Guitar Info

Listening to Susan Tedeschi's 2005 album "Just Won't Burn" yesterday, and glancing at the cover, I noticed that her Telecaster has been signed by someone. I can make out the "To Susan..." part but can't read the rest. It looks like the first part of the name is in quotes. (Click here for a enlargement).

Does anyone know whose signature this is? It could be someone I've never heard of, I appreciate that, but I'm just curious.

And just to confuse the issue further, I found other photos of Susan's Tele - including this one - where the same guitar is absolutely covered in signatures. So, firstly, whose signatures are they, and secondly, is this photo more recent than that on the cover of "Just Won't Burn" or vice versa? Were the (other) signatures removed before the Winnie the Pooh stickers went on or were they a more recent addition?

Anyone?

UPDATE: Alli thinks that the main signature may be "Gatemouth" Brown. (See the comments).

From the seller of yesterday's BSA engine casing guitar also comes this guitar based on the delapidated 3-wheeler van used by Rodney and Del Boy Trotter in top-rated BBC sitcom "Only Fools and Horses".

Strangely, it's been signed by diverse artists such as The Arctic Monkeys, Rik Savage of Def Leppard, Yngwie Malmsteen, Michael Angelo, Paul Carrack, and many others. I wouldn't have thought some of those would even have known what the guitar was supposed to represent. Unless Yngwie is a secret Only Fools and Horses fan. Who knows?

Personally, I'd have preferred to have seen it signed by David Jason and Nicholas Lyndhurst.

This 3-string slide guitar features an aluminium neck and a body made from the engine casing from a BSA Bantam motorcycle. According to the seller, it's the "little brother" to a similar 6-string guitar built for Seasick Steve. I'll look out for Steve playing that one when I go see him play the Royal Albert Hall in October.

I'm going away on holiday, 2-15 August. (Bermuda was work, although we did have some free time). I might be able to access the internet but cannot guarantee I'll be able to make any blog posts in that time.

Do any regular readers fancy being a Guest Guitarz Blogger for a couple of weeks? Knowledge of the workings of Blogger would be of benefit.

Email me at gl.wilson@ntlworld.com.

"Hand Carved Deluxe Work of Art" it says on the listing. However, it's yet another yawn-inducing clichéd design featuring scary skulls. Spooky, eh?

I haven't seen skull-shaped tuners before though. They gave me a laugh.

Hurrah! You know how I love these bizarre vintage Italian guitars.

Currently up for grabs on eBay is this wonderfully cartoony-looking Wandre-Framez Piper Guitar. I can't imagine that it would be a great player, but in purely aesthetic terms as an artistic object I think it's a fantastic piece.

You see it time and again on eBay. Someone builds a "Bitsocaster" guitar - a Strat or a Tele type guitar assembled from spare parts, and they apply a Fender decal to the headstock. In the listing they may say that "This is not a Fender", but in that case WHY put the decal on there in the first place? I do not understand this peculiar way of thinking.

If I play a Strat or a Strat-a-like that is not a Fender then I DO NOT WANT it to say Fender on the headstock. It would be a lie, pure and simple. (Actually, I have five Strats/S-type guitars. Two are Japanese Fenders - a blue flower Strat and a candy apple red 12-string, one is a Japanese Sanox Sound Creator and has that logo on the head, another is my DiMarzio/Charvel which has no logos at all, and the final one is my Feline Holy Panther which sports the Feline logo on the headstock although seeing as the body is from a genuine 1970s American Fender technically it's more Fender than much of the crap bearing that name that you see on eBay.)

How would a copy guitar benefit from having the Fender logo on it? The only answer I can think of is so that the player can pretend that they have the real McCoy, which is a bit sad really.

The same goes for Squiers. If you play a Squier, be proud of it and don't replace the logo with a Fender one. There's nothing wrong with playing Squier guitars, most of which are excellent guitars in their own right. I don't see the point in pretending they are anything else.

What is worse is that there are guitars which aren't even copies that people are slapping the Fender logos on. You see Fender decals appearing on all sorts of weird un-Fender headstocks.

Take a look at this example as pictured above. The diminuitive body is almost certainly from a 1980s Encore starter guitar and is made from MDF. The neck may or may not also be Encore. OK, so the guy has done a nice spray job on it with that blue finish, but it is so definitely not a Stratocaster or even an approximation of one, so WHY put the Fender Stratocaster logo on it? Look at the shape of that headstock! Who does he think he's fooling? Or does he genuinely think it looks like a Stratocaster?