchard) during the hard rocking “Ready Teddy”
and “She’s Got It”; guitarist Russell Willaford plays one later in the
film during Gene Vincent and His Blue Caps’ smoldering “Be Bop a
Lula.”
In the R&B world, players such as B.B. King and Clarence “Gatemouth”
Brown took readily to the Telecaster. And when the great Muddy Waters,
the man who electrified Delta blues, first visited England in 1958, he
shocked audiences who were expecting folksy acoustic sounds by
blasting out loud, stinging blues on his Telecaster. For many young
players in the U.K., Waters’ October 1958 tour was the first time they
ever saw a Telecaster in real life. The dramatic effects of this would
become palpably evident in the decade that followed.
In the country world, Luther Perkins accompanied Johnny Cash from 1954
on by playing bright, catchy lines on a Telecaster and an Esquire.
Farther west, in Bakersfield, Calif., Buck Owens was discovering how
to put the Telecaster to work in a loud and stripped-down country
style that stood in stark contrast to the slick, string-heavy country
sound then in vogue in Nashville. The Telecaster would become the
foundation of the “Bakersfield Sound” pioneered in the later 1950s and
popularized in the 1960s by Owens and his band, the Buckaroos, Merle
Haggard and the Strangers, and others.
The Telecaster also made great inroads in the 1950s as a must-have
studio session instrument. It didn’t take long to become an essential
element in the arsenal of studio veterans nationwide and A-list
session veterans Barney Kessel, Howard Roberts and Tommy Tedesco all
got Telecasters.
Though largely unchanged during the 1950s, a few minor tweaks to the
Telecaster were implemented in the guitar’s first decade though. The
color of the pickguard was changed from black to white in 1954; its
pickup selector switch tip was changed from the original round type to
the “top hat” type in 1955. Perhaps the biggest change of the decade
came in 1958, when the once blonde-finish-only Telecaster first became
available with eye-catching custom color finishes for an additional 5
percent cost. The first significant new version of the model didn’t
appear until 1959, when the Custom Telecaster was introduced, with a
bound body and rosewood fingerboard.
All in all, the Telecaster was a great success story in the decade of
its birth. The 1950s saw it rise from regional obscurity to nationwide
indispensability (with worldwide acclaim looming) as rock ‘n’ roll
proved to be more than a passing fad and youth culture bloomed as it
never before had in the United States. The Telecaster had both the
style and substance; the form and function to endure indefinitely as
both a valuable tool and a potent symbol. It was a great idea whose
time had come, and it changed music in the ’50s-era United States.
In late 1959, with the decade rapidly closing, quite a few of these
English kids were eagerly soaking up every Telecaster-fueled note they
could get their hands on. These included 16-year-olds Keith Richards
and George Harrison, 15-year-olds Jeff Beck and James Page,
14-year-olds Eric Clapton and Peter Townshend, 13-year-old schoolmates
Roger “Syd” Barrett and David Gilmour, 17-year-old Andy Summers and a
great many more. They all immersed themselves in the sounds of the
Telecaster in the 1950s, and they all eventually got their hands on
Telecaster guitars.
The 1960s
In its first decade, the Telecaster had established and proven itself.
It debuted in early 1951 as an innovative new kind of instrument from
a small upstart Southern California maker that served the region’s
Western swing and dance band guitarists. The Telecaster, however,
quite separate from the intentions of its makers, fed the emergence
only a few years later of rock ‘n’ roll and the explosion in U.S.
youth culture that came with it, and by the end of the 1950s it was an
unqualified success as an indispensable workhorse instrument for
guitarists of many musical styles and genres nationwide.
Strangely perhaps, things got off to a slow start, because real rock
‘n’ roll had all but disappeared in the United States by 1960. Elvis
Presley was in the Army; Little Richard had traded his piano for the
pulpit; Jerry Lee Lewis, Chuck Berry and Alan Freed all but vanished
amid scandal and legal woes; Buddy Holly perished in a 1959 plane
crash and Eddie Cochran was killed in a 1960 automobile accident. The
ensuing vacuum was filled with schmaltzy ballads, reverb-drenched teen
idols and girl groups that, while they had a charm of their own,
weren’t especially guitar oriented. Apart from a few bright spots in
the forms of Motown and surf/instrumental music, things looked
somewhat bleak for the electric guitar in U.S. pop music in mid-1960.
Real salvation, as it turned out, came from across the Atlantic and
from seemingly unlikely saviors. Rock ‘n’ roll, it turned out, was
alive and well in the U.K.; rescued by skinny English kids who
couldn’t get enough of authentic U.S. blues and rock ‘n’ roll and who
eagerly devoured every James Burton solo, every Chuck Berry riff,
every Eddy Cochran lyric and every Scotty Moore chord voicing. They
mastered rock ‘n’ roll and made it their own on any third-rate guitar
they could get their hands on, never dreaming that in very short order
they would be the ones to re-introduce the form—explosively so—to the
land of its birth.
In late 1959, these English kids included 16-year-olds Keith Richards
and George Harrison, 15-year-olds Jeff Beck and James Page,
14-year-olds Eric Clapton and Peter Townshend, 13-year-old schoolmates
Roger “Syd” Barrett and David Gilmour, 17-year-old Andy Summers and a
great many more. They spent 1960-1962 continuing to absorb U.S. rock
‘n’ roll and furthering their mostly self-taught musical educations;
some were already performing publicly with their earliest bands.
Back in the United States, the Telecaster bided its time through
1960-1962 as its brothers, the by now well-established Stratocaster
(1954) and the Jazzmaster (1958), kept a tenuous hold on the charts by
fueling instrumental and vocal surf music by performers and acts such
as Dick Dale, the Beach Boys and the Ventures. Nonetheless,
interesting Telecaster sounds were in the works. Motown house
guitarist Joe Messina often used a Telecaster, and out west,
Bakersfield, Calif., singer/guitarist Buck Owens was pioneering a
loud, no-frills anti-Nashville country sound dominated by the sound of
his Telecaster.
Perhaps the first truly quintessential Telecaster album of the 1960s
arrived in October 1962 with the release of Green Onions by
instrumental Memphis R&B quartet Booker T. & the M.G.s. Its title
track was an enormous hit; both it and the album introduced the world
to the impeccable phrasing of Missouri-born
guitarist/producer/songwriter Steve Cropper. Throughout the remainder
of the decade, as a member of Booker T. & the M.G.s and as a house
guitarist for the Stax label, Cropper’s graceful Telecaster work
appeared on many seminal hits, including “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the
Bay” (Otis Redding, 1965), “In the Midnight Hour” (Wilson Pickett,
1965) and “Soul Man” (Sam and Dave, 1967).
In California, meanwhile, Buck Owens’s career had taken off. He first
hit the Billboard country chart in 1959 with his tenth and eleventh
singles, “Second Fiddle” and “Under Your Spell Again,” and 1960’s
“Above and Beyond” reached number three. Owens rebelled against the
slick, string-laden Nashville “countrypolitan” sound so popular at the
time by championing a loud, raw and stripped-down sound fueled by the
brash twang of his Telecaster—what came to be called the “Bakersfield
Sound.”
Owens and his band, the Buckaroos, recorded Johnny Russell-penned song
“Act Naturally” in Los Angeles in February 1963 at a session marked by
Buckaroos fiddle player Don Rich’s first appearance on lead guitar
(Owens’s Telecaster). With its infectious Telecaster riff, “Act
Naturally” was released that March, hit the Billboard chart in April
and made Owens a star when it became his first number-one hit in June.
Thus firmly established, the Telecaster-driven Bakersfield Sound would
rival Nashville throughout the decade as its other hit-making artists
ascended the charts.
The British Invasion of 1964 needs little introduction. In the wake of
the Beatles’ phenomenal success first at home in the U.K. and then
worldwide, mainstream rock music became intensely (and at times
wildly) guitar-driven as it never had before. Fender guitars made
their way to England in ever-greater numbers and began making
appearances of great portent in the hands of those kids—now young
men—who so rabidly devoured the U.S. sounds of the 1950s.
In July 1964, a London quintet called the Yardbirds appeared on
Granada Television program Go Tell it on the Mountain, playing
“Louise” and “I Wish You Would.” What was noteworthy about the
appearance is that while so many British groups at first played
guitars by makers other than Fender, the Yardbirds’ 19-year-old
guitarist, Eric Clapton, tore up both songs on a red Telecaster.
