As the celebrates its 70th anniversary as one of, or surely world’s most successful design of all time, has been leafing through the cover archive, in which, unsurprisingly, there are a lot of iconic Strats and their owners. We thought we would give those owners a call to see what those Strats are up to now, and to find out more about what made this guitars special. On the cover of our May 1982 issue, it was Adrian Belew’s turn, and his has truly lived a life less ordinary, tracking with Frank Zappa, David Bowie, Talking Heads, King Crimson and more, but Belew thinks it might just have started something big in guitars.
Is this the first relic’ed guitar? “I had a plain, natural-finish Stratocaster when I joined Frank Zappa’s band [in late 1977], and I used it only on the American tour because it never made it home. I don’t know if it was stolen or if the airline lost it, but that Strat was never seen again. I had two weeks before we were going to start the European dates [in 1978], and we were going to rehearse in London for 10 days or something.
“At the time I was in Nashville, where I live now. I went to a local used guitar store and was poking around, and in the back they had this kinda ugly Stratocaster hanging on the wall – like a brown sunburst. [Laughs] I said, ‘How much for this one?’ They said, ‘It doesn’t have a case, so we’ll give it to you for $285.
’ A pretty good buy, I thought.” “Seymour Duncan used to live where I grew up in Cinci.