The Grail Guitar

by Chris Adams

  But with Damon in on the cut, there were no dramas, and clutching a first-generation master, I headed for Charisma’s offices in Soho Square. Strat was there with the American producer Dan Loggins, who sat in on the listening session, and I watched their faces as the song played, seeing the smiles start to grow.

  “I think you may have a hit there, Tony,” said the American.

  Strat nodded, perusing the printed label. “Maybe, but I’m not sure about the title. ‘The Game’ makes it sounds like it’s about prostitution. Better use the chorus line, ‘It’s a Game.’”

  In those days, 45s had picture sleeves, and I had just the image in mind for this one. Anyone who has ever seen the archetypal sixties cult TV series The Prisoner will remember the giant chessboard, and given the song’s subtext, I could think of no better place to have our photos taken. So off we set with a photographer to the village of Portmerion in North Wales, where the external scenes in the series had been filmed. It was just as I remembered: narrow streets of brightly painted Italianite houses and quaint piazzas; in fact, everything was there except for the chessboard, which it transpired had been a Patrick McGoohan–inspired prop. That said, the shots we got were good of their kind, moody and atmospheric, but sadly, my “political pawn” message was left undelivered.

  As it transpired, the American was wrong, for “It’s a Game” was just “a turntable hit,” meaning it got a lot of airplay but didn’t chart. On one occasion we were standing by to do Top of the Pops, but the vacant slot was taken at the last minute by Tom Jones, just over from Las Vegas. Seemingly, his manager, the name-changing Gordon Mills, had wangled a spot on the show for an unknown artist of his by promising to deliver his US-based superstar at some point. So this was Mills coming good on his promise. And his unknown artist? Well, that turned out to be none other than the psychedelic guitar painter, our man Gilbert O’Sullivan!

  Chapter 24

  Closing Arguments

  When we first set out to solve the mystery of “Hendrix’s Lost Tele,” we gave ourselves some straightforward goals. We needed to trace the source of the rumors, tie them down, and then ground them in the solidity of evidence. For starters, had Jimi Hendrix ever played a Telecaster whilst on the road with various R&B lineups? Had he used a Tele on any of his famous recordings, and if so, when and why? Then, had he owned a Telecaster after he became famous, and if so, where was it now? And of course, was there any way of proving that my own Tele was in some way connected to this Hendrix myth?

  We’ll leave the last of these questions for later, but as you’ll know by now, we have succeeded in answering all of the others.

  Jimmy (as he was then) owned a Telecaster while on the road touring with a revue that included Bobby Womack, whose brother Harry threw it from the moving bus.

  Having had his Dog Strat stolen in Darlington on the night before the “Purple Haze” session, Jimi compounded someone else’s felony by damaging one of the machineheads on his white Strat at the Ricky Tick Club. Noel Redding then borrowed back his old Telecaster from Trevor Williams to use on the “Purple Haze” overdubs.

  A year after Hendrix’s death, two Telecasters were seen by Pete Davies among gear stored in the black Jimi Hendrix Experience (JHE) flight cases in Mitch Mitchell’s studio in Rye. Three years later, Ray Walton bought a left-handed Telecaster from a shop in London. The shop owner said that Mitch Mitchell had sold it to him.

  So, that just leaves the last question, namely, can we hope to verify Eric Barnett’s contention that Trevor’s “Purple Haze” Telecaster and mine are one and the same? Now remember, at the outset this belief arose from a gut instinct, but I couldn’t go along with it, for I felt it smacked too much of wishful thinking. But the further we went with our research, the more open I became to the possibility that he could be right, though for me the gradual change came about by a process of empirical deduction. So like Doubting Thomas I went looking for holes in Eric’s argument, but unlike the biblical doubter, I couldn’t find any. That being the case, it’s time to look more closely at the proposal itself, beginning with a brief statistical exercise.

