Re: New Fenders at NAMM
Elliot Easton on his signature Kramer (good read):
That was something that I designed with Tom Anderson, who's a fine builder. The guy who was running Kramer at the time, Dennis Berardi, loved to hang around rock bands; I don't know any other way to put it. He was a nice guy, and he offered me the opportunity to design my own signature instrument. I took it as a challenge to come up with something for Kramer that had more of a traditional vibe. At the time, they didn't offer a guitar that didn't have a Floyd Rose. So I designed a guitar with a Tele-style bridge. It was available in two models: The Tele bridge and Seymour Duncan Quarter-Pounder system with a five-way switch for a lot of sounds, or with a humbucking-single-single pickup setup with a Floyd Rose. I thought such a guitar might have some appeal to country players and roots rockers who might go for the Tele configuration.
Looks-wise, I was inspired at the time by that orange Jackson guitar Jeff Beck was playing around the time of his Flash album. I wanted something that looked like it could have existed, but didn't. The pickguard on the Kramer is an example; Fender could have done that with their Tele, but didn't.
Mick Jagger played one of the Tom Anderson-built prototypes in the Mixed Emotions video. Tom built fabulous guitars, and I can't honestly say that the production guitars had the "magic" of the Anderson-built ones. That's not to put Kramer down, but you're talking about two completely different setups; one is an artist in a small shop, building one guitar at a time, the other is a huge factory, which by its very definition has to turn out a lot of instruments. In effect, Fender has gotten around the same potential problem by offering the Custom Shop; they don't ask you to expect the same thing out of a Mexican-built Strat as one that Jay Black builds for you (chuckles).