Elsewhere in London, in 1965, Who guitarist Pete Townshend faced a
vexing issue. The Who had become known not only for their visceral
sound, but also for their violent stage act, which by late 1965
regularly culminated in Townshend smashing his guitar at the end of
set-closing anthem “My Generation.” Smashing up the delicate
Rickenbacker guitars Towshend was known for playing had become
prohibitively expensive, however, and in a money-saving move he began
switching to Telecasters for “My Generation,” as they were less
expensive and certainly easier to repair.
Also of note in 1965 is Clapton’s departure from the Yardbirds that
March.
Clapton recommended his friend Jimmy Page as a replacement, but Page
was reluctant to give up his lucrative session career and in turn
suggested his friend Jeff Beck, who then joined the group. Beck’s
innovative and experimental guitar work typified the Yardbirds’ most
successful period; his 18-month stint featured hits such as “Heart
Full of Soul,” “I’m a Man,” “Shapes of Things” and “Over Under
Sideways Down,” most of which he played on a battered 1954 Esquire.
Back in the United States in the mid-1960s, the Telecaster-bred
Bakersfield sound continued to grow in popularity. Nearly every album
and single Buck Owens released from late 1963 to early 1968 hit number
one on the Billboard country chart. A fellow Californian and early
Bakersfield Sound devotee also started racking up impressive chart
successes, too—in late 1966, Merle Haggard and the Strangers hit
number one with their seventh single, “I’m a Lonesome Fugitive.”
Perhaps no single 12-month period during the 1960s testified to the
Telecaster’s amazing workhorse versatility more than the musically
explosive year of 1967. Muddy Waters, the lion of Delta blues, played
his ever-present Telecaster on the Super Blues album with Bo Diddley
and Little Walter. At London’s Abbey Road Studios on March 28, Paul
McCartney used an Esquire to record guitar parts in “Good Morning Good
Morning” and “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite” for the Beatles’
momentous eighth album, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. In the
same building at the same time, Syd Barrett used his Telecaster and
Esquire models to record Pink Floyd debut album The Piper at the Gates
of Dawn.
Two noteworthy Telecaster technical developments also marked 1967.
First, Fender (sold by Leo Fender in 1965 and now under the corporate
banner of CBS) reconfigured the guitar’s controls so that the
three-way switch delivered neck pickup/both pickups/bridge pickup
operation. This meant that, for the first time since 1952, the
Telecaster once again had a switch setting that activated both pickups
simultaneously. Second, musicians Gene Parsons and Clarence White (the
Byrds) invented the Parsons/White String Pull, later known as the
B-Bender, and equipped White’s 1956 Telecaster with it (Fender would
release its own B-Bender-equipped Telecaster 33 years later).
Equally major artistic and technical developments were in store for
the Telecaster in 1968. Indeed, it was the year that saw the first
truly significant design departure for the model in the lightweight
form of the Thinline Telecaster. Renowned German luthier Roger
Rossmeisl, who arrived at Fender in early 1962 after an enormously
influential career at Rickenbacker and successfully engineered
Fender’s entry into the world of acoustic guitars basically hollowed
out a Telecaster body, routing sections on both sides from the rear
and gluing a thin panel over the back. The Telecaster Thinline debuted
in 1968 and became an enduring success.
Also introduced in 1968 was the psychedelic “Paisley Red” and “Blue
Flower” Telecaster models, so named for the color and pattern of the
self-adhesive wallpaper (!) used to decorate their tops (each guitar
had a clear pickguard). Although James Burton became closely
associated with the Paisley Red guitar, neither model lasted long.
Artistically, the Telecaster served as the main musical voice of two
monumental debut albums recorded in 1968, both by U.K. artists. The
first was Black Claw & Country Fever, by virtuoso
country/rockabilly/rock/R&B guitarist Albert Lee, subsequently widely
known to many as “Mr. Telecaster.” The second was the eponymous debut
album by Led Zeppelin, which Jimmy Page had formed from the ashes of
the Yardbirds. On Led Zeppelin, Jimmy Page played a
psychedelic-painted Telecaster (given to him by Jeff Beck) on tracks
including “Dazed and Confused,” “Good Times Bad Times,” “Communication
Breakdown,” “How Many More Times,” “You Shook Me” and more.
No group epitomized the 1960s more than the Beatles, however, and as
the decade wound to a close, so did the band’s phenomenal career. Ever
since recording “Ticket to Ride” in February 1965 with a droning
Stratocaster part, the Beatles had made steadily increasing use of
Fender gear, and it was in the group’s final chapter that the
Telecaster came into significant play.
George Harrison received a prototype custom all-rosewood Telecaster
built by Fender’s Philip Kubicki. Harrison played this guitar on the
final Beatles album, Let It Be, and played it atop the London
headquarters of the Beatles’ company, Apple, during the famous Jan.
20, 1969, rooftop concert that would be the Beatles’ final live
performance (as seen in 1970 documentary Let It Be). Fender briefly
put the guitar into production, but its unusual tonality and
considerable weight made it a short-lived addition to the line. Soon
after the rooftop concert, Harrison gave his rosewood Telecaster to
Delaney Bramlett of Delaney & Bonnie (Delaney put the guitar up for
auction in 2003; it was bought by actor Ed Begley Jr. on behalf of the
Harrison estate).
And so the 1960s closed with Fender’s original electric guitar
enjoying wider and more varied use than ever, with the company
starting to explore innovative new takes on the Telecaster that would
continue well into the decade to come.
The 1970s
The 1970s began for the Telecaster with its two most acclaimed U.S.
masters making some big changes. First, James Burton had just joined
Elvis Presley’s band the year before, playing a red Telecaster; now he
was using the paisley Telecaster that would thereafter become so
closely identified with him. Second, Steve Cropper left Stax Records
in the fall to establish his own studio, TMI, where he would play with
and produce artists such as Jeff Beck, John Lennon, Ringo Starr, Tower
of Power, Rod Stewart and many others. The decade would later see
further big changes and even more acclaim and success for both men.
As 1970 drew to a close, an article appeared in the Dec. 9 edition of
the Washington Post in which writer Tom Zito described a visit to a
dark suburban tavern in Bladensburg, Md., called the Crossroads
Restaurant and Supper Club, where he caught a set by house band Danny
Denver and the Soundmasters. Although the venue itself was wholly
unimpressive, Zito wrote that “What makes the Crossroads remarkable is
the presence of one man, Roy Buchanan, who provides what may well be
the best rock guitar picking in the world.”
Zito’s Post piece was reprinted in Rolling Stone two months later in
February 1971, and eccentric and phenomenally talented Arkansas-born
guitarist Roy Buchanan, 31, suddenly found himself the object of much
attention after toiling more than 15 years in relative obscurity (he
briefly succeeded Burton in Dale Hawkins’ band in the late 1950s).
It’s difficult, in writing, to do justice to what it was that Buchanan
was able to do with a guitar. He simply worked on another level,
coaxing jaw-dropping solos, haunting cello-like volume swells, and
otherworldly harmonic and feedback sounds from his main instrument, a
1953 Telecaster he nicknamed “Nancy.” Many who saw him came away
convinced that they’d just seen the world’s greatest guitarist.
The Rolling Stone reprint led to interest from public television
station WNET, flagship of the then-new PBS network, which produced an
hour-long documentary, Introducing Roy Buchanan, which aired that
November and shifted his career into high gear. With his band, the
charmingly named Snakestretchers, he release indie solo debut Buch and
the Snakestretchers late in 1971 before inking a deal with Polydor
Records, for which he recorded five solo albums before moving to
Atlantic Records in 1976. A quietly enigmatic figure who amassed
enormous acclaim, Buchanan nonetheless seemed to flee the spotlight,
apparently uninterested in achieving the kind of major-league stardom
that otherwise seemed due to an artist of his astounding ability.
Roy Buchanan, however, was not the only reason that 1971 was a big
year for the Telecaster.
Out on the U.S. West Coast, Fender continued the successful
experimentation with the Telecaster that began with 1968’s
hollowed-out Thinline model, introducing a new version on which both
single-coil pickups were replaced by the company’s first-ever
humbucking pickups. These were the Fender Wide Range humbucking
pickups developed by Seth Lover, who had pioneered hum-cancelling
pickups at Gibson in the mid-1950s (the PAF, most famously) and had
joined Fender in 1967. This model proved reasonably popular, as
several prominent guitarists had started modding their Telecasters
with humbucking pickups (especially at the neck position) in the late
1960s.
In the U.K., Keith Richards got his hands on a butterscotch 1953
Telecaster in 1971 that soon became his number-one instrument for many
years thereafter. He made a few notable modifications, including the
backwards installation of a PAF humbucking pickup at the bridge (as
noted, a popular mod of the era), a six-saddle bridge with the low-E
saddle removed to accommodate his preference for a five-string open-G
tuning, and a white Stratocaster-style switch tip in place of the
original “barrel” tip. Like Buchanan, Richards bestowed a nickname on
this guitar—“Micawber,” after a character in Dickens’ David
Copperfield.
