The velvet icepick: favorite Telecaster moments.

I was watching this YouTube of Merle Haggard singing "Branded Man" when out of nowhere at 1:43 into the track, a burst of beautiful Telecaster licks appeared.  I had forgotten they were there, so it was a nice surprise.


It got me thinking about some of my favorite Tele moments - the recordings that made me love the Tele.  I've played a Tele for about twelve years now.  I think that I've become a 'Tele player' in the process - I tend to play things on it that the guitar seems to want to do.  I think that the Tele has a clear, human voice, and that is part of what makes it a less forgiving guitar than say a Strat or a Les Paul.  Danny Gatton, Albert Collins and Roy Buchanan are three guitarists who have been strongly associated with the Telecaster. All three were masters of the trademark Tele tone - searing, trebly attack and gain, usually bathed in spring reverb.  Danny Gatton especially mastered the various tricks that play on the architecture of the Tele - behind-the-nut bends and the like.


Mike Bloomfield was associated with the 1959 Les Paul guitar in his later work with Paul Butterfield and the Electric Flag, but on his New York sessions with Bob Dylan in 1965, it was a Telecaster all the way.  Al Kooper recounts the story of his first meeting with Bloomfield at the "Like A Rolling Stone" session in '65, where Bloomfield apparently comes in to the studio carrying a Tele without a case, and knocking it against the wall to get the snow off.  It's a great story, but since the "Like A Rolling Stone" sessions took place on June 15 and 16, 1965, I can't see how snowy it could have been.  But no matter.  The guitar breaks in "Tombstone Blues" are my favorite Bloomfield bits on Highway 61 Revisited.
Hear here.

Dylan's other lead player of the sixties, Robbie Robertson, is another guitarist who is not necessarily connected to the Tele in the public imagination because he didn't use one in The Last Waltz.  But in early sessions with Dylan and on the road in 1966, Leo Fender's primordial plank was the go-to.  Here's a YouTube of Robbie's Tele reverberating off the walls of some old English music hall in Eat The Document, D.A. Pennebaker's documentary of Dylan's '66 UK tour.

Some others are more obvious.  Albert Collins? Even David Letterman calls him the "Master of the Telecaster":



This live video of Ricky Skaggs performing "Don't Get Above Your Raisin'" was on high rotation on the country music video channel when I was an idle youth.  Ray Flacke's solo at 1:29 is astounding.


 But the true "Master of the Telecaster" in my heart will always be Roy Buchanan, a guitarist's guitarist who not only is inextricably associated with the Tele, but with one specific Tele, a butterscotch beauty from 1952: