Josh Homme is so cool he has to live in the desert. It’s, like, medical or something, regulates the body heat. But seriously, when we talk of rock stars having a certain presence, the Queens of the Stone Age frontman is the kind of person we mean – he’s the walking definition of cool.
He, is however, reassuringly human, and we have video evidence to prove it. Said footage shows us why no one – besides maybe four other people, two of whom are deceased – is cool enough to play George Harrison’s iconic 1968 Rosewood Telecaster and not break out into a sweat, to find that even the gift of speech has deserted them.
That is exactly what happened to Homme in this clip. Surrounded by Harrison’s guitars – the Rocky Stratocaster, the Duo Jet – the earth tones of the mise en scene a pleasing shade of vintage Tweed – Homme is handed the rosewood Tele by the late Alan Rogan, guitar tech of Pete Townshend and guitar whisperer for some of Johnny Marr’s most-famous six-strings, and he proceeds to melt.
Turning puce as he picks up the Tele, feeling not on the considerable weight of the instrument itself (a prototype that reportedly weighed in excess of 10lbs) but of musical history itself, Homme is lost for words.
It’s like he is speaking in tongues.
“Oh my God. Wow! Wow! I had no idea that… Wow!” But what can you say? You’ve been handed the thing. You are on camera. You can’t back out. Do as the late, great Frank Zappa said, shut up and play yer guitar.
Homme duly plays, gives it his best shot, against all odds he attempts to get his right hand into the aerobic zone, work the muscle memory of QOTSA’s groove, but that is no good. Sometimes you get so flustered that there’s nothing that will work.
We have all been there. Just remember the first time you tried out an electric guitar in a store, on a Saturday afternoon perhaps. Not the first time you had done so. But you have gotten just good enough as to be self-conscious and critical of your playing. Everything sounds choked. The strings – these precision engineered alloys of nickel and steel – turn to spaghetti.
Homme tries some licks. It is no use. This was the prototype electric that was there as the curtain began to fall on the greatest pop-cultural institution of all time.
Fender saw this as a promotional coup. They had presented the Beatles with some very nice kit: a Bass VI, Jazz Bass, plus their Bassman and Twin Reverb tube amps, a Rhodes Piano, and a PA system. The coup de grâce was to be the Tele, a prototype built by Fender's Roger Rossmeisl and Philip Kubicki. Hendrix was to receive a prototype rosewood Stratocaster but sadly died before he could receive it.
Harrison’s ’68 Telecaster travelled in style. As in the fashion of Joe Bonamassa’s Principal Skinner and friends, it had its own seat on the flight over to London.
The design was quietly radical for the Telecaster. It had a sandwich body design, two slabs of rosewood, a thin slice of maple in between. Gibson used a similar “crossbanding” construction technique for some Les Pauls during the Norlin era.
It is cheaper, and this, after all, was a guitar that would go into production a year later. Fender would ultimately chamber the body, taking some of the weight out. A wise decision. Chiropractors could plan some vacation time again.
Although he would give the guitar to Delaney Bramlett in December 1969, Harrison’s prototype saw plenty of action with the Beatles. Harrison used it on the Get Back and Abbey Road sessions.
You can hear it on Get Back, Don’t Let Me Down, I’ve Got a Feeling, and the single version of Let It Be. You can see it in action on the Beatles' last live performance on the roof of the Apple Corps headquarters in central London.
You can see it and hear it in the hands of Homme above. But you might never see him playing it again. Once was enough.
“I think I have to stop playing these things. Man, I… Seriously, I think I have to stop playing these things,” he says. “I’ll tell you, some things you are supposed to touch, and some things you are never supposed to touch.”
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