In 1970, Eric Clapton was touring America with Derek and the Dominos. He’d given up his Cream-era psychedelic Gibson SG (probably a good thing, you can only take so much bad art) for a Fender Stratocaster. Apparently he had seen Steve Winwood in concert playing a white Strat and thought it more becoming. When passing through Nashville, he poked his head into the renown Sho-Bud music store. Clapton was shown into the ‘back room’ of the shop to a rack of vintage Stratocasters, all dating from the mid-1950s. I don’t know why they were kept in the ‘back room’ but I guess it makes the story sound a little more illicit, which is sooo rock-n-roll isn’t it? “When I was in Nashville with the Dominos, I went into Sho-Bud, which had a stack of second-hand Strats in the back room of the shop,” recalled Clapton in 2013. “I thought, wow, the back room, this is sooo rock-n-roll.” No, he didn’t say that, I made it up. Stratocasters were somewhat out of fashion at the time and going cheap, so Clapton grabbed six for a hundred bucks each. Now legend has it, Clapton and some of his roadie mates (yeah right) dismantled three of them to build ‘Blackie’, which later went on to sell for $1.3M. Once back in England, Clapton gave the other three Strats away – one to Pete Townsend, one to his good mate George Harrison and the third to … Steve Winwood. That’s so poetic.
This a Fender Stratocaster detail from a print on Scooter Modern Etsy, click the link to see more www.etsy.com/nz/shop/ScooterModern