Why was the Fender Rose Wood Telecaster the only guitar George Harrison hated?
This indeed seems to be a question which has some irony built into it. George Harrison was given a Fender Rose Wood Telecaster in 1967 as a gift by Fender. His guitar would become iconic as it would make it’s way into the ‘Let it be’ video as well as it was used for their last public performance.
So iconic is that guitar, that Fender decided to do a George Harrison Tele release and my good God is it a gorgeous guitar, yet; George only kept it for around a year as he would give it away in 1969. Ultimately the reason why he gave it away was because of the weight of the guitar. Being a solid body the guitar weighed a ton and he found it too much weight on the straps for it to be comfortable.
The person that George gave the guitar to would hold onto it until 2 years after George’s death. His widow would buy the guitar for under a half million.
Still, despite George only owning the guitar for a year it made its way into two very important moments in history and as such, Fender find this Telecaster to be really unique with the layout of the pickups. The bridge pickup is quite literally in the bridge and unit's a single coil angled pickup complimented by a single coil neck pickup.
The neck pickup is a standard ’67 telecaster single coil and the bridge appears to be the ’64 model. These pickups are just the standard telecaster single coil so there is nothing special added additionally.
What is interesting is that Fender took the original complaint that George had with the guitar and they addressed it within the construction of this reissue. Fender hollowed out the guitar to make it lighter but, in doing so they left a ton of room for modding the guitar into whatever configuration you would like as there is tons of room for wiring and coils.
The construction of the body has two rosewood slabs separated by a slice of maple which gives the guitar a unique look. You can see the white of the maple slice when looking at the guitar from the sides.
The wiring is standard Telecaster wiring with 250K pots, a 3 way switch, and the knobs on this unit are just knobs - they don’t push/pull to go in and out of phase or anything like that.
The body has even more hollowing than what meets the eye as there is literally a giant U that is not visible which is hollowed out from the top going down the length wrapping around the bridge and going back up the other side to the electronics as indicated by the blue marker..
The neck is two slabs of rosewood glued together. It appears that its’ one piece but it’s not. The fretboard itself is glued onto the neck but it’s hard to see so it still looks very cool.. The neck is the late 60s C neck and it has 21 jumbo sized frets.
The guitar weighs 7 lbs. 8 oz. You can check out the sound in the video below. The sound is a bit thin but it’s nice and crisp. The guy doing the demo has some complaints about the tone but, it sounds really good to me.
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