Electric Guitar: The Telecaster’s Influential Design
It is a hunk of Louisiana swamp ash cut with a band saw. Its neck is a single piece of maple with no fretboard; grooves for the frets are cut directly into the neck. Four bolts and a plate hold the neck to the body. It is manufactured on an assembly line. The simple, affordable Fender Telecaster is the Model T of guitars. Its lean, no-frills design in the hands of a competent player creates magic.
It has spent countless nights in smoke-filled honky-tonks, raucous roadhouses, Mississippi Delta blues clubs, and elegant uptown concert halls. It can quack like a duck, squawk like a chicken, and cry like a broken-hearted lover. It is a rock, nearly indestructible, ready for the road.
Al Kooper, founder of Blood, Sweat & Tears, tells this story about legendary blues guitarist Mike Bloomfield who backed Bob Dylan in his first electric band in If You Love These Blues by Jan Mark Wolkin and Bill Keenom:
“It’s pretty funny, it was the dead of winter in New York, and he came into the studio with his Telecaster, without a case. He had it on his shoulder like some guy in a platoon or Johnny Appleseed or something. It was all wet, because it was snowing out. He just wiped it off with a towel, plugged it in, let’s go, you know, that kind of thing.”
The Telecaster evolved from the lap steel. Leo Fender, an inveterate electronics tinkerer, opened Fender’s Radio Service in 1938. Guitarists came to him to help them amplify their guitars. An amplified guitar could be used to play fills usually played by an entire horn section. Fender built himself a wooden platform to test the pickups he designed for guitarists. That platform was the earliest prototype of what would become the most successful production guitar in history.
In 1950, Fender produced a run of 50 guitars called the Esquire. The Esquire was simple — one pickup on a body of solid wood with a volume control and a tone control. The bolt-on maple neck tended to warp from the string tension. Leo went back to the drawing board, added a steel truss rod to strengthen the neck, another pickup with a selector switch, and called his creation the Broadcaster. Legal threats from a drum manufacturer that claimed the trademark Broadcaster persuaded Fender to change the name of the product to Telecaster.
It was an immediate hit with country guitarists. Fender gave one to Jimmy Bryant, known as the fastest guitarist in the country, and sales have been solid ever since. The Telecaster has a shiny, clean tone that has defined country music. The sound is unmistakable. From Luther Perkins’ simple solo in Johnny Cash’s Folsom Prison Blues to James Burton’s flashy steel-like licks on Merle Haggard’s the Fugitive, the unique Telecaster sound shines through.
The Telecaster’s strings run through the body over a simple bridge, adjustable with a screwdriver that houses what is called the bridge pickup. This design accounts for the sustain for which the Tele is famous. When a string is struck, its vibration can be felt through the entire instrument. It is a cunning instrument to hold. The strings are close to the neck, allowing players to bend strings between notes to achieve a steel guitar effect for country players, and much-beloved double-stop bends for blues players. Its neck pickup, often referred to as the lipstick pickup because of its resemblance to a lipstick tube, allows for a mellower, jazzy tone to be added to the mix.
This guitar begs to be customized. Its neck is removable for repair and modification. Its electronics are easily accessible by removing the pick guard with a screwdriver. Players have added humbucking pickups for added bass depth giving the guitar a deeper, richer sound. Junior Brown has added a lap steel neck to the guitar inventing an instrument he calls the gitsteel. Danny Gatton, perhaps the best Telecaster player of them all, modified the guitar in his garage workshop to achieve effects that transcended precious limitations to the instrument. Waylon Jennings, an under-rated guitarist, had his Telecaster adorned with custom leather work. An entire cottage industry has sprung up with replacement pickups, decorative pick guards and bridges, necks cut with different radii to suit the hands of players, and replacement tuning pegs.
The body of the Telecaster is cut away to allow players to access the high notes on its 21 (now 22) fret neck. Without the cutaway, the icy solos of Albert King, the “Master of the Telecaster,” would not have been possible. The transition from the acoustic, finger-picked blues of Tommy Johnson and Big Bill Broonzy to the electrified Chicago blues of Muddy Waters would have been severely limited, merely an amplified version of what had already been without the help of the Telecaster.
When country and blues had a baby they called rock and roll, the Fender Telecaster acted as midwife. Its influential design has affected every production electric guitar since. It is the guitar of choice for today’s punk guitarists because of its simplicity. It has been in the hands of Jeff Beck, George Harrison, Steve Cropper, the Stax soul session man, Thom Yorke of Radiohead, Sly Stone, Keith Richards – the architects of modern music.
Austrian architect Adolf Loos in his 1908 Ornament und Verbrechen, tells us, “The evolution of culture marches with the elimination of ornament from useful objects.” Leo Fender, by stripping the guitar down to its bare essentials and giving it electric life, helped to shape the course of modern music.
He could not play a note.
>Written by d/visible contributor Ken Caudll.
