The life and times of the Fender Jeff Beck Tribute Esquire Relic

Stratoblogster has a good post about a Jeff Beck Tribute Esquire Relic, a purported exact replica of Jeff Beck's battered Esquire, which he used in the sixties with the Yardbirds. The price? $7999.99.

As a working musician, a price like that on an electric guitar, especially one that is so baldly utilitarian as the Esquire, is, to me, laughable. I'm sure that I part company here with many pros, who point to the six-figure prices of some violins. But I just can't get past the cold fact that an Esquire like this, under the painstaking relic-ing, is really just a plank.  A beautifully engineered, mass-produced plank. Am I missing something?

This is not to imply that I don't shamelessly slaver over the picture of the guitar that I've posted here. But that's just because I love Teles, and I love the look and feel of old, beaten-up guitars. I still remember, as a 14 year old, picking up a battered sixties Tele with a Bigsby at Burlington Music (later Lakeshore Music, later still co-opted by Long and McQuade). But they wanted $700, so I couldn't afford it!

Hitting the Google oracle, I see that this guitar listed for $15,000 when it was first offered in February 2006. Here's a blog post from August 2006, reporting the street price of the JB to be $10,000. By December, the street price had dropped to $8,000, according to this forum thread. It has hovered there ever since, as evidenced by the $7999.99 EBay price tag (at this price point, by the way, I find "99" prices tacky) and this listing on Elderly's website.

Fender's extremely expensive guitars, which tend to be relic'ed reproductions of classic Fender guitars used by celebrities, exist in a sort of netherworld to me; a netherworld populated by guitar-dabbling lawyers and doctors, some perhaps buying guitars as investments. Why did the Jeff Beck Tribute Esquire Relic fail as an investment? Were qualms about its accuracy damaging to its reputation?

The trade in reproduced famous guitars can be understood as a particularly fetishized aspect of guitar culture. It depends upon a strain of gear lust that values highly two factors: rarity, and the perceived aura of a celebrity's guitar. The Jeff Beck Tribute Esquire Relic certainly has rarity on its side - only 150 were made. But it's possible that Beck lessened the impact of the Fender model by also allowing Gibson to use his name on their Custom Shop repro of a famous Beck guitar, in this case his "Oxblood" Les Paul.

But what about the aura? The 'Masterbuilt' line of Fender guitars is built by named craftsmen, in this case the late John English. So there is a connotation of the old-world artisan here, rather than the monolithic Fender brand, which has been somewhat cheapened these days by the company's major Chinese, Mexican and Korean operations, along with their Southern California base. The 2007 death of John English might have been expected to affect the price, though perhaps English's role in the manufacture of the guitar is not significant to the actual customers who would purchase these guitars.

And of course, we must take into account the formidable aura of Beck himself. There has been an assessment in some recent sources that Beck is one of the most highly regarded rock guitarists still working. It's entirely probable that the value of both guitars will increase when Beck dies, though the admittedly less rare Danny Gatton and Stevie Ray Vaughan models have not had a renaissance as of yet.