Rare Guitars: Rory Gallagher’s 1966 Fender Telecaster
New Kings Road Vintage Guitar Emporium is a very distracting place for any guitarist to hang out. It’s hard to move without quite literally tripping over one of the gorgeous old guitars racked four or five deep on the shop floor, while the walls are littered with photos of megastars from Noel Gallagher to Jimmy Page and beyond, who’ve bought or sold instruments through its storied proprietor, Rick Zsigmond.
It’s safe to say that it takes a lot to impress a man such as Rick, who has seen it all over the years, but he’s definitely excited about what Rory Gallagher’s nephew, Daniel, has brought with him today – a selection of gigbags, hard cases and flightcases containing some of the treasures from Rory’s huge collection.
“Forget the Strat, this is my favourite Rory guitar!” he exclaims, as a white 1966 Telecaster comes out of an unassuming case. From a man who’s been up close and personal with Clapton’s Blackie, Gary Moore’s Burst and Gilmour’s #0001 Strat, that’s some endorsement.
The 1966 Telecaster was temporarily refinished in Irish green after being run over by an airport luggage cartRory’s most iconic guitar might be his battered ’61 Strat, but Daniel thinks that his heart actually belonged to Leo’s firstborn creation.
“They were probably his favourite guitar,” he insists. “Obviously, his Strat was his favourite guitar, but as a model, I think he really, really liked the Tele. He tinkered with them a lot to make them do other things… but he loved them.
Rory playing his 1966 Telecaster on Gambling Blues at the Isle Of Wight Festival in August 1970. Image: John Minihan“He really liked where the tone control was, because he did a lot of wah-wah effects with it. On his Strat, he ended up just doing that with the bottom tone control, and he actually glued the middle one so it didn’t work! Ultimately, he just loved that Telecaster sound – when you hear him talk about guitars in interviews, I think they were his favourites.”
Rory got this white Telecaster in the mid 60s and continued to use it throughout his career with Taste and as a solo artist. Perhaps most famously and impactfully, he used the Tele on stage at the 1970 Isle Of Wight Festival – a performance that was immortalised on a live album that would become the trio’s swansong.
“My favourite bit of footage of him is when he’s playing Gambling Blues at the Isle Of Wight,” Daniel enthuses. “Early on, he liked a sharp attack with his slide playing, so he used a brass slide with it, so it was really stinging and direct with the AC30 – when you’re trying to get through to 600,000 people it helps if you have a bit of bite.
Loving the verdigris: like most Fenders of its vintage, the Tele’s golden decal has oxidised to a greenish colour“He loved that guitar for slide, for so much of his slide work, he’d use the Tele. If you watch Irish Tour, he swaps back and forth between the Esquire and the Tele. I think he’d have, say, one in D, and that one in A, then as he needed, he’d just jump on it.”
As is a common theme with Rory’s guitars, the Tele has seen its fair share of modifications over the years. “If we took the scratchplate off that, there’d be the routing for a middle pickup,” Daniel explains. “He went mad at one point and I think he got a Seymour Duncan pickup and put it in there! I guess he just wanted to see if it sounded like a Strat? But he didn’t add a five-way switch, so he’d have had to wedge it in-between, like they did with old Strats.”
Rory Gallagher 1966 Telecaster
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Rory’s first modification to the 1966 Tele was to replace the brass saddles for steel ones
Despite its rough life, it’s amazing that this still remains a wonderful, inspiring instrument, with a beautifully played-in neck and a weight right in the Telecaster sweet spot zone at 3.3kg/7.3lb. Okay, so it probably needs a new set of strings – given that they’re corroded to the point of near-disintegration – but with good cause, as the last person to change the strings was Rory himself.
“It’s a bit of a moral quandary,” Daniel admits. “It does feel like we should leave it as Rory left it. The strings will eventually rust and break of course, but most of these guitars still have the original strings that he put on them.”
Also check out Rory’s famed ’61 Fender Stratocaster here.
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