And he asked Clapton if he knew anywhere in New York where he could one of these guitars, and Clapton tells him to speak to this guy, John Hammond Jr, the blues player.
“I remember hearing the story of how he was on the Blind Faith tour in New York, and he wanted a particular guitar, an old Kay I think, because he’d seen Lonnie Johnson playing one on an album cover.
And so he would say: ‘Well I’ve got to get that, because that makes a great blues sound,’ rather than a luxury Les Paul or whatever. “And they would play cheaper guitars, because that’s what they could afford. “Rory loved collecting blues memorabilia – vinyl, posters, photographs – and he was fascinated by what the old blues guys would play,” Daniel explains. So much of Rory’s collection is taken up with these unusual guitars that weren’t exactly trendy at the time, and a lot of it comes back to his deep love of blues and blues history. “He’d be looking at the Nationals, the Teiscos, the Silvertones, asking ‘What’s that? What does it sound like? Can I break the tremolo arm off it?’” “If he was here now, he’d be ignoring all that,” he continues, gesturing to the wall of old Gibsons and Fenders in New King’s Road Vintage Guitar Emporium. He wouldn’t be interested in buying that year’s new Strat or whatever. “When he was on the road, especially in America, he would just go into pawn shops and buy loads of Kays, Harmonys, Tokais and Teiscos. “I feel like this is another one of those guitars where he saw it and thought, ‘That’s mad, nobody else is playing one, I’ll take it!’ And it probably only cost him a couple of hundred dollars, if that! “This is such a mad thing! It’s so cool – it’s got a handle, nobody needs a handle!” Daniel Gallagher – Rory’s nephew – laughs. The Japanese budget brand might have been recently reborn as a maker of oddball effects, but during the mid 1960s, it was bringing its eccentric design approach to guitars such as this offset. Our final leftfield electric comes from Teisco.
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