American rock guitarist and singer Jimi Hendrix (1942-1970) performs live on stage playing a white ... [+]
In 1954, Leo Fender revolutionized the electric guitar and music forever with the creation of the Fender Stratocaster, a model that over the years has been played by the greatest or most influential guitarists in music history.
Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Ritchie Blackmore, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Bonnie Raitt, David Gilmour, Buddy Holly, Kurt Cobain, Dick Dale, The Edge, Buddy Guy, Mark Knopfler, Robbie Robertson, Richard Thompson, Eddie Van Halen. The list is endless. And that insane list of guitar gods doesn’t even include the artist most synonymous with the Strat – Jimi Hendrix.
If the Strat was good enough for the man many choose as the greatest guitarist of all time, that should say it all. With that incredible legacy behind them, Fender is celebrating seventy years of the Strat with a massive new campaign.
The company will release seven new models this year, including five limited edition anniversary models, like the incredible American Vintage II 1954, a masterpiece that manages to unite two different eras of music into one superb guitar, as well as have several other special events to celebrate the milestone anniversary.
One of those is a cover of Hendrix’s “Voodoo Child” that features several contemporary Fender artists – Tom Morello, Nile Rodgers, REI, Ari O’Neal, Tash Sultana and Jimmie Vaughan – paying homage to the iconic guitar song.
Voodoo Child (Slight Return): Forever Ahead of Its Time | The Year of the Strat | Fender - YouTube
As much as the anniversary campaign is a celebration of the guitar’s storied history, it is a bridge to the current music scene. I spoke at length with Fender CEO Andy Mooney, who understands the only way for Fender to continue to expand the legacy of the Strat is to introduce new generations to the power of the guitar.
Indeed, 70 years into the iconic guitar's history, new artists are still discovering the power and majesty of the Strat. Singer/songwriter Sage Bava, who is new to the Strat, was instantly impressed with the guitar. "Fresh out of the stunning case, this beautiful guitar effortlessly resonates in perfect tune. The warm and buttery tones, coupled with the classic 'bite' of a Strat, alongside its exceptionally welcoming playability, define it as the ultimate guitar. Its lightweight yet sturdy construction not only adds to its effortless feel but also makes it both familiar and truly special," Bava says, proving the guitar's timelessness.
Mooney understands that is the key to Fender’s evolution moving forward. I spoke with him, as well as Fender affiliated artists Vaughan and Rebecca Lovell, of Larkin Poe, about 70 years of the Strat’s past and where the guitar is going in the future.
Steve Baltin: You come from Disney, which is one of the largest corporations in the world. Every successful person I found has an internal drive. They're not competing with the world. They're competing with themselves to keep things fresh and interesting. How has Fender allowed you to do that?
Andy Mooney: I owned about 30 Fender guitars before I joined the company. So, this really, for me is a dream job. And for it to be presented to me essentially 15 minutes from my home in LA at the time in the Hollywood Hills because the company was basically starting up a digital organization on Sunset and Gower, the planets aligned at the right time. So, what I say to people is, I brought this big company experience from Nike and Disney combined with my passion and knowledge of the product and the brand. I like to think it's worked out for everyone. The company's grown and I've enjoyed every moment of it.
Baltin: What was your first Fender guitar? How old were you?
Mooney: My first Fender guitar was a Musicmaster. It was all I could afford, a used Musicmaster was all I could afford at the time. Then I gravitated to the guitar that everybody wanted, which was the Stratocaster. For me, it had to be a black and white Stratocaster, because my guitar hero growing up and still is, Ritchie Blackmore from Deep Purple. He was everything that I wanted to be, which is a virtuoso musician, classically trained, playing heavy metal and a gifted performer on stage in the way that [Jimi] Hendrix and other players were. It wasn't just about playing guitar and playing music, but you were actually performing on stage, almost, as an actor. I just loved what he represented.
Baltin: Let's exclude “Smoke On The Water” for a second because it's so obvious. What's your favorite Ritchie Blackmore guitar song?
