The Carson Strat: by Bill Direen

 

In a local second hand instrument shop I was intrigued by a red Stratocaster-copy with three single coil pick-ups and two strings. I’d never heard the name, Carson, as a make of guitar, but I knew that Bill Carson helped design the classic Stratocaster. A limited edition fiesta red Carson Strat was once minted by Fender, and this wasn’t one of those; but it was a totally correct Stratocaster copy from the early nineties. So I tried it out as well as I could on the two strings its previous owner had not busted. Three of the five pickup switch settings sounded just fine, and yet I wasn’t sure I would be “at home” with it. I then compared it with another Strat-like guitar on offer, a Behringer. It didn’t sound as good as the Carson. I was about to take down the Carson and give it another whirl when I heard a voice behind me. It was as if it had come from my own mind: “Yes, that one is the better, I think”. And a long arm reached over mine to gingerly lift it off the rack.

 

The voice belonged to a smart-looking guy with a Palestinian neck-scarf and well-fitting stylish jacket who harped on to me in his sweetly devilish voice as his perfectly-toned musician’s fingers ran over that curious guitar with lots of care and desire. He told me all about himself. He was from Belgium, Brussels, and in a band that had just recorded an album that would be released in a couple of months. He was proud of the band, and proud of the singer, a woman of African origins who also wrote all the lyrics. The band’s name IZIA (pronounced EASIER) was also the name of the singer. You can look it up on the web and you’ll see it’s a real hard-gigging band. He showed me a copy of the fresh recordings (a studio master). Yes, he had a studio-burned CD of the master of some recent sessions in his pocket! There was something infectiously crazy about this guy. His voice had a hypnotic quality, but he wasn’t trying to hypnotise me, he was hypnotised himself. His voice, his hands, the story of his band, it was all part of his obsessive determination to own this guitar. 

 

He knew so much about Stratocasters I asked him if he had ever owned an original model. He knew the answer would shock me but he could not lie, this guy. He had not only had one in his brief past, he had four in his possession right now, and they were not copies. “Four!” I exclaimed, exhausted at the thought of so many high-quality guitars. Then he announced, as if he was in confession, that in fact he owned twenty four electric guitars of all makes and models.

 

“So why do you want this guitar, if you already have twenty four guitars? Do you buy and sell them?”

 

“No, no!” his eyes rolled as if I was way off the mark. Then he blushed as he thought of the real reason, but as I said, he was no liar. He stuttered, “It ... it’s the colour!”

 

This guy was going to play that Strat, and play his heart out, perhaps on only one song in his band’s repertoire, because it was Bill Carson fiesta red. I told him desire like that could get a person into a lot of trouble. He laughed lightly as if he knew about trouble and how to wriggle out of it. I told him about the boss of Flying Nun (he hadn’t heard of the label) who used to have a passion for collecting little rubber and porcelain froggies! He asked me about my music, and a bit about New Zealand, we exchanged MySpace addresses and he paid for the guitar with a gold status credit card. The salesman was listening to all this too, because he knew I had the right of purchase. He had set up the practice amp and guitar lead for me before our friend entered the shop. But I didn’t purchase. I let him have the red Strat copy.

 

Now I learned to play on not very good guitars with little-known names like Marinucci and Kawai and Diplomat—that’s just the way it was, I liked it like that—and the challenge of my self-taught path was to extract an individual sound from them. I was always seeking something that the guitars they were modelled upon (the real Gibsons and Stratocasters and Gretsches) might not have owned. I have always believed that it’s better to play one guitar you know well, than a superb guitar you don’t know at all. A good approach, it seems to me, is to accept your guitar’s kinks and traits and work with them, to try to get the best out of your machine. Our friend from IZIA was going to do just that, but that’s not why I let him have it.

 

You’ll remember that he was stylishly dressed. That and his stylish spiel had reminded me about the essential difference between a Strat and that other great guitar, the Les Paul. It was no one other than Bill Carson who suggested to Leo Fender to make use of “body contours” so the older, existing guitars of the 1940s would become more comfortable to play and to “wear” — he used that very word. Carson is famous for saying that the ideal Fender Stratocaster should fit a man “like a well-tailored shirt”. That fiesta red Strat copy didn’t fit me, but it fitted our friend perfectly—contour and colour and craziness. And I understood there and then WHY my last three guitars (replaced after theft and mishap) have been not Strats but Les Pauls in shape. Mr Les Paul himself used to say your guitar should be your psychiatrist and your lover, and this story has a happy ending, because I found an affordable Les Paul-shaped psychiatrist-lover at a Paris flea market the following weekend.