  We know both guitars left the Fender Factory in 1964, the year before CBS took over, when Leo Fender’s workforce were going at it full tilt, producing approximately thirty thousand instruments. This figure comes from the serial numbers, which began that year somewhere in the L20,000s and ended somewhere in the L50,000s. (This is as exact as Fender historians can get.) So at most, this would start at L20,000 and end at L59,999, making forty thousand instruments, and at least, from L29,999 to L50,000, giving us a total of twenty-two thousand. Averaging these two extremes gives us a mean figure of thirty-one thousand, which for simplicity’s sake, we’ll round down to thirty thousand.

  A breakdown of production figures is impossible to obtain, but the range comprised nine models, made up of six guitars and three basses. The Strat was by far the most popular, making up two-thirds of the ’64 output. This means about twenty thousand Strats left the production line. Next, let’s look at the three basses, the Precision, the less popular Jazz, and the rarely seen Telecaster bass. Working on a rule of thumb that almost every band needs a bass and most usually have two chordal guitarists, you could argue that a third of the instruments produced were basses, and indeed, comparable figures in ’64 for Gibson’s Firebird guitar and Thunderbird bass back this up, at 2,346 and 736 respectively, but not everyone who buys a guitar is in a band, so we’ll decrease this ratio to a sixth, giving us a figure of five thousand.

  If we add this to the Strat numbers, we get a running total of twenty-five thousand, leaving us with a balance of five thousand for the four other guitar models. The Jaguar, Jazzmaster, and Duo Sonic were not as popular as the Tele, but Fender had just tooled up for the August launch of its brand-new Mustang, so if we give the first three a total of two thousand, and allow five hundred for the Mustang, a total of 2,500 for all four is a reasonable assumption. Deducting this from 5,000 gives us a figure of 2,500 as an estimate for the number of 1964 Telecasters, which fits exactly with the accepted ratio of Strat to Tele sales, which is usually taken to be in the order of eight to one.

  So if these 2,500 Fender Telecasters were driven out of the Fullerton factory onto the Californian highways, the next question is, where did they all go? Obviously the United States was the biggest market and along with Latin America and Canada would account for at least two-thirds of the total. Thus we estimate that no more than eight hundred Teles would have been exported to the rest of the world, including markets like Australia, Japan, South Africa, and New Zealand. Giving a conservative figure for these countries of two hundred leaves a total of six hundred that would have crossed the Atlantic. So, how many of these ended up in Germany, Ireland, Holland, France, Belgium, Scandinavia, and so forth? Using an educated guess, we expect that at least half would have gone to Continental Europe and the balance to Britain, but this is where statistics meet politics, for in 1964 the importation of Fender into the UK was in a state of flux.

  As we’ve seen, the Beatles boom badly affected Fender sales in the UK, but even before this, there were only two Fender importers. One was Jennings Musical Industries, famous for its Vox amps and strange-shaped guitars, but when they began to make a range of guitars with names like “Soundcaster,” based on (ripped off from) Fender, understandably the men from Fullerton pulled the franchise plug. The other importer was Selmer, who didn’t even bring in the Telecaster, seeing it as a less popular brand than the Jazzmaster, but they lost their franchise because they were also Gibson’s main distributor, with all the conflict of interest that entailed. So in the summer of ’65, Arbiter stepped into the breach and became the sole UK importers; but remember, before this, only Jennings was importing the Telecaster! This leads to the next question, namely, what are the chances that Arbiter would have gone “all in” for their first half year and imported three hundred examples of a guitar that Selmer hadn’t even deigned to stock?

  I believe this is stretching
the bounds of credibility, so I’ve adjusted this to a probably inflated figure of two hundred to hit the British market in 1964. (We’ll count Noel’s in the UK figures, because he “imported” it, albeit without a license!) So, now we’re looking at a round figure of two hundred Teles, but there were two types of fretboard, maple and rosewood. If we err on the side of caution and say that only 25 percent were maple, that leaves us a figure of 150, but not all would have had the same finish. If you remember, our expert Brian Eastwood believed my Tele was Olympic White, one of fourteen custom finishes that included Sunburst, Sonic Blue, and Black. To find the odds of a guitar being a certain shade, you could divide 150 by the fifteen colors on the chart (fourteen custom plus Standard Blonde), but obviously some, like Standard Blonde or Sunburst, were far more popular. So what percentage were Olympic White? Erring on the side of safety, we’ll take the median route and give a figure of 10 percent, which in round figures, gives us a running count of just fifteen!

  But of course the UK is a big place, with music shops in cities such as Bristol, Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, Newcastle, and Glasgow, so no more than half of the Teles that came into the UK could possibly end up in the South East. Again, let’s be safe and reduce the pool to ten. But now we also have to factor in the “secondhand” nature of my Tele, for not every guitar sold new in a shop would subsequently be resold or traded back in. I still have an Epiphone Casino bought in ’69, a Precision bass bought in ’74, and of course, the Tele bought in ’73. My point is that many players hold on to their favorite guitar, but even the ones who decide to sell them wouldn’t as a rule head for London, where instruments were relatively cheaper because they were much more plentiful.

  Obviously we’re aware that a few British players were bringing guitars back from the States in those years, and some could have ended up in shops in Shaftesbury Avenue, but the figures here would be so small that it’s difficult to factor them in; so, to balance that out, we’ve inflated the possible number of Teles all the way down the line. So taking all this into account, we calculate that no more than 60 percent of the Telecasters bought new would be sold on, which reduces the pool even further, down to six guitars.

  So far we’ve been using a simple process of elimination to find the statistical chances of both guitars being one and the same, but now I must don the robe and wig that my mother vicariously desired for me, to introduce some compelling pieces of circumstantial evidence. The first of these is the “asymmetric fretboard dots.” As we saw in Brian’s workshop, mine are two millimeters closer to the bass side of the fretboard, and a cursory inspection of the photo of Trevor’s Tele shows exactly the same feature. Indeed, even with the naked eye, it’s plain to see that the dots are much closer to the D string than the G. I’ve taken into account the fact that Trevor is playing a D chord so his forefinger is pressing down on the G string at the second fret, but this in itself would not move the string noticeably away from the dot.

  We must also factor in the height from which the photo is taken, but though Trevor is seated slightly below the lens, this is no optical illusion created by an acute angle. Whichever way you view it, the dots on each image are out of place. Eric and I have looked at other photos of Teles from around this period, notably the reproductions in A. R. Duchossoir’s seminal book The Fender Telecaster, and there are a couple of examples where the dots seem closer to one side of the fretboard than the other, but the crucial thing here is that the spacing on both Trevor’s and mine appear to be the same. Obviously this was down to faulty calibration on a jig, and given the production methods that year, it could have been a matter of days before this was noticed, but even so, only a tiny proportion of ’64 Telecasters would have this “defect,” so either we have two Teles with necks that came from the same small faulty batch or we’re looking at the same guitar.

  For me, another piece of evidence is just as persuasive. When Brian Eastwood applied his micrometer, he found the guitar had had approximately one-tenth of an inch either sanded or planed from the body. Following this, Andy Allan pointed out that the subtle contouring at the edge of the body was nonexistent at the front but perfectly normal at the back. This tells us the tenth of an inch was taken from the front. Now as we saw, Brian was able to establish the original finish was Olympic White, so the question begs itself, why go to all the trouble of sanding that amount off the front of the guitar only to return it to a similar or identical color?

  Remember, most of the first Strats imported into Britain were overpainted by Selmer to create the Hank Marvin look, and to achieve this, the factory simply sprayed on top of the existing finish, be it Black, Blue, or Sunburst. So anyone desperate to paint mine Olympic White could easily have done so without removing a thick slice from the front of the body, unless of course, the existing paintwork was unsuitable to paint over. For this reason alone, a simple “aesthetic” refinish just doesn’t add up. But what makes eminent sense is a scenario in which someone has had to sand or plane the front of the guitar down by that amount in order to remove a thick layer of psychedelic Day-Glo paint.

