You won’t hear Bill Frisell say a bad word about a well-made archtop. The archetypical jazz guitar has a special place in his heart. But there is a practicality about the Fender Telecaster that makes it his number one.
He tells Guitarist that it’s not only that it’s durable, it can be customised, with his number one electric guitar on new album, In My Dreams, unlike any Tele you’ll find in today’s Fender catalogue…
“My first guitar I ever got was in the summer of ’65 – a Fender Mustang – but soon after that I went into the pawn shop and saw a late-’50s Esquire that was $75. I thought, ‘Oh, that looks cool, I’ll get that.’ With the Telecaster, it’s like, they got it just right at the beginning, y’know?
“Everything about it is so simple. Everything you need is right there. I have a number of Teles now, and some of them have different pickups or whatever. But I just have an instinct for all of them. I know where the volume knob is, where the pickup switch is – I don’t have to reprogram my brain if I switch between them.
“Some of my guitars are just straight Telecasters, but the design is so easy to mess with. With my main instrument, it’s basically a Telecaster, but it comes from a bunch of different models, all put together by JW Black, who was one of the first guys that worked at the Fender Custom Shop. So he’s serious about Telecasters, knows them inside out and restores old ones.
“We have a sort of a dangerous relationship because he’ll always get some idea, like, ‘Oh my God, what if we put this pickup in this guitar…?’ So my main Telecaster is a shorter Gibson scale and the neck pickup is made by TK Smith – I guess he was inspired by those old Bigsby pickups.
“It’s painted by my friend Terry Turrell, and the bridge pickup is a Seymour Duncan, a Little ’59 or something. That Telecaster was the only guitar I used on my new album, In My Dreams.
“I have to say, I love playing archtops. Like, I have a Collings I-30 that I love. But it’s harder to travel with those. I don’t have a crew and roadies, or a truck with 50 guitars. When I travel, I carry one guitar and I end up checking it in under the plane.
“With a Telecaster, you can pretty much just throw it down there in the hold and it’ll survive somehow. And even if it doesn’t survive, you can just get a screwdriver and screw it back together.
“So there’s this practical thing about the Telecaster for travelling. I’d love to go out with a Gibson L-5 or something, but you just know it would be destroyed in a matter of minutes by the airlines!”
- In My Dreams is out now via Blue Note.
- This article first appeared in Guitarist. Subscribe and save.
