AS LEO FENDER’S GREATEST CREATION CELEBRATES ITS SEVENTH DECADE, WE GATHER A REMARKABLE GROUP OF ARTISTS AND EXPERTS TO ASSESS ITS 70-YEAR IMPACT ON THE LANDSCAPE OF GUITAR MUSIC – KICKING OFF WITH SHADOWS PIONEER HANK MARVIN. WE ALSO ASK FENDER’S MASTER BUILDERS WHAT SEPARATES A GOOD STRAT FROM A GREAT ONE AND REVIEW THE NEW ANNIVERSARY MODEL FENDER HAS BUILT TO MARK THE BIG OCCASION...
Imagine you are musician walking past a shop window in 1954. You stroll past, take a glance... and then stop dead in your tracks. Behind the glass is what seems to be a rocket ship, its sunburst finish glowing like polished amber. The guitars around it seem bulky and cumbersome by comparison – even that upstart solidbody, the Telecaster, you first clapped eyes on a few years before, now seems like a tractor parked beside a Cadillac…
In 1954 there was no guitar like the Strat. More remarkable still, in the seven decades since, no other new guitar has had such a transformative effect on the guitar scene. Today, a Strat looks as familiar as a tree or a drinking glass. But 70 years ago, it had no real precedent. The shock of that arrival must have been all the greater in post-war Britain. Rationing was still in effect the year the Strat launched and a ban on imported goods from America, which included electric guitars, would remain in place until June 1959. Little wonder, then, that guest editor Hank Marvin describes his first experience of a real Strat as being akin to an encounter with “a guitar from Mars”. To read the full account head to page 64.
In many ways, the Strat retained its power to astonish, to revolutionise. Just six years after Hank got his first Strat and made sweet, melodious musical history with it, Bob Dylan outraged a traditionalist crowd at the Newport Folk Festival by ‘going electric’ armed with a Strat, revolutionising popular music in A