  Obviously that is a leap of faith, but if we are looking for evidence that is consistent with the facts as we know them, then to simply ignore such a puzzling aspect of the refinish would be extremely remiss of us. In the end, it’s the gradual accumulation of small pieces of evidence that make such a leap not only possible but also inevitable. For example, the headstock had been given the same psychedelic paint job, so to remove it, the Fender transfer would have to disappear, as indeed it had on mine. And this little coincidence leads us to the last connection, the one that started this whole process, namely, the Schaller machineheads.

  Our bass player Andy was quite clear that this was an upgrade, as was the little string tee, and from this he deduced that the man doing the “modding” was a technician, rather than a player. We also noted that whoever had fitted a humbucker was savvy enough to put the original scratchplate away for safekeeping and use a temporary one for the meantime. I think these little details are crucial, for whoever did these upgrades was obviously more interested in improving the technical aspects of the instrument than in restoring its lost looks. What player who wanted his Tele to look like a classic fifties Blackguard would ever have put those clunky Schallers on it? For any Fender purist, that is about as close to sacrilege as it’s possible to get. Nor would he have omitted to stick a Fender transfer back on the headstock. No, it’s clear that whoever did the modding on this guitar had no “aesthetic feelings” for Telecaster tradition. All of this brings me back to my question to the Sound City salesman in February 1973, about why a right-handed guitar should have been set up to tune left-handed and his off-the-cuff shrug of a reply, to wit, “A Hendrix roadie brought it in.”

  So to sum up, our statistical exercise tells us that there was a one in six chance of the guitars being the same beast, but given the “dots defect,” this must be reconsidered. If that faulty jig remained in place for one week, only sixty Teles could have been produced in that time frame, and what are the odds against this small batch including one that was shipped across the Atlantic to some music store in London and one transported to an army base in the United States and then flown in a consignment to the PX in Frankfurt? Combine this with the conundrum that is the “same color” refinish, and I believe we have a compelling case for identical twins being two images of the same guitar. This leaves just one question: how did the psychedelic Tele finish up in Ivor Arbiter’s Sound City store in Shaftesbury Avenue in February of 1973? Let me answer this in a logical series of steps.

  All of the evidence on the upgrades leads me to believe it was the work of a guitar tech. All the evidence about Mitch Mitchell selling off Strats and Teles up to four years after Jimi’s death leads me to believe his studio in Rye was the source of my guitar. The fact that NuNu Whiting was his drum tech in Rye in ’71 would suggest that he could well be the man who took it into Sound City. Tracking it back, we know from Trevor that he and Noel swapped the Tele
for a Jazzmaster in the fall of ’69 when Trevor was gigless and Noel still had rock-star trappings courtesy of the Fat Mattress advance. But we also know that Noel’s circumstances changed drastically in the opening days of 1970.

  For me, that’s the clincher. He had always been the fixer in the band, the one in touch with the roadies, and he would have known that they were always in the market to buy Jimi guitars, either to feed his abuse habit or to add to his studio palette. We also know that he suddenly needed money and that he was on the periphery of the Hendrix camp, jamming with Jimi and Mitch that spring at Olympic. So what would be more natural than to offer his buddies in the road crew a guitar that Jimi had already got results from back in ’67? There’s an old adage that states, One is chance, two is coincidence, and three is a pattern. Well I would suggest that a pattern can be discerned. We have means, motive, and opportunity, and in my considered opinion, we can finally say there is a better than fifty-fifty chance that both guitars are, as Eric always contended, one and the same.

  However, dear reader, this is where you come in. If anyone out there is sitting with a psychedelic Tele under his or her bed, then this is the time to come forward. Equally, if you bought one in the early seventies and refinished it, and then sold it on, it is more than likely that you yourself once owned the fabled beast. Or on the opposite end, if you put a set of left-handed Schallers on your old beat-up Telecaster and traded it in at Sound City in the winter of ’72, then we want to hear from you, because in the end, no one is keener than me and Eric to get to the truth of this matter. Failing that, commission must give way to its opposite force, namely, omission, which means that in the end, the case we’ve made will just have to stand.