The Grail Guitar

by Chris Adams

  But then, as mentioned earlier, just when we were beginning to lose hope, we had a mini-breakthrough, when I managed to make contact with the composer who had introduced the Lonely Ones to the world of film music, David Llewelyn. After a few e-mails had gone back and forth, I brought up the subject of images of the Lonely Ones.

  “I’m pretty sure I do have photographs of the band playing,” he said over the line from Munich, “but I’ve been unwell lately and I’m afraid I just don’t have the strength to start looking for them right now. Wait till I’m a bit stronger.”

  Two months went by and then one day a message arrived from one of his pupils with a link to Dropbox. With the delightful feeling of butterfly wings gently caressing my stomach, I followed it to the digital storage space, and there I found a batch of black-and-white shots taken in the studio in Munich in 1968. There were about forty prints in all, and there was something of cinema verité in their starkness; there was no posing, no soft-lit portraits, just a purposeful record of a young band and their older mentor at work in a recording studio. But that said, I was almost two-thirds of the way through the batch before I finally found a shot of a young Trevor Williams playing his psychedelic guitar. I could see immediately that the fretboard was rosewood, and beneath the psychedelic artwork, the body had obviously been light colored and the scratchplate most likely white. For me, it was a moment that made all the months of frustration worthwhile, and when I shared it with Eric, his fist pumped the air; he then immediately ran his researcher’s eye over it.

  The first thing he noticed was that the artist had chosen to paint the headstock, and he was quick to point out that anyone trying to remove those tight swirls with Nitromors would undoubtedly have also removed the Fender transfer. And of course he was right. So was this the reason there had been none on mine when I first saw it hanging in that quiet side window off Shaftesbury Avenue? Either way, the coincidences were continuing to build up, but even with this crucial breakthrough, the vital question remained: exactly how had Trevor’s guitar reentered the Hendrix camp? We were sure that the answer lay in the period when Noel had the house in Aldington and his buddy suddenly found himself without band or retainer, but in the end, only one man could answer that question, and that was Mr. Williams.

  In the meantime, someone who was really delighted to receive a copy of the photos was one of the actual participants in that Munich session, Martin Vinson. “These are the same ones that got stolen from my flat,” he said, once again thanking me profusely. By this time we had tracked down the old Lonely Ones drummer, Keith Bailey, now living in California, and much to Martin’s delight he had connected with his long-lost rhythm-section partner. All of this happened just before the end of 2012, and as usual, everything closes down at that time of year. Martin had gone to Montpellier in the South of France to spend Christmas with his daughter and didn’t return til December 30. He had just received Keith’s e-mail and said he’d reply to it in the New Year, but a week later, I’d heard nothing from him, and unusually, I’d had no reply to my e-mails. Puzzled, I went to Martin’s Facebook page and discovered to my horror that he was seriously ill.

  Now this is the kind of event that puts everything else into context. I had not actually met Martin face-to-face, but we had spoken often by phone and had been e-mailing each other regularly for six months, so by now we had struck up a good relationship, maybe because, like me, he was a musician who had lived through those heady days. In fact, lately he had entered into the spirit of the enterprise by repeating Eric’s catchphrase, “the Quest must go on,” so we felt as if this had become some sort of shared endeavor, and we had agreed that when he came to visit his Mum in Folkestone after the New Year, I would fly down to meet him.

  But now suddenly here he was, dangerously ill on a ventilator in a French hospital. I knew that he’d had heart problems the previous year, but apart from a recent chest infection, he seemed to have more or less recovered. He gigged with friends on a regular basis, and on the phone he always sounded bright and cheery, ribbing me that time because I was heading off to the pub for a pint of real ale with Eric.

  “A pint of Spitfire would do it for me,” he’d said.

  “Funnily enough, I’ve got two bottles of that in the cupboard.”

  “Unfair!” was the response.

  And reflecting on conversations like this, I would have to remind myself that the incidents we had been chatting about had happened over forty years ago. Somehow it seemed that in our teens and twenties, we’d had much more traction on the terrain of life, perhaps because we were still climbing steadily toward that distant peak of ambition, at times visible, at others, swathed in clouds. Certainly the details of that climb were still incredibly sharp, while the opposite was true of my forties and fifties when the gradual momentum of gravity seemed to accelerate the slide so that whole decades had whizzed by in the blink of an eye.

  I spoke a while back about the doubts I began to feel as my own painful memories started to float toward the surface. As they did, I found myself being reminded of the acting techniques pioneered by the great drama teacher, Konstantin Stanislavsky, who encouraged his pupils to draw upon their past experiences to help re-create certain emotions. For some actors, this was a key that led to great artistic success, but for others, it was the hinge that opened Pandora’s box, for once they began to look into it, they found there was no turning back. In psychological terms, the pull of the past can be all powerful.

