Why A Telecaster?
I bought my first electric guitar from Sears & Roebuck. It was the “better” model of their good, better, best. I couldn’t afford the best. It was ebony, a think hollow body with F-holes and a Bigsby whammy bar. Someone told me later it was a model built by Epihone, back when Sears was Wal-Mart. It was okay, but it wasn’t sexy. I saved up my money, went to Durdel’s in Toledo, and bought a Fender Jaguar. I didn’t realize it was uncool. “Serious” guys got a Jazzmaster with a full-sized neck; budget-minded hotshots got the Stratocaster.
I went to college and met a guy they called “Ace.” He had a white Telecaster. Ugly thing. All square. Only two pickups and one of them was crooked. No whammy bar like the Strat. No sleek sculpted body and rosewood fingerboard. It has funky knurled knobs and a cheap rocker switch for the pickups. A maple neck that looked really cheesy. This was the “entry level” guitar for people who wanted a Fender.
It hadn’t advanced much since it was the prototype for the first solid body electric guitar. Still, people bought them. I went on to play classic guitar after I my enlistment with the US Army ended in 1967 and, after a while (about 20 years), quit doing that too. In the years since, the Tele became an object of fascination. Like Springsteen’s work shirt, a working class icon. I dreamed someday I would buy a Telecaster, but never really thought I would.
Last year, amid a personal and private perfect storm, the opportunity came. Not only a Tele, but a classic Tele bought from Durdel’s in Toledo, OH. A lightweight ash body that is the envy of the guitar geeks here in Carrboro, NC at the Music Loft. I play for shit, but I like it. I put on headphones and play scales and Hanon exercises in 5 scale positions. That only started half a year after I bought the Tele (Sister Ruth actually paid for it, but the time was right and I thank her). It’s the Fender for ordinary people with dreams, a blue shirt and a star compass. My dreams are simple now. I want to play scales and exercises that sonically evoke a vision of bubbles rising through the water from a Scuba mask.
It’s probably more complex than that, but I know it when I hear it. Some notes evoke images of a train wreck in Osaka and I try to minimize the number of those that happen. Some I don’t listen to and that’s the worst. But a few, but a few, pot a feu, develop something resembling a bubble shape and seem like they want to float to the surface of something. Others are definitely underwater, nive dark blue water, but go nowhere - just hanging there like the pancetta.
The strings are way too high and hurt my fingers a little bit, but that doesn’t bother me. They are probably too thick: D’Addario Chromes ECG24 High Finish Ribbon Wound Jazz Lights - .011 on the high E and who the fuck uses flatwounds? Not Eddie Van Halen, they’re too heavy to bend. They push back too hard. But, every so often, some note makes a decided bubble and goes up in the water just a little bit, and I am a patient man. I can wait. The Tele can do it.
9:52:33 PM 
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