Richards, in fact, became something of a Telecaster connoisseur during
the 1970s, acquiring and further nicknaming instruments of various
vintages, including a blonde 1954 model (“Malcolm”) and a sunburst
1966 model (“Sonny”). He uses his Telecasters extensively to this day.
Finally, any survey of the Telecaster in 1971 isn’t complete without
noting that early in the year, Jimmy Page used his ’58 model to record
the solo on quintessential Led Zeppelin epic “Stairway to Heaven”—one
of his most famous guitar solos, if not his most famous solo.
Back at Fender headquarters, Telecaster experimentation continued
apace by institutionalizing the most popular mod players had been
making for a few years already—replacing the single-coil neck pickup
with a fatter-sounding humbucking pickup. With Lover’s Fender Wide
Range humbucking pickups successfully in place on the Thinline model,
Fender simply stuck one in the neck position on a solid-body
Telecaster, added a new pickguard design, upper bout pickup toggle
switch and a new four-knob control layout, and there it was—the
Telecaster Custom, introduced in 1972.
At Fender, 1973 saw the last of the three major design revisions to
the Telecaster. The Telecaster Thinline and Telecaster Custom were now
joined by the Telecaster Deluxe, which featured two humbucking
pickups, a Stratocaster-style headstock and a choice of hard-tail or
tremolo bridge.
The mid-1970s saw some of the most diverse use the Telecaster has ever
been put to. From prog to punk, rockabilly-inflected jazz to FM rock
and an unexpected blues revival to chart-topping pop, Fender’s first
guitar—still largely unchanged—was more ubiquitous than ever in the
middle of its third decade.
An archetypal Telecaster moment came in 1975 when Long Branch, N.J.,
native Bruce Springsteen achieved breakout success with his third
album, the epic Born to Run. The album established Springsteen as a
major star, and its famous black-and-white cover showed him leaning on
Clarence “The Big Man” Clemmons’ shoulder and slinging his … Esquire?
Telecaster? The guitar is often said to be the former, but has two
pickups like the latter. So which is it?
An Esquire. On the Born to Run cover photo, it still has its original
three-saddle 1950s bridge with a stamped steel base plate
(subsequently replaced by Petillo with a six-saddle titanium bridge),
although it does have a set of replacement tuners.
1975 is also notable in the Telecaster story because of the release of
a relatively obscure debut album, American Music, by a Washington,
D.C., trio called Danny and the Fat Boys. “Danny” in this case being
Danny Gatton, a stylistically eclectic guitar virtuoso regarded
throughout the remainder of his career as one of the most technically
dazzling players ever to wield a Telecaster.
As the mid-1970s gave way to the latter part of the decade, Burton and
Cropper remained busier than ever. Burton gigged extensively with
Presley until the star’s death in August 1977; he’d also found time to
record and perform with Emmylou Harris and John Denver. Cropper once
again found himself in the spotlight with the unexpectedly successful
1978 formation of blues/soul revival outfit the Blues Brothers by
Saturday Night Live *alumni John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd. As a member
of the duo’s backing band that year, Cropper appeared with them on
*Saturday Night Live and on chart-topping debut album Briefcase Full
of Blues.
Across the Atlantic, sweeping change had struck the U.K. music scene
in mid-decade. Punk reared its reactionary spiky-haired head, thumbing
its safety-pinned nose at the establishment and at the lumbering
blues-based, psychedelic and prog giants who ruled the first half of
the 1970s. But the ever-ubiquitous Telecaster found itself right at
home there, too.
After the Sex Pistols opened an April 3, 1976, show at the Nashville
Rooms in London for his band, the 101’ers, pub rocker John
Mellor—better known by the stage name he’d taken the year before, Joe
Strummer—switched from pub to punk. Strummer accepted an invitation to
be lead singer in a new band with guitarists Mick Jones and Keith
Levene, bassist Paul Simonon and drummer Terry Chimes. Strummer
brought his battered 1966 Telecaster along with him. The new band, the
Clash, made its live debut three months later, opening for—as fate
would have it—the Sex Pistols at the Black Swan in Sheffield, England,
on July 4, 1976.
Elsewhere in London of that era, another band coalesced that would
achieve even greater heights; the very loftiest heights, in fact.
Veteran U.K. guitarist Andy Summers (Dantalian’s Chariot, Soft
Machine, the Animals) returned to England in 1977 after a few years in
United States during which he studied music at California State
University, Northridge. During his years in California, he bought a
battered 1961 Custom Telecaster from one of his guitar students; the
instrument was heavily modified with a humbucking neck pickup, phase
switch, onboard preamp and overdrive unit, maple fingerboard and more.
Having returned to London in ’77, Summers recorded and performed with
several acts before accepting a mid-year invitation by musician Mike
Howlett (ex-Gong) to join a new act called Strontium 90. That’s when
Summers met Howlett’s other recruits, bassist/vocalist Gordon “Sting”
Sumner and drummer Stewart Copeland, who had already formed a trio of
their own earlier that year called the Police. Strontium 90 only
lasted a few gigs and several furtive demos, but the
Sting-Copeland-Summers combination showed fantastic chemistry, and
Summers replaced original Police guitarist Henry Padovani that August
and the rest is history.
Northwest of London in March 1978, in Hereford, Ohio-born singer,
songwriter and Telecaster-wielding guitarist Chrissie Hynde assembled
a four-piece band with a lineup that quickly settled on her, guitarist
James Honeyman-Scott, bassist Pete Farndon and drummer Martin
Chambers. Hynde named the band the Pretenders, and they recorded their
first single, a cover of the Kinks’ “Stop Your Sobbing,” later that
year.
And so the Telecaster struck the final notes of its third decade, put
to greater use than ever by U.S. and U.K. guitarists, veterans and
newcomers alike. In the 1970s, as always, the guitar itself had
changed hardly at while music had mutated wildly. As the 1980s dawned,
Fender itself was in for seismic change—for the better,
fortunately—and its first electric guitar once again found itself in
the hands of seasoned pros who now revered it with a newfound sense of
history and a fresh young generation of imaginative newcomers who
would chart new musical territory and define their own new decade with
it.
The 1980s and Beyond...
The Telecaster charged into its fourth decade of indispensability on
the crest of a wave of revitalized U.K. rock and pop. Tight, focused
punk- and new wave-based Davids of the late 1970s and early 1980s
wrested the charts and the critical acclaim from the blues-based
Goliaths of the early- and mid-’70s using the very same
instruments—the Telecaster chief among them. Thus, ’70s-dominating
U.K. giants such as Led Zeppelin, Yes and Pink Floyd segued into
’80-dominating U.K. giants of an entirely new and different kind, such
as the Police, the Clash and the Pretenders.
Especially the Police. The famously blonde trio became the biggest
band in the world in the first half of the 1980s, turning out hit
after hit and achieving unprecedented visibility thanks to the arrival
of MTV, which trumpeted their captivating sound and photogenic looks
24 hours a day. To say nothing of looks and marketing, however, the
Police had formidable musical substance to back it all up, and their
empire was founded on solid songcraft fueled by the startlingly
original Telecaster work of Andy Summers.
The Clash was also at its artistic and commercial peak in the first
half of the 1980s. Like Summers, leader Joe Strummer also wielded a
battered ’60s-era Telecaster, which he continually plastered with
slogans befitting his group’s early-’80s status as “the only band that
matters.” Stylistically sprawling epic double album London Calling was
released in late 1979, but was truly an album for the 1980s and
included the band’s first U.S. Top 40 hit, “Train in Vain.”
Strummer wielded his 1966 Telecaster with authoritative swagger
through two other hit Clash albums of the period, Sandinista! (1980)
and Combat Rock (1982) before the band started to disintegrate.
Nonetheless, he remained a revered post-punk figure as the Clash
soldiered on until 1986, and he too was honored (posthumously;
Strummer passed away in 2002) by Fender in the late 2000s with a
tribute Telecaster model that reproduced his battle-hardened guitar
down to the last detail.
In the United States, the main Telecaster triumph of the first half of
the 1980s took place in 1984 with the release of Bruce Springsteen’s
seventh studio album, Born in the U.S.A. The album was a massive
commercial and critical blockbuster, eclipsing even the success of
Springsteen’s 1975 breakthrough, Born to Run. The album catapulted
Springsteen to worldwide superstardom and, like the Police, he too
benefitted immeasurably from the around-the-clock exposure afforded by
heavy MTV airplay.
