The Grail Guitar

by Chris Adams

  So this brief exercise had given us a feel for some of the quirks we might encounter once we got round to having the guitar examined by Chris Hewitt’s expert. This turned out to be the Lancashire luthier Brian Eastwood, whose company specializes in creating unusual variations on the Stratocaster shape. Chris had arranged for us to meet when my band played the Great British Folk Festival in Skegness later in the year, and so it was that at the end of November 2012, in the Arctic setting of a holiday camp on the Lincolnshire coast, Brian first came face-to-face with the guitar. He ran an expert eye over it and smiled.

  “Well for a start, it’s been thinned down, and it’s definitely had a refinish.”

  He turned the guitar in his hands.

  “The scratchplate looks to me like a Traffolyte replacement.”

  “What’s Traffolyte?”

  “It’s a three-layer laminate made by Metropolitan Vickers in their Manchester factory in Trafford Park. Hence the name! It was actually designed for use as signs or name tags because the middle layer stands out in relief when you engrave it.”

  “So how can you tell that it’s not the original Fender guard?”

  “Fender used a celluloid material with a really high-gloss sheen, but over the years, it proved liable to shrinkage, so a lot of these old sixties guards have been replaced, some of them with Traffolyte!”

  I explained how Jimmy Moon had taken it off and found that the front cavity had been enlarged for a humbucker.

  “Well, that would explain it. I mean, you can’t make that kind of omelet without breaking the original scratchplate!”

  I then took him through the story of Trevor’s psychedelic guitar and finished by telling him about the salesman’s remark on the day I bought mine.

  “So you want to know if yours has ever been covered in Day-Glo paint?”

  “Is it possible to tell if it was?”

  He shrugged.

  “Why don’t I put it under the microscope and see?”

  And on that note, he invited me to bring the Tele down to Bacup for an ultraclose inspection.

  It was February before we managed to arrange the visit, and after a long drive, early afternoon saw me and Eric sitting with Brian in his downstairs workshop. The first surprise came when he removed the scratchplate and discovered that the reverse side was white and was not in fact a laminate as he’d previously thought.

  “I was wrong. It isn’t Traffolyte. This is actually the original white scratchplate, and it’s been painted black on one side.”

  I caught Eric’s little glance—not the last one he’d throw me in the next two hours.

  “By the Fender factory?” he asked.

  “Very unlikely, but we’ll get to that later. Let me start at the beginning.”

  He took out a chisel and removed a small layer of white paint from beside the enlarged humbucker cavity. “Ok, from the paint color in here, I’d say the guitar was originally Olympic White. The only other color it could have been is blonde, but that’s a translucent finish that lets you see the grain, so basically we can rule that out. The body itself is swamp ash, which is lighter than mountain ash.”

  He was out with his calipers now, measuring the thickness. “Someone has sanded it down by an average of a tenth of an inch and then it’s been refinished white. See this grey undercoat; that’s definitely not original.”

  He returned to the scratchplate and rubbed some thinning spirits over the black daubs on the reverse side but with no effect.

  “Ok, this is definitely not oil-based cellulose paint.”

  “So what is it?”

  “I’d say it could be an acrylic, which is what they used for Day-Glo.”

  This brought another knowing glance from Eric.

  For the next two hours, Brian went over the guitar in painstaking detail. The tray and saddles were original, but though the Schaller machineheads were not, he thought that at the time, they might well have been seen as an upgrade. The bridge pickup was a replacement, probably a Mighty Mite, but I’d already told him that I had the original in a cupboard at home. The wiring for the front pickup was new, which chimed with the humbucker cavity, and while the control plate was original, the switch assembly below was new. So, very much as we’d expected, the guitar was a bit of a mongrel. It was when we came to the fretboard, however, that the temperature began to climb.

  “Okay, a maple neck with a Brazilian rosewood fingerboard and what we call ‘mother of plastic’ dots; all normal for a guitar of this age. On the headstock, you have two string guides, and there should only be one, so the double-decker guide for the D- and G-strings has been added. The question is why . . .”

  He turned the guitar round, squinting down the shaft of the fingerboard, one eye beside the right horizontal edge, and then he picked up his calipers again and made some quick measurements. “Right, these central dots should be plumb in the middle, but they’re not. I make them two millimeters closer to the D string, which obviously means that there must have been a faulty jig being used.”

  At this, Eric reached into his inside pocket, took out the black-and-white Munich photo of Trevor playing his psychedelic Telecaster.

  “Have a look at this,” he said.

  Brian gave it the once over. “Right, so this is the actual guitar that Hendrix used on ‘Purple Haze?’”

  “Correct.”

  “And you want to know if it has the same fault with the dot spacing?”

  “Exactly.”

  He held it up. “Well you don’t need the microscope to see that the dots are nearer the G string than the D. Here, have a look for yourself!”

  And he was right.

  In the car on the way back, the two of us talked over what we’d learned.

  “Okay,” said Eric. “So someone took the trouble to sand down a white guitar by a tenth of an inch and then restored it to exactly the same color. What does that tell you?”

  “That maybe it wasn’t plain white anymore.”