Mooney: I think Deep Purple in Rock was one of the finest rock albums ever made. “Black Night” is not on that album, but I have tried for three decades to replicate that particular guitar solo because I think it was done in one take. There's a transition between John Lord's Hammond organ solo and Ritchie's guitar solo and I still haven't been able to master it. My father bought me my very first record player and gave me enough money to buy two singles. The two singles I bought were “Black Night,” which had a “Strange Kind of Woman” on the flip side and “Paranoid,” from Black Sabbath. That had “The Wizard” on the flip side. I still play all of those four songs sometimes today. I love that genre of music because that's what I grew up on.
Baltin: How did coming to Fender affect the lifelong passion you already had for guitars?
Mooney: It was absolutely heightened. On my first week on the job, I was introduced by the interim CEO at that time, Scott Gilbertson from TPG, to the organization that was in Scottsdale. During that opening address to the group, I talked about what I describe as my first real Fender, which was the black Stratocaster, and how I loaded the middle pickup to replicate what Ritchie had done. I made the presentation, and at the end of the presentation, this long-tenured employee at the company came up to me and said, "I looked at your resume before you joined here." And he said, "I really thought I was gonna hate you." And he goes, "But you might actually get it” [laughter]. He and I have a great relationship. He's still at the company. But his point was I understood the product, I understood the brand, I had a passion for it. And I was surprised to find that I was the first CEO of the company who actually played guitar.
Baltin: I read an interview where you talked about how you are very excited about the future of guitar. What gives you that feeling right now?
Mooney: I think the adoption of the Stratocaster for electric guitar players is at an all time high. There was the infamous Washington Post article about the death of the electric guitar, which the author had the headline in mind and ignored all of the data that was supplied to him because it was a sexy headline. But what I explained to him at the time was that, again, when I grew up, Hendrix, Jimmy Page, Tony lommi, those guys were heroes and people tried to emulate them, but they were almost impossible to emulate. They were all virtuosos. For me, the big change in guitar usage and adoption happened with punk. We're going back now into the '70s, and when punk came along, all you needed was the ability to play three chords and have some passion to get up on stage and you were in the game. I think guitar usage changed from being a virtuoso or singularly a virtuoso instrument into being a textured or backdrop for great songwriting. So, you look at guys like Edge, the way that he has used guitar is very different from the virtuoso players. It's more emblematic, I think, of contemporary musicians who want to pick up a guitar that's versatile and easy to play. Then you've got an effects board with either 20 analog pedals or some computer interface and you're using it as a creative tool for contemporary songwriting.
Baltin: Are you noticing a surge in younger musicians who want real instruments?
Mooney: I can answer that in a couple of ways. When I talk about the external drivers for industry growth, it comes down to two things, which is an increased consumption of recorded music through streaming. And I think Goldman Sachs' pre-COVID forecast that by the year 2030, a billion people would be subscribing to a streaming music service. That number was surpassed during COVID, but the bulk of people who are signing up for streaming music these days are listening predominantly to what the labels called back catalog music. So, the early adopters might have been listening to very contemporary music and still are. But again, I think increasingly even for them, they're now kind of going back in time and the new users were always there. Then you couple that with Live Nation here in L.A. From everything I hear what they're saying, this would be the best year they've ever had in their history. So, there's more desire to listen to live music, particularly festival music because it's experiential. The predominant instrument that's used in live music is electric guitar, and about 70-90 percent of the players using electric guitar you would see on a stage would be using one of the instruments that our company makes. So, if you have any aspiration to play guitar, there's plenty of stimuli coming from either listening to music or seeing artists on stage playing music.
Baltin: Who are the artists today that you feel really embody what the Stratocaster is in 2024?
