GORDON KENNEDY on the body with black and gold starbursts all over it, and it said“ The Fugitive” on it. Cigarette burn on the headstock, one of the tuning pegs replaced with an ivory-colored one instead of silver … It looked like it had been to Hades and back. I thought when I went to look at it that it would say Telecaster on the headstock, like mine, but it said Esquire. That was the first time I learned what else was out there.
It’ s like Jerry Seinfeld’ s joke about the remote. A woman picks up the remote and wants to know what’ s on TV. A man picks up the remote and wants to know what else is on TV. Click, click, click. As guitar players, at some point we all go through that. What else is there? Pedals, guitars, amps. I was reading Guitar Player in high school, and all of a sudden there were DiMarzio Super Distortion pickups, and I thought, oh, that’ s how Al Di Meola was getting that sound. I didn’ t know what a Marshall would do yet because I’ d never played through one. But the question was always: is there something else out there that might inspire me?
So, I went through my phases with that Telecaster. First, I refinished it red, put a gold pickguard on it, stuck a Tom Holmes humbucker in the neck. I’ d met Tom when I was a student at Belmont. Then when I joined White Heart, Dann Huff asked me to sub for him for three shows while he went to L. A. to play some sessions. Of course he stayed out there five years, and they asked me to stay on, so I was in the band for six years. During that time, I pulled the neck off the Telecaster and had Joe Glaser build me a Stratocaster body. Everybody was doing the Eddie Van Halen thing— single humbucker, Floyd Rose. Joe made me this black Strat body with an experimental finish that changed colors with heat. Black at rest, it would turn green when it got warm and blue if it got really hot. That’ s the guitar you hear on songs like Invitation, Power Tools, and Bye Bye Babylon from the Freedom album: that Joe Glaser body, Floyd Rose, a Seymour Duncan pickup with blue and yellow side by side, and my Telecaster neck.
When I finished with White Heart I put the neck back on the Telecaster. Then Jimmy Lee Sloas and I started working together on what became the Dogs of Peace project. The first time I ever saw Jimmy Lee, he was on stage with the Imperials, and then we ran into each other at Quad Recording in Nashville and ended up sitting in his Pathfinder talking for hours. I had seen him do this unbelievable bass solo on stage and asked who his main influence was. I could not have been more shocked when he said Buck Owens. I thought he was pulling my leg. But he genuinely loved Buck Owens, loved the Statler Brothers, whom my dad had produced. We just hit it off.
At some point we decided we wanted matching finishes, gold metalflake on his bass and my Telecaster, and had that done by the renowned guitar tech David Graef. So, it’ s had that look ever since.
I just recently had the original pickups put back in. I picked the guitar up recently and thought, man, this thing is really thick. Where did the jangle go? Had to go back through a box of pickups to find what was in there originally. So now it’ s close to the way it was when I first got it, except for the gold metalflake, which is very cool looking. And
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