Is this the first relic’d Strat? Andrian Belew and Seymour Duncan’s chaotic ‘relic-ing’ session revealed: “He laid it in the grass, doused it with lighter fluid, and poof!”
Who invented the relic’d guitar? Depending on who you ask, the answer might be the Fender Custom Shop… or a young Adrian Belew watching Seymour Duncan set his freshly purchased $285 Stratocaster on fire in their backyard.
The prog legend has now shared never-before-seen photos from that gloriously unhinged afternoon, giving guitar fans a rare peek at what may well be one of the earliest relic jobs ever attempted.
READ MORE: “I’m just going to throw that thing in the fire”: Shinedown guitarist admits his relic’d PRS Silver Sky inspired so much “drama” that he wanted to get rid of it
In a new Instagram post, Belew recounts the brutal treatment his brown sunburst Strat endured that fateful day.
“Seymour Duncan just sent these cool photos from the day he and I (mainly he) battered and burnt the $285 strat I had just bought,” the post begins. “It had to have been one of the earliest examples of ‘relic-ing’ a guitar.”
“He laid it in the grass, doused it with lighter fluid, and poof! The relic-ing ritual began. When we were finished gouging it with screwdrivers, spraying blops of paint on it, dragging it around the yard, and banging it on the driveway, we hung it up in a tree.”
The next day, Belew brought the battered Strat to rehearsals – where Frank Zappa couldn’t resist commenting: “If you wanted to ruin your guitar, Adrian, why didn’t you loan it to a friend?’”
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And while Belew’s backyard burn session was pure chaos, most professionals would agree that relic’ing today is a very different beast. For all the debate the practice stirs up, the modern process is often meticulously planned, measured, and executed down to the last scratch.
Max Gutnik, Fender’s Chief Product Officer recently explained just how involved modern-day relic-ing really is: “You know, relicing is hard to do. It’s ironic because people think you can just drop it a few times and drag it down the street. But it’s actually a really intensive process that adds a lot of hours to the guitar.”
“Trying to make the relicing not look uniform is really important. The processes we use have improved so much: you want the feel and the look of a broken-in guitar, but you don’t want anything actually broken! So we just keep improving that process, the lacquer and paint…”
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Source: www.guitar-bass.net