Mooney: I think when you see the roster of artists that we're going to feature in our art campaign, Tom Morello is a contemporary guitar hero that is featured in our campaign and has very iconic examples of his Stratocaster like Saw Power, which is the one that he uses in the campaign. But I think what's interesting is kind of emblematic of the artist that you see in the campaign is again, some are Japanese, some are Australian, some are more traditional like Tyler Bryant out of Nashville, who's playing music more in the genre of Jimmy's late brother [Stevie Ray Vaughan]. I think the part of the Washington Post article that they got right is this notion of the guitar hero that dominates the landscape may have passed. But the breadth of usage of the instrument and the breadth of connection between genres and fans and artists is wider than has ever been in history. As I say, I think punk was the ignition point for that. But I don't see it as being any one artist today. I just see it being the cumulative effect of all the artists around the world who are using the instrument.
Baltin: I think one of the great things is making the guitar more egalitarian, more available for everybody.
Mooney: I couldn't agree more. Again, if you look at the roster of artists that's in the campaign, in addition to Tom Morello, Nile Rodgers, Buddy Guy and Tyler Brain, you've got Rebecca Lovell, you've got REI, from Japan, who's a very interesting artist. It's an amazing roster. Again, it’s emblematic, I think, of the versatility and widespread adoption of it. It's completely amazing how broad the adoption is.
Baltin: What do you look for in new artists you work with?
Mooney: When I joined the company, one of the first questions that I had is, “Who's buying the guitars?” The internal point of view was it was middle age to later age Caucasian males. But when we actually did the survey work, we found that was not true. Particularly for new players it was 50/50 female, male. And in terms of diversity, both by genre, gender, race, however we want to define diversity, the audience was much younger, much more diverse, much more genre diverse than anybody inside the company would have contemplated. So, we set out in 2015 to have our brand and our artist relations function represent the current generation of people who are playing guitar. Yes, the original guitar heroes, the Eric Clapton’s of the world, we still honor them. We still have relationships with them. But what we wanted to do was be contemporary and be reflective of the artists that are currently resonating with today's consumers. So, we put a lot of energy into connecting with contemporary artists. Today we have relationships with 4,000 artists around the world at various levels in every geography. We're very happy with where we are because, again, we're connected to and reflective of the current definition of who's playing guitars these days.
Baltin: It’s to Fender's benefit to make the guitar accessible to new artists. You have the Fender Next series. Talk about that series.
Mooney: That's a good point. We deliberately created Fender Next. The name of the concept pretty much communicates what it is we're trying to do. We were trying to connect with artists who were on the rise, bands or individuals, who were committed to guitar. One of the first graduates of Fender Next was Sam Fender, whose name just happened to be a coincidence. Then we also had Japanese Breakfast with a lead vocalist and guitar player (Michelle Zauner), who plays the Jazzmaster. In both cases, these acts have broken through where they're pretty close to or at the place where they're headlining festivals. Another good example is Bruno Mars, who we just released a signature guitar with. He sold out seven nights in the Tokyo Dome. Seven nights, it's totally amazing. He will be playing a Stratocaster on stage every one of those nights.
Baltin: How has the Stratocaster changed based on your relationships with artists?
Mooney: That's why we have the breadth and depth of the relationships that we have. I like to say to people, the Stratocaster hasn't really changed except for the neck, the fingerboard, the tuning keys, the pickups, the tremolo arm. Every single thing has changed. Sometimes I compare the evolution of the Stratocaster to the Porsche 911. Some people like the original bathtub 911 except Porsche doesn't make it anymore. So you have to buy it from somebody who reproduces it. But the contemporary Porsche 911 is a lean, mean driving machine. I look at the Stratocaster and for those folks who really think that the 1954 Stratocaster is the greatest example of the instrument, we can do that. But a lot of contemporary musicians these days, they're gravitating towards the Ultra, or the American Professional because the elements of those guitar really play to the styles of usage. Those features have been developed from direct feedback from contemporary musicians. “We want the neck shape to be like that. We want the headstock, we want locking tuners.” Whatever it might be. That's really the primary raison why the guitar is so widely used. It was originally designed for working musicians, and it still is. Every single element of it has evolved to represent the feedback that we're getting from musicians in the field.
