BRIAN FALLON‘ 59 TELECASTER
teresting object. Fender’ s Custom Shop in Corona, California has turned a guitar player’ s workhorse into a collectible, and Fallon himself had a hand in every decision. The result is something that manages to be historically informed, technically specific, and deeply personal all at once.
The name deserves some explanation. Fender didn’ t produce the humbucker-and-single-coil variant of the Telecaster Custom until 1972, yet this guitar wears‘ 59 in its name. The reference is to The Gaslight Anthem’ s breakthrough album, The‘ 59 Sound, and more specifically to the amp that generated it: a‘ 59 Bassman that Fallon spent two years building and correcting, chasing a tone in his head by playing through original examples in stores and then adjusting his own until it matched.
The guitar that got plugged into that amp was a black double-bound Telecaster, and that combination of instrument and amplifier is what people heard on that record. Fender is honoring the era, the album, and the partnership between musician and machine that produced something special.
Fallon came to the Telecaster the way many players do: through the people he was trying to become. Bruce Springsteen played one. Joe Strummer played one because he saw Springsteen play one in London in 1975 and wanted that. Fallon understood early that the Telecaster wasn’ t the guitar for technical display. It had only switches, volume, and tone, and that was all you got. What you couldn’ t do with those controls you’ d have to find somewhere else, which was its own kind of instruction.
He also saw Dave Pirner of Soul Asylum play a Telecaster Deluxe through Marshall 800s as a kid and registered that a humbucker in the neck of a Tele could open up something fuller, something that had country and folk and the Pogues’ punk inside it at once.
The idea of a humbucker in a Telecaster has its own history. Denny Dias of Steely Dan was among the earlier practitioners who demonstrated what the configuration could do in a studio context, softening the snap of the instrument’ s character into something more harmonically complex. By the time Fender introduced the Tele Custom in the early 1970s, it had become a recognized variation on the formula rather than a departure from it. Fallon was working within that tradition, though he kept refining it toward something specific to his own needs.
The original guitar this Custom Shop replica is based on had a Loller Imperial humbucker in the neck and a Loller single-coil in the bridge. Fallon especially liked the middle position, that blend of the two pickups, for quieter passages. When financial reality intervened and the guitar was sold, he carried the memory of that tone with him. Getting to work with Fender’ s Custom Shop meant he could address the things he’ d wanted to change anyway. The pickups on the new guitar are Righteous Sound“ Fourth Man” units: a humbucker-sized split single-coil at the neck and a single-coil at
100 | SUMMER 2026