Andy Summers is a Strat fanatic, yet his chart-smashing career with The Police was also partly defined by a heavily modded and rule-breaking Tele – but he was hesitant to adopt the guitar at first.
He calls the Tele and his red 1962 Fender Stratocaster, for which he is most widely known, “major historical items” today. The Tele was bought in California in 1972, the year before he relocated to London, and the peculiarly modded electric guitar is steeped in mystery.
Many disagree on its probable year of birth, although it's unanimously believed to have been a special-order guitar. And while Summers is left scratching his head as to why the original modder still hasn’t come forward, given its providence, he’s ultimately glad he ditched his initial reservations about it.
“When I got it, I’d said, ‘I don't know if I want to…’” he tells Kylie Olsson’s Life in Six Strings, saying that he initially thought Teles to be a “country instrument”. “But then I took it home, and I played it for hours.
“It's a hybrid,” he develops. “It came through an era when everybody was messing about with their guitars, and this guy put a humbucker in the front, which is totally against the Telecaster thing.
“This little switch goes into overdrive; it’s like putting on a fuzz pedal. And you can combine the two pickups, which normally, you wouldn't be able to do on a Telecaster.”
“He wanted $200 for it. I didn’t have the money, but I said, ‘I want it,’” Summers recalls. “I can't even remember how I got the money, but for years I would just travel around, throw it in the back of a van, never even really thinking about it, but now it's an iconic instrument. It’s worth millions.”
The guitar was used throughout his time with the band, which saw him frequent the charts with startling regularity. But at the height of The Police’s powers, Summers felt he needed an artistic challenge, so he turned to King Crimson’s Robert Fripp for a remarkably oddball collaboration, despite admitting he doesn’t like King Crimson’s work.
In related news, the legal wranglings between Summers, Police drummer Stewart Copeland and their former bandmate, Sting, continue, with Sting reportedly paying out $800,000 to the pair in light of legal action taken against him. In response, they've said the sum is a “historic underpayment” for their contributions to the Police's hits. Sting’s lawyers, meanwhile, suggest they were actually overpaid.
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