The story of Bruce Springsteen’s Fender: “The best deal of my life”
Heartland rocker Bruce Springsteen has always had a soft spot for Telecasters. After watching the likes of Jeff Beck and Pete Townsend play on the iconic electric guitar, he knew its sound would gel with the increasingly varied sonics of the E Street Band. In a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame interview, he recalled gravitating toward a guitar that could handle the funk and “feeling” of soul.
In 1973, on the heels of the release of Greetings From Asbury Park, he walked into Petillo Guitars in New Jersey and walked out with a guitar he would cherish for years. In the musician’s autobiography Born to Run, he paid homage to one of his wisest purchases. “I strapped on my new guitar, a 1950s mutt with a Telecaster body and an Esquire neck, I’d purchased at Phil Petillo’s guitar shop for one hundred and eighty-five dollars,” he wrote.
“With its wood body worn in like the piece of the cross that it was, it became the guitar that I’d play for the next 40 years. It was the best deal of my life.” He subverted rock tradition by staying faithful to the Fender for so long, but a cursory glance at his album covers, namely Born to Run and Wrecking Ball, will reveal the reverence he has for the instrument.
“It still is unique amongst all my guitars the way it sounds,” Springsteen reiterated in the Hall of Fame interview. “For me, when I put it on, I don’t feel like I have a guitar on. It’s such an integral part of me. I’ve held it aloft to the audience on thousands and thousands and thousands of nights, I suppose with the idea that it says something about the power of rock and roll and the power of us.”
Not only did it deliver a powerful sound, but it was something of a Frankenstein, dubbed an “Esquire/Telecaster mutt”. It had already gone through extensive modifications by the time Springsteen bought it, its neck part Esquire, the body of the guitar a Telecaster. Shop owner Petillo added his precision frets, and went to the lengths of waterproofing the guitar so it was fit for a sweaty Springsteen show. As Petillo attested himself in a 1984 interview, it was so robust by the time it was bought, “you could play underwater” with it.
Springsteen lovingly played it in every show until the early 2000s. Up until then, he’d been routinely chucking it off stages to his faithful guitar tech, Kevin Buell. On the occasions it did break, as it did on the European leg of a tour in 1980, one unfortunate guitar tech would have to fly to Petillo’s shop, get it fixed, and fly back for the next show.
There’s nothing quite like that special guitar.