New talent also reinvigorated mainstream U.S. country music. While
old-school Telecaster masters such as Merle Haggard and Waylon
Jennings continued to score hits in the ’80s, a new generation of able
Telecaster players took their first solo steps. These included former
Pure Prairie League member Vince Gill, a truly formidable guitarist,
who released debut solo album Turn Me Loose in 1984, and Marty Stuart,
who left Johnny Cash’s band mid-decade and released his eponymous solo
album in 1986.
At home at Fender, however, all was not well. After nearly two decades
of general neglect, quality control problems and budget cuts under
CBS, the Fender of the early 1980s had fallen far from its former
greatness. It now suffered from a bleak reputation for producing, as
noted guitar author and historian Tom Wheeler put it in his 2011
history of the Fender Custom Shop, The Dream Factory, “boat anchor”
guitars, and revenues were starting to decline along with quality. A
late ’70s Telecaster may have looked like its 1950s or early 1960s
ancestors, but that was about it, and it was around this time that
word began to circulate that if you wanted a really good Fender
instrument, you needed an old one (this is when the oft-heard term
“pre-CBS” originated).
To remedy this situation, CBS enlisted former Yamaha executives
William “Bill” Schultz as president of Fender and Dan Smith as
director of marketing for electric guitars. Both men set about
improving Fender’s fortunes; and one of the first things Smith did was
restore the original body shape of the Telecaster, which had changed
slightly and none too elegantly in the 1970s to accommodate the
abilities of computer-controlled body cutting machinery.
Schultz, seeing that his recommendation for modernizing Fender’s U.S.
manufacturing facilities largely meant halting production while
machinery was updated and staff was re-trained, suggested building
Fender guitars in Japan for the large Japanese market. This would keep
Fender instruments in production and combat the cheap copies that were
voraciously eating away at Fender’s Far East sales.
Accordingly, Fender Japan was established in March 1982 and began
building quality Fender instruments while U.S production was
reorganized. One of the earliest results was the Vintage Reissue
series, a high-quality new family that appeared in 1982 and featured a
well-built and largely historically accurate ’52 Telecaster model.
These Vintage series Japanese instruments were soon introduced into
the European market under the Squier name.
With U.S. production resumed but not up to full steam by late 1983,
Japanese-made Fender guitars—including a’70s-style Squier
Telecaster—became available in the United States, too. The U.S.
factory did produce the short-lived Elite Telecaster of 1983-1984,
which was intended as a high-end model with humbucking pickups and
active circuitry.
1984, however, was also the year that CBS decided to sell Fender.
Schultz and a group of investors bought Fender in a sale that was
completed in March 1985, ending 20 years of unpopular CBS rule. Owning
very little in the way of resources—only the name, distribution and
some leftover inventory and machinery (no U.S. factory)—Schultz set
about rebuilding and revitalizing Fender. While Fender Japan now
became the world’s main producer of Fende...

...

[stratrat]

Post by Garrison Hilliard
by Jeff Owens
#fenderhistory
#telecaster
THE RUNDOWN
While Leo Fender and the staff of his small Southern California
instrument- and amp-making company knew that they’d built a
revolutionary new guitar when they introduced the Telecaster in early
1951, they had no idea of the size and scope of the musical revolution
their unusual new invention would start. They couldn’t possibly have.
It was not a foregone conclusion that such an instrument would
succeed; indeed, some scoffed and laughed at the Telecaster when it
was officially unveiled that year at the industry’s largest U.S. trade
show, mocking it as a “boat paddle” and a “snow shovel.” This kind of
derision didn’t last long, though.
That’s because players quickly realized that Fender had given them
something not only new and unusual, but something well-designed,
easy-playing, efficient, rugged, affordable and, above all,
great-sounding. Although electrified guitars had been around in
various forms since the 1920s, Leo Fender and his inner circle had
labored mightily throughout the close of the 1940s and the earliest
dawn of the new decade to design and perfect something that really
didn’t exist before—a mass-produced solid-body Spanish-style electric
guitar.
THE GUITAR
As innovative as it was, little if anything was fancy about the
Telecaster. Several of its features were carried over from the
Hawaiian steel guitars Fender had already been making since 1945, such
as the “ashtray” bridge cover, knurled chrome knobs, Kluson tuners and
combination of bridge and bridge pickup in one integral unit. If the
maple neck broke or became too worn, there was no complex luthiery
involved—you just screwed on a new one. It had a simple black
pickguard (of fiber or Bakelite) held on with five screws. Unlike many
existing guitars at the time, the Telecaster’s strings were pulled
straight over the nut, with all the tuners on one side of the
headstock—ideas that Leo himself said he borrowed from 19-century
Istrian folk guitars and Viennese Staufer guitars.
The controls were another matter. True, the layout was simple—two
knobs and a three-position switch, but their combined function was not
as simple as might be supposed at first. The front knob always
controlled master volume, but the rear knob was not always a master
tone knob. In 1951, putting the selector switch in the rear (bridge)
position delivered both pickups, with the rear knob serving as a blend
control that governed the amount of neck pickup sound mixed into the
bridge pickup sound. The selector switch in the middle position
delivered the neck pickup only with its “natural” mellow tone (its
chrome cover soaked up extra capacitance), and the switch in the front
(neck) position delivered the neck pickup only with extra capacitance
that produced a bassier tone; the rear knob affected neither of these
settings.
American Vintage '52 Telecaster
This control arrangement was “simplified” in 1952 to what became known
as the conventional Telecaster control layout. After this change,
putting the selector switch in the rear (bridge) position delivered
the bridge pickup alone, with the rear knob acting as a proper tone
control. The selector switch in the middle position delivered the neck
pickup alone, with the rear knob again acting as a tone control. The
selector switch in the front (neck) position delivered the neck pickup
alone with the preset bassier sound and a non-functioning rear knob
(as before). In this control scheme, there was no switch setting in
which both pickups were on at the same time, an arrangement that
lasted until the late 1960s. However, players were quick to discover
that the Telecaster’s three-position switch could be precariously
balanced in the two “in-between” switch positions to deliver in-phase
or out-of-phase sounds (depending on the polarity of the pickups) in
which both pickups were on (an unintentional design feature exploited
by players to even greater extent on the Stratocaster).
So there was quite a bit of tonal versatility there. Unlike any guitar
that came before it, the Telecaster had an incredibly bright, clean
and cutting sounding, with a piercing high end and thick midrange and
bass.
Even today, 60 years after its invention, a basic modern Telecaster
outwardly differs very little from its ancestors of 1951. Its
simplicity and efficiency as a solidly reliable workhorse guitar
remained hallmarks of its design throughout the 1950s, as indeed they
would throughout subsequent decades.
THE PLAYERS
Buck Owens
Steve Cropper
Eric Clapton
Jimmy Page
Luther Perkins
Jimmy Wyble
Charlie Aldrich
Jimmy Bryant
Roy Watkins
Bill Carson
Merle Haggard
Waylon Jennings
James Burton
Muddy Waters
B.B. King
Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown
Roy Buchanan
Pete Townshend
Syd Barrett (Pink Floyd)
Clarence White (the Byrds)
Albert Lee - Keith Richards
George Harrison
Joe Strummer
Ritchie Kotzen (Winery Dogs, Mr. Big, Poison)
Danny Gatton
Andy Summers (the Police)
Steve Howe (Yes)
Chrissie Hynde (Pretenders)
Graham Coxon (Blur)
Jonny Greenwood (Radiohead)
THE FULL STORY
The 1950s
Outside the factory, the western swing guitarists who helped Leo
perfect his new guitar were the first to fully understand how good the
Telecaster really was. Early players such as Jimmy Wyble, Charlie
Aldrich, Jimmy Bryant, Roy Watkins and Bill Carson took to the
instrument with missionary zeal, and Fender Sales chief Don Randall’s
carefully built sales network made sure the appeal of the Telecaster
slowly but surely radiated from Southern California all the way to the
East Coast.
It bears remembering that when the Telecaster was introduced in 1951,
rock ‘n’ roll was still a few years away; Leo Fender and his staff
were building guitars and amps mainly for the western swing guitarists
whose touring circuits often brought them near the company’s home in
sunny Southern California. Nonetheless, Fender’s innovative new
instruments fed the rise of the small, loud bands that, by the
mid-1950s, had largely supplanted the big bands of the 1930s and
1940s, a phenomenon that in turn fueled the concurrent explosion of
U.S. youth culture.
