![]() The truth of whether the guitar was originally a Telecaster or Esquire has been forever buried by the sands of time but Clarence is so heavily-modified that it’s of little importance now. I think it’s getting pretty close to needing some new frets.” Although I think I may have had to replace one. “Clarence had another neck made for it at Fender, in the late 60s or early 70s. “I think the body is a ’54,” says Stuart. The Tele has been used heavily by Marty since he bought it in the 80s “So, that’s how much she charged me and she hand wrote out a receipt… and from the beginning I felt a responsibility towards that guitar.”Īs it turned out, “Doing the right thing” has seen the Telecaster in constant service since – in the studio and on the road. I know you’ll take care of it, and do the right thing with it’. “She said, ‘I want $1,450.’” White recalls “I said, ‘Susie, the E string on Clarence’s guitar is worth more than that.’ ‘I know what it’s worth,’ she replied. “Susie said, ‘That’s the guitar you really want, isn’t it?’ And I said, ‘Are you kidding!?’ I laid my chequebook on the table and said ‘Within reason, fill in any number you want to… and if I don’t have the money, my mom works at a bank!’” The body is twice as thick as a regular Tele thanks to the prototype B-BenderĪfter some deliberation, White came back with a price for him. The guitar’s standout feature is the prototype ‘pull string’, or B-Bender, which was the first of its kind on any guitar I’d dreamed about just touching it for so long. You could put a thousand Telecasters in a row, I could close my eyes and tell you which one was ‘Clarence’. I didn’t have a clue what to feel other than it was like holding the ‘Grail’ of Telecaster guitars. There it is!’ I started playing it and just poking around. “I said, ‘Is the pull-string here?’ She said, ‘That’s what you really want to see…’ and I said ‘Yep!’ She opened the case and there was like a string missing off it and I said ‘Oh man, look at that. While Stuart was interested in the ’54 Strat and the Byrds stuff, he had another Clarence White artefact on his mind… I said, ‘Sure, I’m happy to buy it’.” ‘Clarence’ is one of the most iconic – and heavily modded – Telecasters ever “I drove up to her home in Kentucky and she wanted to sell a 1954 Stratocaster that they had used as a parts guitar for Clarence’s pull-string, and she wanted to sell some Nudie suits and some Byrds paraphernalia that had belonged to Clarence. “So somewhere along the way, in the early part of the 1980s, Susie called me one night and said ‘I need to sell a few things.
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