'With a Strat you can rule the world!' Nile Rodgers, Bonnie Raitt and John Squire on the electric guitar that changed e
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‘With a Strat you can rule the world!’ Nile Rodgers, Bonnie Raitt and John Squire on the electric guitar that changed everything
Andy Welch
Wed 10 Apr 2024 11.23 EDT
How did a radio repair man make an instrument so sublime that it makes giants of music weep with reverence? As the Fender Stratocaster turns 70, we explore its extraordinary life
‘I found the cheapest Strat in all the shops,” says Nile Rodgers, speaking to me from Miami Beach, the very place he went trawling for what would later be regarded as the world’s greatest electric guitar. “I traded in my Gibson Barney Kessel. The guy behind the counter gave me the Strat – and $300 back. It was the real runt of the litter.”
In a nod to the model played by his hero Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock in 1969, Rodgers stripped the guitar and painted it Olympic white. He then locked himself in his bathroom for three days – “woodshedding” he calls it – until he’d mastered “chucking”, a dazzling new technique that blended offbeat strumming with the muting of fretted notes. It’s a style made for the Strat’s rich percussive qualities and slick feel.
Armed with this new instrument, a 1960 model with a 1959 neck, Rodgers set about reinventing music. His unique sound became the gyrating backbone of disco – he knocked out hits for Diana Ross, Sister Sledge and his own band, Chic. Other acts soon came calling, from David Bowie to Grace Jones, Madonna, Duran Duran and Daft Punk. Rodgers’ Strat can be heard on records that have sold hundreds of millions of copies, earning the “runt of the litter” not one but two nicknames: the “hitmaker” and the “$2bn guitar”.
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2024/apr/10/fender-stratocaster-turns-70
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