Fender and its new Telecaster guitar were ideally placed to take
advantage of all of this, because Fender didn’t belong to the stodgy
old world of high-end guitar craft. Fender was brash, young,
innovative and West Coast; not old, staid and East Coast. Fender
instruments and amps were fun, tough and affordable rather than
delicate and expensive. All those kids who found themselves with a
powerful new cultural movement of their own in the post-war mid-1950s
could get their hands on great-sounding, solidly built Fender guitars
easily enough.
Consequently, by mid-decade the Telecaster was finding its way into
the inventive hands of rock ‘n’ roll, R&B and country guitarists and
onto their recordings. In Nashville in July 1956, Johnny Burnette and
the Rock and Roll Trio recorded an energetic rock ‘n’ roll version of
1951 jump blues song “The Train Kept-A-Rollin”; lead guitarist Paul
Burlison used his Telecaster to play one of the first recorded
instances—if not the first recorded instance—of a contemporary fuzz
guitar sound. In July 1957, Dale Hawkins scored what was probably the
first Telecaster-fueled U.S. Top 40 hit with “Suzie Q,” a song built
on a catchy guitar lick by his band’s young guitarist, James Burton.
When Burton later joined teen idol Ricky Nelson’s band (at age 18),
thousands of U.S. TV viewers saw him play a Telecaster on The
Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet in the late ’50s and early ’60s,
performing songs such as “Just a Little Too Much,” “It’s Late,” and
"Believe What You Say".
And in what is widely regarded as the greatest rock ‘n’ roll film ever
made, 1956’s The Girl Can’t Help It, the Telecaster (in its
single-pickup Esquire version) puts in a pair of appearances. It’s
first seen in the hands of Little Richard’s guitarist (likely either
Ray Montrell or Ed Blanchard) during the hard rocking “Ready Teddy”
and “She’s Got It”; guitarist Russell Willaford plays one later in the
film during Gene Vincent and His Blue Caps’ smoldering “Be Bop a
Lula.”
In the R&B world, players such as B.B. King and Clarence “Gatemouth”
Brown took readily to the Telecaster. And when the great Muddy Waters,
the man who electrified Delta blues, first visited England in 1958, he
shocked audiences who were expecting folksy acoustic sounds by
blasting out loud, stinging blues on his Telecaster. For many young
players in the U.K., Waters’ October 1958 tour was the first time they
ever saw a Telecaster in real life. The dramatic effects of this would
become palpably evident in the decade that followed.
In the country world, Luther Perkins accompanied Johnny Cash from 1954
on by playing bright, catchy lines on a Telecaster and an Esquire.
Farther west, in Bakersfield, Calif., Buck Owens was discovering how
to put the Telecaster to work in a loud and stripped-down country
style that stood in stark contrast to the slick, string-heavy country
sound then in vogue in Nashville. The Telecaster would become the
foundation of the “Bakersfield Sound” pioneered in the later 1950s and
popularized in the 1960s by Owens and his band, the Buckaroos, Merle
Haggard and the Strangers, and others.
The Telecaster also made great inroads in the 1950s as a must-have
studio session instrument. It didn’t take long to become an essential
element in the arsenal of studio veterans nationwide and A-list
session veterans Barney Kessel, Howard Roberts and Tommy Tedesco all
got Telecasters.
Though largely unchanged during the 1950s, a few minor tweaks to the
Telecaster were implemented in the guitar’s first decade though. The
color of the pickguard was changed from black to white in 1954; its
pickup selector switch tip was changed from the original round type to
the “top hat” type in 1955. Perhaps the biggest change of the decade
came in 1958, when the once blonde-finish-only Telecaster first became
available with eye-catching custom color finishes for an additional 5
percent cost. The first significant new version of the model didn’t
appear until 1959, when the Custom Telecaster was introduced, with a
bound body and rosewood fingerboard.
All in all, the Telecaster was a great success story in the decade of
its birth. The 1950s saw it rise from regional obscurity to nationwide
indispensability (with worldwide acclaim looming) as rock ‘n’ roll
proved to be more than a passing fad and youth culture bloomed as it
never before had in the United States. The Telecaster had both the
style and substance; the form and function to endure indefinitely as
both a valuable tool and a potent symbol. It was a great idea whose
time had come, and it changed music in the ’50s-era United States.
In late 1959, with the decade rapidly closing, quite a few of these
English kids were eagerly soaking up every Telecaster-fueled note they
could get their hands on. These included 16-year-olds Keith Richards
and George Harrison, 15-year-olds Jeff Beck and James Page,
14-year-olds Eric Clapton and Peter Townshend, 13-year-old schoolmates
Roger “Syd” Barrett and David Gilmour, 17-year-old Andy Summers and a
great many more. They all immersed themselves in the sounds of the
Telecaster in the 1950s, and they all eventually got their hands on
Telecaster guitars.
The 1960s
In its first decade, the Telecaster had established and proven itself.
It debuted in early 1951 as an innovative new kind of instrument from
a small upstart Southern California maker that served the region’s
Western swing and dance band guitarists. The Telecaster, however,
quite separate from the intentions of its makers, fed the emergence
only a few years later of rock ‘n’ roll and the explosion in U.S.
youth culture that came with it, and by the end of the 1950s it was an
unqualified success as an indispensable workhorse instrument for
guitarists of many musical styles and genres nationwide.
Strangely perhaps, things got off to a slow start, because real rock
‘n’ roll had all but disappeared in the United States by 1960. Elvis
Presley was in the Army; Little Richard had traded his piano for the
pulpit; Jerry Lee Lewis, Chuck Berry and Alan Freed all but vanished
amid scandal and legal woes; Buddy Holly perished in a 1959 plane
crash and Eddie Cochran was killed in a 1960 automobile accident. The
ensuing vacuum was filled with schmaltzy ballads, reverb-drenched teen
idols and girl groups that, while they had a charm of their own,
weren’t especially guitar oriented. Apart from a few bright spots in
the forms of Motown and surf/instrumental music, things looked
somewhat bleak for the electric guitar in U.S. pop music in mid-1960.
Real salvation, as it turned out, came from across the Atlantic and
from seemingly unlikely saviors. Rock ‘n’ roll, it turned out, was
alive and well in the U.K.; rescued by skinny English kids who
couldn’t get enough of authentic U.S. blues and rock ‘n’ roll and who
eagerly devoured every James Burton solo, every Chuck Berry riff,
every Eddy Cochran lyric and every Scotty Moore chord voicing. They
mastered rock ‘n’ roll and made it their own on any third-rate guitar
they could get their hands on, never dreaming that in very short order
they would be the ones to re-introduce the form—explosively so—to the
land of its birth.
In late 1959, these English kids included 16-year-olds Keith Richards
and George Harrison, 15-year-olds Jeff Beck and James Page,
14-year-olds Eric Clapton and Peter Townshend, 13-year-old schoolmates
Roger “Syd” Barrett and David Gilmour, 17-year-old Andy Summers and a
great many more. They spent 1960-1962 continuing to absorb U.S. rock
‘n’ roll and furthering their mostly self-taught musical educations;
some were already performing publicly with their earliest bands.
Back in the United States, the Telecaster bided its time through
1960-1962 as its brothers, the by now well-established Stratocaster
(1954) and the Jazzmaster (1958), kept a tenuous hold on the charts by
fueling instrumental and vocal surf music by performers and acts such
as Dick Dale, the Beach Boys and the Ventures. Nonetheless,
interesting Telecaster sounds were in the works. Motown house
guitarist Joe Messina often used a Telecaster, and out west,
Bakersfield, Calif., singer/guitarist Buck Owens was pioneering a
loud, no-frills anti-Nashville country sound dominated by the sound of
his Telecaster.
Perhaps the first truly quintessential Telecaster album of the 1960s
arrived in October 1962 with the release of Green Onions by
instrumental Memphis R&B quartet Booker T. & the M.G.s. Its title
track was an enormous hit; both it and the album introduced the world
to the impeccable phrasing of Missouri-born
guitarist/producer/songwriter Steve Cropper. Throughout the remainder
of the decade, as a member of Booker T. & the M.G.s and as a house
guitarist for the Stax label, Cropper’s graceful Telecaster work
appeared on many seminal hits, including “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the
Bay” (Otis Redding, 1965), “In the Midnight Hour” (Wilson Pickett,
1965) and “Soul Man” (Sam and Dave, 1967).
In California, meanwhile, Buck Owens’s career had taken off. He first
hit the Billboard country chart in 1959 with his tenth and eleventh
singles, “Second Fiddle” and “Under Your Spell Again,” and 1960’s
“Above and Beyond” reached number three. Owens rebelled against the
slick, string-laden Nashville “countrypolitan” sound so popular at the
time by championing a loud, raw and stripped-down sound fueled by the
brash twang of his Telecaster—what came to be called the “Bakersfield
Sound.”
Owens and his band, the Buckaroos, recorded Johnny Russell-penned song
“Act Naturally” in Los Angeles in February 1963 at a session marked by
Buckaroos fiddle player Don Rich’s first appearance on lead guitar
(Owens’s Telecaster). With its infectious Telecaster riff, “Act
Naturally” was released that March, hit the Billboard chart in April
and made Owens a star when it became his first number-one hit in June.
Thus firmly established, the Telecaster-driven Bakersfield Sound would
rival Nashville throughout the decade as its other hit-making artists
ascended the charts.
The British Invasion of 1964 needs little introduction. In the wake of
the Beatles’ phenomenal success first at home in the U.K. and then
worldwide, mainstream rock music became intensely (and at times
wildly) guitar-driven as it never had before. Fender guitars made
their way to England in ever-greater numbers and began making
appearances of great portent in the hands of those kids—now young
men—who so rabidly devoured the U.S. sounds of the 1950s.
In July 1964, a London quintet called the Yardbirds appeared on
Granada Television program Go Tell it on the Mountain, playing
“Louise” and “I Wish You Would.” What was noteworthy about the
appearance is that while so many British groups at first played
guitars by makers other than Fender, the Yardbirds’ 19-year-old
guitarist, Eric Clapton, tore up both songs on a red Telecaster.
Elsewhere in London, in 1965, Who guitarist Pete Townshend faced a
vexing issue. The Who had become known not only for their visceral
sound, but also for their violent stage act, which by late 1965
regularly culminated in Townshend smashing his guitar at the end of
set-closing anthem “My Generation.” Smashing up the delicate
Rickenbacker guitars Towshend was known for playing had become
prohibitively expensive, however, and in a money-saving move he began
switching to Telecasters for “My Generation,” as they were less
expensive and certainly easier to repair.
Also of note in 1965 is Clapton’s departure from the Yardbirds that
March.
Clapton recommended his friend Jimmy Page as a replacement, but Page
was reluctant to give up his lucrative session career and in turn
suggested his friend Jeff Beck, who then joined the group. Beck’s
innovative and experimental guitar work typified the Yardbirds’ most
successful period; his 18-month stint featured hits such as “Heart
Full of Soul,” “I’m a Man,” “Shapes of Things” and “Over Under
Sideways Down,” most of which he played on a battered 1954 Esquire.
Back in the United States in the mid-1960s, the Telecaster-bred
Bakersfield sound continued to grow in popularity. Nearly every album
and single Buck Owens released from late 1963 to early 1968 hit number
one on the Billboard country chart. A fellow Californian and early
Bakersfield Sound devotee also started racking up impressive chart
successes, too—in late 1966, Merle Haggard and the Strangers hit
number one with their seventh single, “I’m a Lonesome Fugitive.”
Perhaps no single 12-month period during the 1960s testified to the
Telecaster’s amazing workhorse versatility more than the musically
explosive year of 1967. Muddy Waters, the lion of Delta blues, played
his ever-present Telecaster on the Super Blues album with Bo Diddley
and Little Walter. At London’s Abbey Road Studios on March 28, Paul
McCartney used an Esquire to record guitar parts in “Good Morning Good
Morning” and “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite” for the Beatles’
momentous eighth album, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. In the
same building at the same time, Syd Barrett used his Telecaster and
Esquire models to record Pink Floyd debut album The Piper at the Gates
of Dawn.
Two noteworthy Telecaster technical developments also marked 1967.
First, Fender (sold by Leo Fender in 1965 and now under the corporate
banner of CBS) reconfigured the guitar’s controls so that the
three-way switch delivered neck pickup/both pickups/bridge pickup
operation. This meant that, for the first time since 1952, the
Telecaster once again had a switch setting that activated both pickups
simultaneously. Second, musicians Gene Parsons and Clarence White (the
Byrds) invented the Parsons/White String Pull, later known as the
B-Bender, and equipped White’s 1956 Telecaster with it (Fender would
release its own B-Bender-equipped Telecaster 33 years later).
Equally major artistic and technical developments were in store for
the Telecaster in 1968. Indeed, it was the year that saw the first
truly significant design departure for the model in the lightweight
form of the Thinline Telecaster. Renowned German luthier Roger
Rossmeisl, who arrived at Fender in early 1962 after an enormously
influential career at Rickenbacker and successfully engineered
Fender’s entry into the world of acoustic guitars basically hollowed
out a Telecaster body, routing sections on both sides from the rear
and gluing a thin panel over the back. The Telecaster Thinline debuted
in 1968 and became an enduring success.
Also introduced in 1968 was the psychedelic “Paisley Red” and “Blue
Flower” Telecaster models, so named for the color and pattern of the
self-adhesive wallpaper (!) used to decorate their tops (each guitar
had a clear pickguard). Although James Burton became closely
associated with the Paisley Red guitar, neither model lasted long.
Artistically, the Telecaster served as the main musical voice of two
monumental debut albums recorded in 1968, both by U.K. artists. The
first was Black Claw & Country Fever, by virtuoso
country/rockabilly/rock/R&B guitarist Albert Lee, subsequently widely
known to many as “Mr. Telecaster.” The second was the eponymous debut
album by Led Zeppelin, which Jimmy Page had formed from the ashes of
the Yardbirds. On Led Zeppelin, Jimmy Page played a
psychedelic-painted Telecaster (given to him by Jeff Beck) on tracks
including “Dazed and Confused,” “Good Times Bad Times,” “Communication
Breakdown,” “How Many More Times,” “You Shook Me” and more.
No group epitomized the 1960s more than the Beatles, however, and as
the decade wound to a close, so did the band’s phenomenal career. Ever
since recording “Ticket to Ride” in February 1965 with a droning
Stratocaster part, the Beatles had made steadily increasing use of
Fender gear, and it was in the group’s final chapter that the
Telecaster came into significant play.
George Harrison received a prototype custom all-rosewood Telecaster
built by Fender’s Philip Kubicki. Harrison played this guitar on the
final Beatles album, Let It Be, and played it atop the London
headquarters of the Beatles’ company, Apple, during the famous Jan.
20, 1969, rooftop concert that would be the Beatles’ final live
performance (as seen in 1970 documentary Let It Be). Fender briefly
put the guitar into production, but its unusual tonality and
considerable weight made it a short-lived addition to the line. Soon
after the rooftop concert, Harrison gave his rosewood Telecaster to
Delaney Bramlett of Delaney & Bonnie (Delaney put the guitar up for
auction in 2003; it was bought by actor Ed Begley Jr. on behalf of the
Harrison estate).
And so the 1960s closed with Fender’s original electric guitar
enjoying wider and more varied use than ever, with the company
starting to explore innovative new takes on the Telecaster that would
continue well into the decade to come.
The 1970s
The 1970s began for the Telecaster with its two most acclaimed U.S.
masters making some big changes. First, James Burton had just joined
Elvis Presley’s band the year before, playing a red Telecaster; now he
was using the paisley Telecaster that would thereafter become so
closely identified with him. Second, Steve Cropper left Stax Records
in the fall to establish his own studio, TMI, where he would play with
and produce artists such as Jeff Beck, John Lennon, Ringo Starr, Tower
of Power, Rod Stewart and many others. The decade would later see
further big changes and even more acclaim and success for both men.
As 1970 drew to a close, an article appeared in the Dec. 9 edition of
the Washington Post in which writer Tom Zito described a visit to a
dark suburban tavern in Bladensburg, Md., called the Crossroads
Restaurant and Supper Club, where he caught a set by house band Danny
Denver and the Soundmasters. Although the venue itself was wholly
unimpressive, Zito wrote that “What makes the Crossroads remarkable is
the presence of one man, Roy Buchanan, who provides what may well be
the best rock guitar picking in the world.”
Zito’s Post piece was reprinted in Rolling Stone two months later in
February 1971, and eccentric and phenomenally talented Arkansas-born
guitarist Roy Buchanan, 31, suddenly found himself the object of much
attention after toiling more than 15 years in relative obscurity (he
briefly succeeded Burton in Dale Hawkins’ band in the late 1950s).
It’s difficult, in writing, to do justice to what it was that Buchanan
was able to do with a guitar. He simply worked on another level,
coaxing jaw-dropping solos, haunting cello-like volume swells, and
otherworldly harmonic and feedback sounds from his main instrument, a
1953 Telecaster he nicknamed “Nancy.” Many who saw him came away
convinced that they’d just seen the world’s greatest guitarist.