  “Exactly, and a tenth of an inch is a lot to sand off.”

  He took the Munich photo from his pocket, held it up. “How hard would it have been to remove this psychedelic paint?”

  “I hear what you say, but we have to be careful not to start creating the scenario we want to hear.”

  “Agreed! But all we’re doing here is asking if the scenario fits, and it does!”

  I nodded. He was right. It did all fit, especially the dots.

  A few nights later, the current lineup of String Driven Thing was having its fortnightly rehearsal in my house, an event that has been going on for about a decade now and always involves beer and pizza. Our bass player, Andy Allan, arrives first, as he usually finishes work at four. I should explain that Andy is a self-confessed geek. He also admits to suffering from GAS, an acronym for gear acquisition syndrome, and in the years we’ve played together he’s had more basses and amps than I’ve had pairs of socks. He is also wont to digitally inhabit those communal chat rooms designed for nerds such as himself, and as a longtime Fender jazz bassman, he is conversant with all the Fullerton nuances. So over slices of pizza I told him of our journey to Brian’s workshop and showed him Eric’s notes. He read through them and then asked to see the guitar. After I’d fetched it, he proceeded to make some extremely interesting observations.

  Firstly, he explained that the string guides or tees, as he called them, were there to make the tension of the strings even, as without them, the “break angle” of the ones going to the furthest machineheads would be less steep and the player would find the action on them higher, thus requiring more force to press them down. Seemingly Fender normally turned the Tele out with just one string tee, and in his opinion only a tech would have added a second, especially as in this case said tech had installed a double-decker affair, with the first one reversed and the second one sitting on top of it. The intention here would be to lower the action.

  “This guy knew what he was doing,” he said.

  Next he turned to the
Schallers.

  “These would have been upgrades. The original Klusons had a square shield to guard the cog, but these are sealed units packed with grease, much more advanced, in fact state of the art at the time. Again, this is the kind of thing that only a guitar tech would do.”

  He then asked if we had tried to establish when these particular Schallers were manufactured, and I explained how we had actually written to the German company, attaching photos of the machineheads and asking if they knew when this specific model had first come into production. Now coincidentally, like Leo Fender, Helmut Schaller had started his business as a radio repair shop, but unlike Leo, he never sold out, so the company that started in 1945 is still going strong in Bavaria. This being the case, we had high hopes that we’d get a definitive response on this simple request, but in the event, the reply was, “We’ve been making these for decades!”

  Andy laughed: “So much for German efficiency!”

  He turned the guitar in his hands and ran the tip of his forefinger along the scratchplate. “The paint on this scratchplate looks like the kind you’d use for plastic models, you know like airplane kits. And it’s lasted really well, as you can see.”

  This was true. There were a few tiny breaks in the paint that showed the original white coating underneath, and the way the edges had been done did make it look like a laminate.

  “What condition was the guitar in when you got it?” he asked.

  “Pretty beat up. Hard to tell how much I’ve added to it, but not a lot.”

  “So that means it definitely wasn’t the shop that refinished it.”

  “No way! I reckon they just bought it in, hung it up, and made themselves a modest wee profit in the process.”

  “Aye well, that’s private enterprise for you.”

  He then unscrewed the tone control plate and examined the two pots.

  “Okay. The rear one is original, and it should have some numbers on it that will let you double-check the date of manufacture. Go and get your Telecaster book.”

  He was referring to A. R. Duchossoir’s seminal publication, which I’d recently purchased.

  “Right,” he said, when he’d located the relevant page. “There’s a whole string of digits, but the last four are the important ones, so write these numbers down. Six, four, four, zero.”

  I did as I was told.

  “Okay, sixty-four is the year and four-zero is the week, so this pot was manufactured in September of 1964.”

  “Which agrees with the number on the back plate.”

  “Exactly!”

  He picked the guitar up and ran an experienced eye over the body.

  “This missing tenth of an inch he talks about obviously came from the front of the guitar because you can see where the rear is still chamfered whereas the front edge is really square. Look, run your finger along it.”

  I did as he asked and saw he was right. The edge was sharp and unbeveled.

  “Okay, so to sum up. This instrument has definitely been upgraded by a geek who didn’t give a toss for the aesthetic niceties that any Fender enthusiast would normally value. In other words, it’s a musical oxymoron!”

  And he was spot on, for no one with a respect for the authenticity of a Telecaster would ever have removed the original Kluson machineheads and replaced them with clunky Schallers. But on that note we left it, as our drummer Dick arrived, and what with the music, the beer, and the pizza, I slept late next morning, and when I finally awoke it was to discover that our friend Martin Vinson had died during the night.

