Grail Quest

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I was just watching an interview with one of my favourite guitarists, Robben Ford, on YouTube this evening. He was extolling the virtues of a 1960 Fender Telecaster that he bought some number of years ago, and which has been one of his go-to stable of guitars over the years: a blonde, rosewood-boarded, white-pickguarded beauty, now much road worn and very much played-in example of Leo Fender's genius. Pictured is my bastard-caster, which is now nearly fifteen years old, and which has undergone much modification and mutation in its short life. It started out as a Fender Modern Player, with a middle pickup, Strat-style, and a humbucker in the bridge position. It's a tad different now:

Ever since I started to listen to music, I'd always wanted a Telecaster, and almost bagged one back in the early seventies, that was at the sweet spot of the marque: a sixties' model identical to Robben Ford's beauty of a guitar, which I couldn't finance at the time, despite what now seems an unbelievably low price of £161.00 sterling, a full twenty quid under retail. But there you go, and that particular joy of a guitar - and it was a player - would now coincidentally be worth seven or eight times the value of my car. But that's not the point: if I'd managed to bag that one, it would have been a keeper, as it was baby bear's porridge; I've never played anything better in my life. My Tele has been modified to within an inch of its life, and plays damn' well; but it ain't the Grail that slipped through my fingers all those years ago...

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