Adrian Belew: The Battered Strat

Shortly after I joined Frank Zappa in 1977, we did a two-month tour of the United States. Unfortunately, the Stratocaster I had been playing didn’t make the return trip home. Whether it got lost in the world of air travel or someone actually stole it, I’ll never know. But I had two weeks to find a new guitar before we headed off to Europe for another two months. I lived in Nashville at the time, and I went into a music store there where I found a very ugly brown sunburst Stratocaster. It had no case, but that didn’t matter; I’d have to get a proper road case for it, anyway. So for $285, I bought that Strat, which was a good deal. But the guitar was really ugly. I flew back to California to begin our rehearsals for the European tour. While I was there, I hooked up with Seymour Duncan, an old friend of mine. He came by, and I showed him the guitar. As he was playing it, I said, “What am I going to do with this guitar? It’s so ugly.”He got up from his seat, and holding the guitar said, “I’ll show you.” I followed him outside, where he set the guitar up against a tree. At that moment, a neighbor lady was unloading her groceries from her car and looking at these two long-haired guys, wondering what the heck we were doing. Then Seymour went to his car and came back with lighter fluid, which he started squirting on the guitar. Before I could say a word, he lit it. In an instant, that Strat looked like the opening scene of Bonanza, with the flames burning away the title image. Then the celluloid pickguard caught fire, and the thing became a real inferno. We couldn’t get the bloody thing out, so we started pouring water and sand on it. By this time the woman next door was ready to call the police on these two loons, burning a guitar on the front yard. And then it just lay there, burnt, looking a bit like Hendrix had just had his way with it. We then proceeded, under his direction, to make that guitar look ancient. We dragged it in dirt and rubbed it grass, we gouged it with screwdrivers, and we poured motor oil on it. We put twenty-five years of abuse into that guitar in one afternoon. When we were done with it, it looked like a guitar that had been played forever. The next day I took it to rehearsals, and Frank looked at it and he said, “If you wanted to make your guitar ugly, why didn’t you just loan it to a friend?” That guitar has since become the Stratocaster that a lot of people associate with me. It shows up in a lot of the early ’80s photos of King Crimson and is also featured on the cover of my first solo record, Lone Rhino. Today it hangs proudly in the number one position on my wall of guitars. It’s pretty special to me now. It’s retired in the sense that I don’t take it on tour anymore—I wouldn’t want anything bad to happen to it!
Visit Adrian Belew at www.adrianbelew.net