The Rolling Stone reprint led to interest from public television
station WNET, flagship of the then-new PBS network, which produced an
hour-long documentary, Introducing Roy Buchanan, which aired that
November and shifted his career into high gear. With his band, the
charmingly named Snakestretchers, he release indie solo debut Buch and
the Snakestretchers late in 1971 before inking a deal with Polydor
Records, for which he recorded five solo albums before moving to
Atlantic Records in 1976. A quietly enigmatic figure who amassed
enormous acclaim, Buchanan nonetheless seemed to flee the spotlight,
apparently uninterested in achieving the kind of major-league stardom
that otherwise seemed due to an artist of his astounding ability.
Roy Buchanan, however, was not the only reason that 1971 was a big
year for the Telecaster.
Out on the U.S. West Coast, Fender continued the successful
experimentation with the Telecaster that began with 1968’s
hollowed-out Thinline model, introducing a new version on which both
single-coil pickups were replaced by the company’s first-ever
humbucking pickups. These were the Fender Wide Range humbucking
pickups developed by Seth Lover, who had pioneered hum-cancelling
pickups at Gibson in the mid-1950s (the PAF, most famously) and had
joined Fender in 1967. This model proved reasonably popular, as
several prominent guitarists had started modding their Telecasters
with humbucking pickups (especially at the neck position) in the late
1960s.
In the U.K., Keith Richards got his hands on a butterscotch 1953
Telecaster in 1971 that soon became his number-one instrument for many
years thereafter. He made a few notable modifications, including the
backwards installation of a PAF humbucking pickup at the bridge (as
noted, a popular mod of the era), a six-saddle bridge with the low-E
saddle removed to accommodate his preference for a five-string open-G
tuning, and a white Stratocaster-style switch tip in place of the
original “barrel” tip. Like Buchanan, Richards bestowed a nickname on
this guitar—“Micawber,” after a character in Dickens’ David
Copperfield.
Richards, in fact, became something of a Telecaster connoisseur during
the 1970s, acquiring and further nicknaming instruments of various
vintages, including a blonde 1954 model (“Malcolm”) and a sunburst
1966 model (“Sonny”). He uses his Telecasters extensively to this day.
Finally, any survey of the Telecaster in 1971 isn’t complete without
noting that early in the year, Jimmy Page used his ’58 model to record
the solo on quintessential Led Zeppelin epic “Stairway to Heaven”—one
of his most famous guitar solos, if not his most famous solo.
Back at Fender headquarters, Telecaster experimentation continued
apace by institutionalizing the most popular mod players had been
making for a few years already—replacing the single-coil neck pickup
with a fatter-sounding humbucking pickup. With Lover’s Fender Wide
Range humbucking pickups successfully in place on the Thinline model,
Fender simply stuck one in the neck position on a solid-body
Telecaster, added a new pickguard design, upper bout pickup toggle
switch and a new four-knob control layout, and there it was—the
Telecaster Custom, introduced in 1972.
At Fender, 1973 saw the last of the three major design revisions to
the Telecaster. The Telecaster Thinline and Telecaster Custom were now
joined by the Telecaster Deluxe, which featured two humbucking
pickups, a Stratocaster-style headstock and a choice of hard-tail or
tremolo bridge.
The mid-1970s saw some of the most diverse use the Telecaster has ever
been put to. From prog to punk, rockabilly-inflected jazz to FM rock
and an unexpected blues revival to chart-topping pop, Fender’s first
guitar—still largely unchanged—was more ubiquitous than ever in the
middle of its third decade.
An archetypal Telecaster moment came in 1975 when Long Branch, N.J.,
native Bruce Springsteen achieved breakout success with his third
album, the epic Born to Run. The album established Springsteen as a
major star, and its famous black-and-white cover showed him leaning on
Clarence “The Big Man” Clemmons’ shoulder and slinging his … Esquire?
Telecaster? The guitar is often said to be the former, but has two
pickups like the latter. So which is it?
An Esquire. On the Born to Run cover photo, it still has its original
three-saddle 1950s bridge with a stamped steel base plate
(subsequently replaced by Petillo with a six-saddle titanium bridge),
although it does have a set of replacement tuners.
1975 is also notable in the Telecaster story because of the release of
a relatively obscure debut album, American Music, by a Washington,
D.C., trio called Danny and the Fat Boys. “Danny” in this case being
Danny Gatton, a stylistically eclectic guitar virtuoso regarded
throughout the remainder of his career as one of the most technically
dazzling players ever to wield a Telecaster.
As the mid-1970s gave way to the latter part of the decade, Burton and
Cropper remained busier than ever. Burton gigged extensively with
Presley until the star’s death in August 1977; he’d also found time to
record and perform with Emmylou Harris and John Denver. Cropper once
again found himself in the spotlight with the unexpectedly successful
1978 formation of blues/soul revival outfit the Blues Brothers by
Saturday Night Live *alumni John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd. As a member
of the duo’s backing band that year, Cropper appeared with them on
*Saturday Night Live and on chart-topping debut album Briefcase Full
of Blues.
Across the Atlantic, sweeping change had struck the U.K. music scene
in mid-decade. Punk reared its reactionary spiky-haired head, thumbing
its safety-pinned nose at the establishment and at the lumbering
blues-based, psychedelic and prog giants who ruled the first half of
the 1970s. But the ever-ubiquitous Telecaster found itself right at
home there, too.
After the Sex Pistols opened an April 3, 1976, show at the Nashville
Rooms in London for his band, the 101’ers, pub rocker John
Mellor—better known by the stage name he’d taken the year before, Joe
Strummer—switched from pub to punk. Strummer accepted an invitation to
be lead singer in a new band with guitarists Mick Jones and Keith
Levene, bassist Paul Simonon and drummer Terry Chimes. Strummer
brought his battered 1966 Telecaster along with him. The new band, the
Clash, made its live debut three months later, opening for—as fate
would have it—the Sex Pistols at the Black Swan in Sheffield, England,
on July 4, 1976.
Elsewhere in London of that era, another band coalesced that would
achieve even greater heights; the very loftiest heights, in fact.
Veteran U.K. guitarist Andy Summers (Dantalian’s Chariot, Soft
Machine, the Animals) returned to England in 1977 after a few years in
United States during which he studied music at California State
University, Northridge. During his years in California, he bought a
battered 1961 Custom Telecaster from one of his guitar students; the
instrument was heavily modified with a humbucking neck pickup, phase
switch, onboard preamp and overdrive unit, maple fingerboard and more.
Having returned to London in ’77, Summers recorded and performed with
several acts before accepting a mid-year invitation by musician Mike
Howlett (ex-Gong) to join a new act called Strontium 90. That’s when
Summers met Howlett’s other recruits, bassist/vocalist Gordon “Sting”
Sumner and drummer Stewart Copeland, who had already formed a trio of
their own earlier that year called the Police. Strontium 90 only
lasted a few gigs and several furtive demos, but the
Sting-Copeland-Summers combination showed fantastic chemistry, and
Summers replaced original Police guitarist Henry Padovani that August
and the rest is history.
Northwest of London in March 1978, in Hereford, Ohio-born singer,
songwriter and Telecaster-wielding guitarist Chrissie Hynde assembled
a four-piece band with a lineup that quickly settled on her, guitarist
James Honeyman-Scott, bassist Pete Farndon and drummer Martin
Chambers. Hynde named the band the Pretenders, and they recorded their
first single, a cover of the Kinks’ “Stop Your Sobbing,” later that
year.
And so the Telecaster struck the final notes of its third decade, put
to greater use than ever by U.S. and U.K. guitarists, veterans and
newcomers alike. In the 1970s, as always, the guitar itself had
changed hardly at while music had mutated wildly. As the 1980s dawned,
Fender itself was in for seismic change—for the better,
fortunately—and its first electric guitar once again found itself in
the hands of seasoned pros who now revered it with a newfound sense of
history and a fresh young generation of imaginative newcomers who
would chart new musical territory and define their own new decade with
it.
The 1980s and Beyond...
The Telecaster charged into its fourth decade of indispensability on
the crest of a wave of revitalized U.K. rock and pop. Tight, focused
punk- and new wave-based Davids of the late 1970s and early 1980s
wrested the charts and the critical acclaim from the blues-based
Goliaths of the early- and mid-’70s using the very same
instruments—the Telecaster chief among them. Thus, ’70s-dominating
U.K. giants such as Led Zeppelin, Yes and Pink Floyd segued into
’80-dominating U.K. giants of an entirely new and different kind, such
as the Police, the Clash and the Pretenders.
