Robbie Robertson’s favourite guitar: “That’s the one”
If you close your eyes and picture Robbie Robertson, you probably see him on stage during The Band’s legendary Last Waltz farewell concert, a 1954 Fender Stratocaster around his shoulder.
That specific axe became the stuff of legend, but according to the man himself, even that customised Strat, which was literally dipped in bronze like some sort of Medieval weapon, wasn’t quite as unique as the instrument he admired the most.
During an interview with the Los Angeles Times in 2019, Robertson was asked to listen to a random assortment of tracks from his own career, as well as some by artists who’d inspired him in his youth. One of the selected songs, Chuck Berry’s classic ‘Brown-Eyed Handsome Man’ from 1956, drew an immediate smile from him, as he remembered how the single had “stopped me in my tracks” when he had first heard it.
“There is a particular guitar sound on these early Chuck Berry records,” Robertson said, “and I thought, ‘What is that? How do you do that?’” The mystery would carry on for a while, as his early forays into playing rock music saw him playing Strats and Telecasters alike, but never unlocking a sound quite in line with the one he’d heard coming out of Berry’s guitar; the one he’d famously nick-named “Maybellene”.
Of course, Maybellene wasn’t a Fender model but a semi-acoustic Gibson ES-350T that was introduced in 1955, featuring twin humbucker pickups and a distinctive Florentine cutaway, and while Robertson did eventually encounter a few of the same over the years, he never could claim to own one worthy of Berry until 2018, when his son Sebastian reached out to representatives at Gibson about building a custom model fit to Maybellene’s specs.
“It’s on the wall right there,” Robertson told the LA Times, motioning to a blond 350 hanging in a place of honour in his home, “That’s the exact guitar that we’re hearing [on ‘Brown Eyed Handsome Man’]. No other guitar has that sound, and I got it. My son presented it to me on Father’s Day. I don’t know what it is about that instrument, but that’s the one.”
Berry’s model, made in Kalamazoo, Michigan, was finished in natural blond maple and paired perfectly with his aggressive playing style: those crisp double-stops, sharp chord stabs, and ringing intros that would come to define early rock guitar. While many early rockers were leaning toward solid-body Fenders for their bite and sustain, Berry’s instrument delivered a sound that was equal parts swing and snarl, a holdover from the jump-blues bands of the 1940s, electrified and streamlined for a new teenage audience.
Gibson only produced the ES-350T for a few short years before Berry switched to other models like the ES-355, but that early instrument remained the one most closely tied to his legacy. By no coincidence, the same golden tone that stopped a young Robbie Robertson in his tracks had also lit the fuse for Keith Richards, John Lennon, and countless others who tried and mostly failed to replicate its mix of warmth and bite. So when Robertson finally hung that custom-built Maybellene replica on his wall, he wasn’t just honouring a guitar, he was paying tribute to the sound that arguably had made the rest of his career possible.