  For me personally, dredging up old memories meant reliving those hours I had spent in the hospital in Tottenham, after the morphine wore off. During that long night, I found myself desperately clinging to the edge of what had recently passed for reality, praying for dawn’s early light to arrive so that the darkness would not swallow me and terrified that I might drop off, in case some nightshift cleaner should glide in unheard, lift the bubbling bottle above the level of the bed, and drown me. Somehow I got through the endless hours and even managed to nap after the cleaners had done their thing; then Pauline came to visit, bright and fresh from a lunch in Soho. Her expression held a mirror to my own. Both of us were, in that evocative phrase of the times, totally freaked out. The doctors were puzzled by my obvious panic. Was I on drugs? Apart from the odd joint, the answer was no. Truth was, I was simply no longer in control, and if you have ever been driven to achieve some great goal, then you will know that a sudden loss of control is a very difficult thing to handle.

  During the days that followed, I spent hours writing lyrics for the songs on our next album. The opening track would be called “Heartfeeder,” and it would start with the word “Pain.” After one of the longest weeks of my life, I was told I had surgical emphysema, a condition in which air starts to escape through the chest, though the doctor said I’d be fine unless the swelling reached my throat, at which point I signed myself out of the hospital and went back to the room with the convector heater, only this time I used it much more sparingly. At first the world outside seemed to be going at a million miles an hour, but gradually it started to slow down, and I began to recover, physically if not psychologically. Two weeks later as planned, we made that first night at the Rainbow, but not without a last-minute visit to a Harley Street doctor to have my chest x-rayed. He glanced at the negatives and nodded sagely.

  “Well, the lung’s fully reflated. No sign of any new damage.”

  “Maybe so, Doctor, but I have a lot of high notes to hit.”

  He smiled. “What’s your tipple?”

  I told him Guinness.

  “Well, have two or three pints before you go on. That should relax you.”

  I took his advice, and somehow we got through the gig, albeit rarely getting out of third gear, but by the second week of the tour we had hit our stride, and by now I was using the old Telecaster as my first-choice guitar. I found it grittier than the Epiphone, with a hard edge that cut through the overall sound, so after the tour, when we finally got into the studio to start making the album I had part written
in hospital, it was the Tele I reached for. Our producer, Shel Talmy, had produced scores of hits, including some for the Kinks and the Who, so he was old school, just like Mickie Most and Chas Chandler. For him, making records was all about creating the environment where we could lay down a convincing performance, but that said, the tapes we delivered to Charisma were not well received.

  For a start, I had smuggled a drummer into the sessions, and it had worked so well that he was now a permanent member of the band. The label owner, Tony Stratton Smith, was not well pleased. Nor was he impressed with the doom-laden atmosphere that permeated the album. My brush with death had thrown a dark shadow over my writing style, and our violinist, Graham, had responded with a truly tormented pallet of chilling sounds. The overall effect was Gothic to say the least, but singles there were none. When it came out, “The Machine That Cried,” as I’d named it, was almost universally slagged, save for one critic from the Guardian who went to the other extreme, calling it a work of genius. In the aftermath, Stratton Smith decided that henceforth we should demo our material before being allowed to record it for real. This effectively spelled the kiss of death for the band and its ongoing creative process, so the crossroads I hit that night in the Marquee eventually took me back to Glasgow and the safety of relative anonymity, but at least the old Tele got another moment in the sun, even if it was one partially obscured by clouds.

  Chapter 20

  The Examination

  Martin’s illness brought a lull to proceedings, for truth be told, in the context of real-life events, our Quest suddenly seemed a bit shallow. If we were stuck in a state of limbo, it was simply because the people we needed to speak to had lives to lead, and events from forty years ago didn’t begin to register on their present priority scale. So given this disconnect, Eric Barnett and I were now facing the distinct possibility that with the best will in the world, we might never hear from Trevor Williams or NuNu Whiting, and so we decided it was time to reach some conclusions, based on the evidence we had collected over the last year or so. This would hopefully mean that we could achieve some degree of closure to the two-year process, with or without those last few missing pieces of the “Purple Haze” Tele jigsaw.

  I said earlier that our tale had elements of a cold-case crime novel, and in keeping with that particular genre, we had looked at the possibilities that my guitar might hold DNA evidence of its distant past. Through an intermediary, we were able to quiz an expert in this field, and he quickly disabused us of the notion that Jimi Hendrix or Trevor could have left a physical trace of themselves on the instrument. Whilst guitars could be DNA goldmines, especially the Tele, where dead skin drops into the hollow under the scratchplate via the bridge pickup, it seems these skin samples are only useful as a source of DNA if the guitar has been played consistently by the same person. So mine would be the predominant DNA, and even if others had handled the guitar regularly, the statistical chances of tracing them would be next to zero.

  Our first follow-up question was about the fretboard, but again we got a no, because this gets damp through fingertip sweat and thus becomes “a horrible soup,” encouraging DNA-eating fungus. Also, like most sensible guitarists, I usually wiped mine down after gigs, which would help to destroy any DNA that was there. So how about the channel routed out for the humbucker, and for that matter the ancillary fittings? Could there be traces there? Again the reply was in the negative. While DNA can be found on screws and other fixtures, we’d have to know who modded it so that we could make a match, and even then, there would only be a one-in-ten chance of it being successful. So if Trevor Williams ever did leave any DNA on the Tele, it would be totally untraceable by now.

