Fender and country guitar legend have teamed up for a limited edition Telecaster that comes hot out of the Custom Shop with an O.G. Blue Paisley finish from the late ‘60s and a story that begins with the discovery of a rare vintage curio – a sheet of Paisley Cling-Foil wrapper.
The Brad Paisley 1967 Lost Paisley Telecaster might be the latest high-profile signature guitar to come out of the Fender Custom Shop but it’s really an exercise in recreating what might have been.
The idea for the guitar took seed when Paisley was restoring his own 1967 Tele and was gifted a sheet of the original Blue Paisley Cling-Foil that was used to apply the original Paisley pattern finishes to Fender Telecasters and Telecaster bass guitars in 1968.
This was a blink-and-you’ll-miss it moment for the Telecaster range. These metallic finishes were introduced at the height of the hippie era, the Summer of Love and all that, and they were notoriously flaky. By 1969 they were discontinued. If you need a metaphor for the whole hippie movement, well, that’s almost too on the noise.
For vintage guitar enthusiasts, however, this makes the Paisley Telecaster something of a unicorn. For vintage guitar enthusiasts by the name of Paisley, it makes it the ultimate pet project, and recreating this guitar has seen Paisley working in collaboration with guitar historian Zac Childs and Joe Glaser (of the Glaser Bender Tele mod) to resurrect a lost classic.
“From the very beginning there has always been a pattern following me, from the moment they wrote my last name on my birth certificate,” says Paisley. “It’s unreal that my own name is one of the coolest finishes I think Fender has ever done. This is an attempt to show what this lost color could have been. It’s the best guitar I’ve ever had.”
The Lost Paisley Telecaster is for sure a high-end piece of kit. It has all the signature Paisley details – the hand-wound Seymour Duncan electric guitar pickups, the Custom ‘60s Oval C-profile maple neck – and Mr Glaser’s work is in evidence with the “G” Bender. which gives you that secret pedal steel-style twang move.
Not only did they recreate the guitar, the recreated the Cling-Foil sheet in the process. The finish is going to naturally pull a lot of focus on this one – c’mon, it looks incredible, with that single-ply transparent acrylic pickguard showing it all off – but the build itself is something you don’t come across every day.
This Tele has an alder body with paulownia wings and a spruce top and back. There are all the Custom Shop details you’d expect on the reproduction of a guitar from 1967, such as the wear on the 7.25” radius maple fingerboard.
There are vintage-style tuners, a bone nut, a leather guitar strap, certificate of authenticity, and a custom hard-shell guitar case. This is definitely a collector’s item and is priced accordingly at $7,000. See the Fender Custom Shop for more details.