Baltin: How long have you been playing Fender?
Jimmie Vaughan: I used to ride the bus Downtown in Oak Cliff, which is a suburb of Dallas, and look in the window. They would let me play them way before I got the Fender. I got a Telecaster first. I bought it for 175 bucks. It was a ‘50s blonde Telecaster and I bought it at Arnold And Martin’s for 175 bucks. I guess I was 12, 13.
Rebecca Lovell: I bought my first Fender guitar around 2009, 2010. My sister and I, at the time, we were doing a lot of touring with Elvis Costello, and he is the quintessential Jazzmaster player. So, of course, I had to go and get myself a Jazzmaster out of the gate. That was my first foray into the Fender family.
Baltin: It was Elvis who got you into it. Did you know much about Fender before that? Besides Elvis, was there anything else that really turned you on to that in particular?
Lovell: Interestingly, I think for my part, it was more the amp side that drew me into the Fender family. We inherited a Fender Vibrolux, early ‘60s, from a family friend. That was what my sister was playing her Rickenbacker lap steel through. I was always aware of course, knowing the shapes of a Strat and a Tele and a Jazzmaster, and thinking they were beautiful. But I didn't conceive at the time that it had any application to me. From that jumping off point of the amp side and the Jazzmaster, I realized the sheer physicality of being a smaller person. I'm 5'6, and trying to run around on stage with my Jazzmaster, because both my sister and I like to put on a very energetic stage show. I kept kicking the guitar, the Jazzmaster because the profile is so large, I would hit it with my knees trying to run around the stage. So it was honestly like, “Oh, I'm going to get another Fender, I'm going to get a Strat because it's smaller.” I went to Guitar Center and bought one. Then I was like, “Oh my goodness, this guitar makes so much sense, and it makes sense why it is the quintessential rock and roll guitar from where I sit."
Baltin: When you started playing it what was it that stood out to you?
Lovell: The pickup selectors, that it's such a natural flow. There's just a beautiful linear quality to the instrument. It is a very sexy shaped guitar, and I just think that there's a magnetic quality and a gravitas to the instrument, especially when I, after having bought one, started to delve into the history and seeing that Bonnie Raitt played a Strat, and Susan Tedeschi often plays a Strat. Once I started zoning in on it, I realized that a lot of my own guitar heroes were playing Stratocasters.
Vaughan: At first, it just looked so cool. They were space age and you didn’t know if it was a lamp or a machine gun, you didn’t know what it was. They were very streamlined and I still love the way they look.
Baltin: Talk about the relationship between Fender and their artists.
Lovell: Yeah. I do appreciate, even in viewing this piece of content that Fender has created, the effort for diversity and inclusionary choices that they seem to make as a company. It is very interesting when you go on Google and you search famous Stratocaster players, the majority of the names that pop up, it's all dudes. Trying to dig and find the female Strat players, of which there are many, it's harder to find. I think even by nature of the fact that there have been quite a few female signature models over the years, most recently with H.E.R., they've done an incredible signature model guitar. As a female player it feels good to see a company that is prioritizing creating a platform for different types of players, to where any individual player, regardless of ethnicity, gender or cultural lens, are able to see themselves playing a Fender guitar. To be asked to participate in this piece of content as well further cemented that for me. Also having a really collaborative relationship with Fender, because for many years, they would help me with artist cost on guitars, they would send me pedals, they have sent me cables, and when we've been on tour they've given us backline amps. All of this was happening before we were even close to making any sort of a ripple in the pond. So I think that their willingness to also invest in up and coming bands and create that real-time support for artists feels very real. It actually feels like a family. I have quite a few brand relationships, but there's something about the Fender spirit that rings very authentic and that in turn makes me want to play a Fender, and by extension a Gretsch. I play a lot of Gretschs on stage, and I love the fact that there's that family affiliation as well.