  Next on our forensic query list was the possibility of tracing paint samples, in the context of the psychedelic makeover, but again this was a scientific dead end because records of paints don’t go back to the early seventies. So apart from differentiating between the basic oil and water bases, there’s no way of knowing what type it was, where it was made, or who sold it. Modern paint samples are now routinely kept so that police can cross-reference with stains, for example, on clothing, but in the late 1960s that was as futuristic as fingerprints were in the nineteenth century. One other avenue we considered exploring was the possible effects of the electric shock at the Titan Club. Could this event have left some sort of burn mark on the fretboard? The answer was a tentative yes, but though there were some tiny gouges between the very high frets, there was no sign of scorchmarks.

  But this long list of negatives only helped to highlight the fact that if we wanted to do justice to the project, I would have to get the guitar more closely examined. Jimmy Moon had been good enough to give it the once over, but what I needed was someone with specialist knowledge of old Fenders who could afford to spend enough time to go into the real minutiae of the instrument. As it happened, my old friend Chris Hewitt, owner of Ozit Records, knew someone who might just be up for it and said he’d try to set up a meet. But while we were waiting for him to get back to us, we decided it would only be sensible to familiarize ourselves with the production methods that Leo Fender’s company used to turn out the early Telecasters.

  As we know, my Olympic white Tele is a ’64 model, which is the year before Leo sold out to CBS. Most experts are agreed that this is the watershed point, because from then on the rigors of mass production were brought to bear on the manufacture of instruments that had previously been made with a fair degree of craftsmanship. At least, that’s the line taken by guitar geeks, but it’s not the story I got from the owner of Glasgow’s best-known music store. By the midseventies, McCormack’s had sold hundreds of Fenders, and as with many longtime customers, its owner was invited to tour the Fullerton factory and meet the main man. As Neil McCormack described it, Leo told him there was a lot of romantic nonsense attached to the earliest models, because for a solid-bodied guitar to sound good, it should be made from a substantial, meaning heavy, piece of wood. But seemingly in the early days, there was no way they could afford to throw away the light cuts, so some of those revered fifties guitars that are now worth ridiculously big bucks would never have passed their latter-day quality controls. And that, dear reader, is another excellent example of urtext!

  The city of Fullerton lies twenty-five miles southeast of Los Angeles, and it was there that Leo opened a radio repair shop in 1938. Aware of the feedback problems that plagued hollow-bodied guitars and knowing the solid laptop Hawaiian guitar had no such issues, he formed the Fender Electrical Instrument Company and, in 1949, launched the Broadcaster, which to a nonpurist like me, looks exactly like a Tele. But bizarrely, the rival instrument makers Gretsch decided to sue him because they were producing a Broadkaster drum kit, and despite the obvious wisecrack that only a drummer could confuse a guitar with a kit of drums, Leo was forced to stop using the name and come up with a new marketing campaign from scratch.

  But by now his solid-bodied guitar had a life all of its own, especially in the Country market, where its fast maple fretboard had earned it the nickname of the “takeoff lead guitar.” So with demand still outstripping supply, Leo turned out what is now called a Nocaster, an expedient achieved by cutting “Broadcaster” from the headstock transfer and simply leaving “Fender.” Only five hundred of these were made, and naturally they’re now much sought after, so not for the first time, necessity bred a highly desirable invention. But this was just a short-term fix. A model name was a must, so Leo came up with a stroke of genius. With the new medium of television now taking off, radio broadcasting was becoming very old hat, so protruding his tongue at the Gretsch pedants, he plumped for “Telecaster.”

  Leo’s guitars were all built modularly, so a neck made in ’58 might hang for two years before it was joined to a body. This has always created problems when it comes to dating Fenders, but the easiest way of identifying the year of make is by checking the serial number against the company’s output records. On most models, this number is stamped on the metal backplate, where
the neck locks onto the body. On my own Tele, it’s L39782, which puts it somewhere in the latter half of ’64, but there’s a quirk here, for up to a certain point in 1963, all Fender guitars were numbered from 1 to 99,999, after which the L appeared as the first digit. There are different theories on this, such as maybe the L stands for Leo, but either way, in the year after they began using the L system, the factory turned out over thirty-nine thousand guitars, an achievement that can best be put down to the imminent CBS takeover.

  One other area of production was of special interest to us, and that was the finishes that Fender offered. By 1964, the standard finish was blonde, and Olympic white was one of fourteen custom colors that cost an extra 5 percent on retail price. But anyone who has read about Fender’s production methods before they sold out to CBS in 1965 can’t help but be amazed by the ad hoc methods they used. The name of the game was getting margins up, so they were really flexible when it came to their finishes. For instance, they used Du Pont auto paints for most of the guitars, but they also used a white nitrocellulose primer that cost one-twelfth of the price of their custom paints. By doing so they created a consistent white surface that allowed them to use half as much of the expensive custom finish. Moves like this cut costs and, scaled up to thousands of guitars, made a lot more profit.