  Now to put this into some kind of perspective, of all the people we had dealt with in the early stages of our Quest, Martin was the one who had really come on board. Possibly because he had time on his hands, or maybe because he was at a stage in his life where he was happy to look back at his younger self and keen to make contact with the guys who went through so much with him, he threw himself enthusiastically into the spirit of our enterprise. We’d put him back in touch with Andy, and I now knew that Martin had told him how much he regretted leaving the band the way he had in Munich but that he’d suffered a kind of “mini-breakdown.” I knew what he meant. Exactly the same thing had happened to me just before I quit String Driven Thing. It was as if, like that bottom E in the Marquee, a taut string had snapped inside me, and suddenly the part of me that was tied to the band began to fray and unravel. The sad thing is, we had just found Keith Bailey, and Martin had expressed the same regret to him in the e-mail he’d sent just after Christmas. Seemingly they had been really close, as rhythm sections often are, but whether he had been able to read Keith’s reply was impossible to say. Keith had copied me in, and reading through it, I could see he was someone who lived in a world of the spirit, for whom those far-off days were closer now than all the intervening decades. I was reminded of the esoteric saying that tells us how our fingernail is closer to the claw of the tiger than to our own fingertip.

  But was it any wonder that the intensity of those youthful times held a magnetic quality for us? Weren’t they the days when we finally threw off the shackles of childhood and began to live our own lives as “adults”? And the incredible thing about the sixties was that our generation managed to throw off a set of shackles that seemed to bind us to a Victorian world. It was as if two world wars and a depression had somehow frozen the development of liberal society and suddenly the sun had broken through after decades of dark clouds. So these times were startlingly real to us and especially for members of the Lonely Ones, who had shared the pangs of hunger, the drama of Trevor’s electrocution, and the high of being “discovered” by Sam. For them, that era was indelibly stamped on their collective conscious.

  So with a heavy heart I e-mailed Keith and David Llewelyn the sad news and then phoned Andy Andrews. Maybe it was the Kentish accent, but talking to him reminded me of the chats I’d had with Martin: the sense of enthusiasm, the little touches of humor, the themes branching off into interesting byways as one detail sparked off another. Obviously he was sad to hear of his friend’s passing, though he said that Martin had suffered from ill health for years. But I could see from this conversation why Andy had always been the leader. There was a real resilience there that spoke of a lifetime of taking hard decisions.

  “Mind you,” he said, “Martin was always a heavy smoker.”

  That seemed to sum it up. Given the habit, this outcome was always on the cards.

  “So now we’ve really got to speak to Trevor,” he said.

  “While he’s still with us,” I replied.

  He laughed. “Okay. Leave it with me.”

  Part IV

  Conclusions

  Chapter 21

  Exit Lines

  In a November ’69 article in Rolling Stone, Noel Redding came out with the following: “The problem with Mitch, and with Jimi too, is that they never saved any money. As fast as they got it, it was spent. But not me, mate. I’ve got my Rolls and I’ve got still quite a kitty in the bank. I’m alright.”

  I had never set out to write a book about Jimi Hendrix, or for that matter, the other two members of the Experience, but as Noel had been the one who’d set the whole “Purple Haze” Telecaster ball rolling, I’d read his autobiography, and I was struck by the fact that extracts from his diary list the fee that the Jimi Hendrix Experience (JHE) got for every gig. Where Hendrix seemed to show no interest in filthy lucre, the opposite was true of Redding. At the outset, he was obviously delighted with his weekly retainer of £15, but once they hit the big time, he started pushing to get a bigger slice of the expanding pie. But Mike Jeffery had given Hendrix his own deal, so in this house divided, all his politicking got him was a raise to £45; then on the first US tour this rose to $200, with a one-off bonus of £500 for expenses, which would certainly have bought him a new wardrobe but was nowhere near his share of what they were grossing, which for seventeen concerts on the ’68 tour, Noel worked out as in excess of $1.3 million.

  So on the live front, Redding knew he was being
ripped off, but he must have thought the earnings from their record sales would soon start to roll in. After all, in the autumn of ’66 he had signed a production contract entitling him to a quarter of JHE recording royalties, and with sales in the millions, that would set him up for life. But with Jeffery at the helm, nothing was that simple, and soon Noel would be sucked into the netherworld of legal hyenas battling over the carcass of the JHE output. That struggle would darken his world for the next two decades, and sadly, much of it stemmed from his trust in Chas Chandler. So even if we ascribe the noblest of motives to the big Geordie, we still have to ask ourselves how he ever reconciled his artists’ financial naïvety with his partner’s Machiavellian tendencies. Strangely though, I think the answer is in the missing production contract, for the artist royalty is so small that to all intents and purposes Noel was already being shafted. I think Chas always believed Noel and Mitch would get paid and simply saw their miniscule royalty rate as the norm. He had been ripped off the same way while in the Animals and had obviously come to the conclusion that the only way to beat the “suits” was to join them.

  But when Jimi’s pony deal with PPX began to cast its long shadow over proceedings, those royalties were frozen in escrow accounts and fortunes gobbled up in the ensuing court proceedings. The real gainers from the huge sums involved were now lawyers fighting battles to settle who owned what. For Noel, the riches never materialized, and with this came a huge disconnect. He’s in the hottest act in the world, drawing huge ecstatic crowds, with albums topping the charts and singles never off the radio; he’s flying across the States in leased jets, being met at the airport by limos, staying at the best hotels, and being treated by fans and media like a demigod; in fact, there’s only one way he’s not a big star. He’s not rich!