Baltin: One of the things I discussed with Andy too is Fender needs to create new musicians. Andy has said he sees the guitar at a high point. Being on the road do you see that?
Lovell: Absolutely, I would agree with that assessment. From where I sit, even just on social media, and I know it's tailored to my algorithmic preferences, I'm seeing a lot more guitars in the hands of people who look like me and the younger generation. When you're really trying to speak the language of music, I think being able to have your hands on the instrument itself, there is this special connection that you cannot argue with, this extra essence, to hearken back to the Bonnie Raitt’s and the Susan Tedeschi’s. These are players that have such an intrinsically unique tone when they touch the guitar, and so being able to reference Suzi Quatro and these really powerful musicians that got up on stage and can duke it out with the boys, that was definitely a really important thing for me to see. Some of the time, being able to see it really helps you believe it. You're like, “Oh, that is also available to me as a choice. I can choose to dedicate my time to picking up a guitar and learning the ins and outs, and learning the Jimi Hendrix solos and learning the Eric Clapton solos and doing the thing, and being able to represent that for my own generation, that archetypal rock god figure of my generation.” It is absolutely a privilege to be a little droplet in the wave of female rock energy that is just crashing on the industry right now. It was really cool to be at the Grammys and win in contemporary blues. It was a female majority in the contemporary blues category. That, in and of itself, is such an interesting and exciting moment in time, to be making blues music when women's perspective is finally being not just heard but celebrated and valued. That goes across the board of the Grammys. It was dominated by female artists, and it's a long time coming. It is an exciting time, to feel like the work that my sister and I are doing for guitar music is going to have a beneficial outcome for those players beneath us. To have young girls and boys come up and say, “Hey, my mom bought me a guitar because I'm obsessed with your records, and watch me, I can play your guitar riff.” There's nothing better that.
Baltin: Who were the first people that inspired you to play Fender?
Vaughan: There were a lot of guys like that. I was into The Yardbirds, Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton. I’m talking 13. They were just coming out and I had been watching and listening to music. My dad liked big band and my uncles played guitar on both sides of the family. So I was into it. On Saturday’s in Dallas, there were TV shows all day long and into the night on a local station that played hillbilly and country and western and even blues on TV, channel 11. So, it was all day.
Baltin: Is there one favorite for you?
Vaughan: I have my Hearts guitar right here and it’s a Jimmie Vaughan model from Fender. I’ve had the Tex-Mex guitars assembled in Mexico. I’ve had those first and I love them because they’re like hot rods, you can build them, swap out the necks. You can do all kinds of things, change the pickups. They’re like a car.
Baltin: What did it mean to you to see your name on a Fender after growing up with them?
Vaughan: It was so exciting. Do you remember the one-page folded Fender ads that you could get at the music stores? It was black and white. When I first started playing I would go down the street to a friend’s house and somebody’s big brother would have an electric guitar, a Fender. I would say, “Can I come over and play your brother’s guitar?”
Baltin: Why does the Strat remain so relevant and important?
Vaughan: I don’t really know about all that. I just go to the gig, pick up my guitar, it’s part of me. I love the way it looks, it’s cool, I feel comfortable. I use Fender amps, I use two Bassman’s, and I use Flatwound Strings. When Fender’s first came out, they had Flatwound’s on them, the Telecaster’s. So I put them on and they’re fabulous. If you haven’t tried them you should try them and get some light-gage Flatwounds.
Baltin: Why is it comfortable to you?
Vaughan: You can get every sound out of it. You get the bass pickup and all the crazy stuff in the middle. And then the treble pickup, which is like a Telecaster. I was always in love with the bridge pickup because it sounds like a Telecaster. You can control the tone so you can have it as bright as you want. I don’t know. What’s not to like about it? And you can fight with it too. You can take it off, slug somebody with it, put it back on and it’ll probably still be in tune. I’ve seen it a couple of times. You can’t do that with the other ones.