Especially the Police. The famously blonde trio became the biggest
band in the world in the first half of the 1980s, turning out hit
after hit and achieving unprecedented visibility thanks to the arrival
of MTV, which trumpeted their captivating sound and photogenic looks
24 hours a day. To say nothing of looks and marketing, however, the
Police had formidable musical substance to back it all up, and their
empire was founded on solid songcraft fueled by the startlingly
original Telecaster work of Andy Summers.
The Clash was also at its artistic and commercial peak in the first
half of the 1980s. Like Summers, leader Joe Strummer also wielded a
battered ’60s-era Telecaster, which he continually plastered with
slogans befitting his group’s early-’80s status as “the only band that
matters.” Stylistically sprawling epic double album London Calling was
released in late 1979, but was truly an album for the 1980s and
included the band’s first U.S. Top 40 hit, “Train in Vain.”
Strummer wielded his 1966 Telecaster with authoritative swagger
through two other hit Clash albums of the period, Sandinista! (1980)
and Combat Rock (1982) before the band started to disintegrate.
Nonetheless, he remained a revered post-punk figure as the Clash
soldiered on until 1986, and he too was honored (posthumously;
Strummer passed away in 2002) by Fender in the late 2000s with a
tribute Telecaster model that reproduced his battle-hardened guitar
down to the last detail.
In the United States, the main Telecaster triumph of the first half of
the 1980s took place in 1984 with the release of Bruce Springsteen’s
seventh studio album, Born in the U.S.A. The album was a massive
commercial and critical blockbuster, eclipsing even the success of
Springsteen’s 1975 breakthrough, Born to Run. The album catapulted
Springsteen to worldwide superstardom and, like the Police, he too
benefitted immeasurably from the around-the-clock exposure afforded by
heavy MTV airplay.
New talent also reinvigorated mainstream U.S. country music. While
old-school Telecaster masters such as Merle Haggard and Waylon
Jennings continued to score hits in the ’80s, a new generation of able
Telecaster players took their first solo steps. These included former
Pure Prairie League member Vince Gill, a truly formidable guitarist,
who released debut solo album Turn Me Loose in 1984, and Marty Stuart,
who left Johnny Cash’s band mid-decade and released his eponymous solo
album in 1986.
At home at Fender, however, all was not well. After nearly two decades
of general neglect, quality control problems and budget cuts under
CBS, the Fender of the early 1980s had fallen far from its former
greatness. It now suffered from a bleak reputation for producing, as
noted guitar author and historian Tom Wheeler put it in his 2011
history of the Fender Custom Shop, The Dream Factory, “boat anchor”
guitars, and revenues were starting to decline along with quality. A
late ’70s Telecaster may have looked like its 1950s or early 1960s
ancestors, but that was about it, and it was around this time that
word began to circulate that if you wanted a really good Fender
instrument, you needed an old one (this is when the oft-heard term
“pre-CBS” originated).
To remedy this situation, CBS enlisted former Yamaha executives
William “Bill” Schultz as president of Fender and Dan Smith as
director of marketing for electric guitars. Both men set about
improving Fender’s fortunes; and one of the first things Smith did was
restore the original body shape of the Telecaster, which had changed
slightly and none too elegantly in the 1970s to accommodate the
abilities of computer-controlled body cutting machinery.
Schultz, seeing that his recommendation for modernizing Fender’s U.S.
manufacturing facilities largely meant halting production while
machinery was updated and staff was re-trained, suggested building
Fender guitars in Japan for the large Japanese market. This would keep
Fender instruments in production and combat the cheap copies that were
voraciously eating away at Fender’s Far East sales.
Accordingly, Fender Japan was established in March 1982 and began
building quality Fender instruments while U.S production was
reorganized. One of the earliest results was the Vintage Reissue
series, a high-quality new family that appeared in 1982 and featured a
well-built and largely historically accurate ’52 Telecaster model.
These Vintage series Japanese instruments were soon introduced into
the European market under the Squier name.
With U.S. production resumed but not up to full steam by late 1983,
Japanese-made Fender guitars—including a’70s-style Squier
Telecaster—became available in the United States, too. The U.S.
factory did produce the short-lived Elite Telecaster of 1983-1984,
which was intended as a high-end model with humbucking pickups and
active circuitry.
1984, however, was also the year that CBS decided to sell Fender.
Schultz and a group of investors bought Fender in a sale that was
completed in March 1985, ending 20 years of unpopular CBS rule. Owning
very little in the way of resources—only the name, distribution and
some leftover inventory and machinery (no U.S. factory)—Schultz set
about rebuilding and revitalizing Fender. While Fender Japan now
became the world’s main producer of Fender instruments, Schultz and
his staff established headquarters for the newly renamed Fender
Musical Instruments Corporation in Brea, Calif., and acquired a
14,000-square-foot factory in Corona, Calif., in October 1985. It is
at this point that the modern-era history of the Telecaster begins.
With that new mid-’80s beginning under Bill Schultz, Fender started by
concentrating on quality rather than quantity, beginning with a small
number of vintage reissue guitars and redesigned back-to-basics modern
instruments dubbed American Standard models. The American Standard
Telecaster appeared in 1988, updated with 22 frets, a more
robust-sounding bridge pickup and a six-saddle bridge.
Meanwhile, the Fender Custom Shop had been established in 1987, and
one of the very first orders it took was for a custom left-handed
Telecaster Thinline for Cars guitarist Elliot Easton. From that year
onward, the Custom Shop would repeatedly elevate the Telecaster from
mere utilitarian workhorse to work of art.
Since that late-’80s resurrection, the Telecaster once again reigns
supreme as a must-have instrument for guitarists of all types and
styles worldwide. Many variations have been offered ever since, but at
it its heart the Telecaster very much remains the same great
instrument it was when the world first heard it in the early 1950s. It
continues to embody the spirit of Fender innovation and dedication to
tonal and performance excellence. And it can still take a beating.
And in its modern era, new masters have discovered the Telecaster
while stalwarts have stayed with it and still others, sadly, have
departed.
The modern Telecaster was seen in the early 1990s being wielded by
many a grunge guitarist for the intensely meteoric few years when that
genre dominated rock. In the mid-1990s in the U.K., inventive Britpop
guitarists such as Blur’s phenomenally talented Graham Coxon and
Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood put the Telecaster to remarkably creative
(and hit-making) use.
In the 2000s, the Telecaster was positively everywhere, from modern
country (Brad Paisley, Keith Urban, Dierks Bentley) to modern metal
(Fender signature artists John 5 and Jim Root) to modern alt-indie
(Frank Black, Franz Ferdinand, Bloc Party, Jimmy Eat World and
countless others) and a great deal more.
As the 50th anniversary of the Telecaster approached, the Fender
Custom Shop celebrated by introducing a limited edition run of 50 Leo
Fender Broadcaster models in 2000 that featured Leo Fender’s signature
on the headstock in place of the standard logo. That year also saw the
introduction of the American Nashville B-Bender Telecaster, which uses
a mechanical device that raises the pitch of the B string by a whole
tone (up to C#), producing plaintive, sinuous bends very much like
those produced on a pedal steel guitar.
Since then Fender has offered a wealth of modern Telecaster models
designed to suit the playing, personality and pockets of any
guitarist. In addition to many artist models and the ongoing American
Vintage series Telecaster guitars, Fender has introduced a variety of
Telecaster variations, from authentically traditional to distinctively
modified, from pristine to battered and from high-end to
budget-conscious. Some of these models include Classic Player (2006),
Road Worn (2009) and American Special (2010), all of which have kept
the Telecaster at the forefront of modern electric guitar. In 2017
Fender released the American Professional Telecaster (also available
for lefties) and the Telecaster Deluxe Shawbucker featuring classic
design and innovative new features.
Much of the history of modern popular music owes a great deal of its
sound to the Telecaster, and to the spirit of innovation and design
excellence embodied in its elegantly shapely form. Its look and sound
are still instantly identifiable, and it is still the workhorse
instrument of countless musicians worldwide who praise its form and
function as much or more today than they did in the 1950s and every
decade since. The Telecaster is an original that remains, simply and
more than ever, indispensable.

...

The 'grand' and later the more versatile keyboard climbed to the top of
the favorite instruments pile early on while the guitar remained a
distant unknown that could barely be heard and was mostly sidelined to
accompaniment playing weak chords and even at that not in every orchestra.

All this changed for ever with amplification, what many people don't
know is that the guitar has for some time now been #2, a spot it's
likely to lock-in for a very, very long time.


http://www.creativesoulmusic.com/blog/what-is-the-most-popular-instrument-to-play