Rory Gallagher’s heavily weathered 1961 Stratocaster is a blues-rock icon. So much so that it sold for $1.16m at auction last year. Naturally, icons have their admirers, and a young Johnny Marr went to brutal lengths to make his own electric look like Gallagher’s. It didn’t go to plan.
Speaking in the May 1995 issue of Total Guitar, the former Smiths guitarist, then working with New Order’s Bernard Sumner in Electronic, was asked about his first guitar.
“It was a Vox that looked like a Strat,” he said. “It was well weird.”
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For years, the guitar was his pride and joy, and it remained by his side unscathed until he hit his teenage years.
“It had two Strat-like pickups, and a curved head,” he remembered. “Great sound, and it was red.
“I had that for a few years, then when I got to secondary school, about 13, I took a blowtorch to it. I wanted it to look absolutely fucked like Rory Gallagher’s. It looked so funky, and that’s what I wanted it to be.”
Gallagher’s Strat itself tells a remarkable story. He bought the guitar from Crowley’s Music Store in Cork, Ireland, for £100 in 1963, and it originally had a Sunburst finish. He was said to be in tears when its paint started stripping away, the result of his aggressive picking technique, highly acidic sweat, and the fact that he never stopped playing it.
Not once did he take a hammer, a chisel, or a blowtorch to the guitar to give it one of rock guitar’s most unique ‘colorways’. Marr was forced into cutting corners.
“I nearly killed myself trying to get the lacquer off; it kept catching fire,” he laughed. “I kept blowing it out; I’d inhaled all these fumes. I ended up conking out in the road.”
Given Marr’s age – he was born in 1963 – this would have been roughly the same time period when Adrian Belew enlisted the help of Seymour Duncan to relic his Strat, in truly brutal fashion. The difference is, Belew was so happy with the results of his aggressive modding that it went on to grace the cover of Guitar World in May, 1982. He also never passed out during the process.
“I guess I went a bit too far with it,” Marr conceded. “It ended up looking terrible.”
Marr has just sold nearly 100 of his guitars – and a healthy dollop of amps – in a bumper Christie’s auction that raised nearly $5m. Guitars tied to milestone indie moments with the Smiths and beyond went under the hammer, including a bizarre nine-pickup Strat, and his prized ’82 Rickenbacker 330 Jetglo.
