David Gilmour of Pink Floyd famously has a Strat with the serial # on it’s neck plate of #0001. It is discussed as a 1954 - not likely the true first production Strat, since they stamped the neck plates with numbers and tossed them in a box; so it was assumed a worker pulled it out. But one of the very first Strats, with a custom gold pickguard, etc. Huge wow factor.
Here is link to a site with what I see as the “known story”: http://www.gilmourish.com/?page_id=259
However, I get a newsletter email from Fretted Americana, a super-pricey vintage guitar shop in CA. In this week’s email, they are selling a Limited Edition replica of the Gilmour 0001 Strat. But they offer a VERY different history of the original guitar:
[QUOTE=Fretted Americana newsletter]
Here is the correct story regarding David Gilmour’s actual guitar that this one is based on…
"This is one of those folklore legends that has taken on a life of its own. Here’s the real story - and it’s actually a tale of two guitars. In 1976, right before he started Seymour Duncan Pickups, Seymour was doing guitar repair at Jensen’s Music, here in Santa Barbara. While he was there, a guy from Nipomo, California named Richard Green brought a '57 Strat to Seymour to fix and refinish - he wanted the new color to be see-through root beer, like Bonnie Raitt’s guitar. Seymour remembers the original color as a light mint green; probably the same finish Fender used on some lap steels.
Seymour sent the body to his friend and colleague Wayne Charvel for refinishing. Wayne was an authorized Fender repairman. But Wayne couldn’t refinish the body because the dings and nicks were too deep for a see-through finish. So Wayne used another Fender body, which he sprayed see-through root beer, and he sent it back to Seymour. (Back in the '70s, when you sent a neck or body to Fender for replacement, the practice was to saw the original in half and throw it away. However, in this case, the original body wasn’t destroyed…)
The original neck went to another Santa Barbara repairman Phil Kubicki who refinished it. It eventually made its way back to Seymour who re-plated the hardware gold, put the guitar back together (with the new body) and returned it to Richard Green. The neck plate said serial number #0001, but Seymour knew it wasn’t accurate since Fender didn’t do solid color finishes back then.
Some time later, Seymour was visiting Wayne’s shop and saw the original '57 body and bought it to use for a test guitar he was building. Seymour bought a '57 maple neck from Kubicki for $85 and he bolted it onto the '57 body. He wound some '60s replica pickups and used the guitar as a test bed. Eventually, he sold the Frankenstein guitar to a guy named Phil Taylor who in turn sold it to David Gilmour for $600. The neck plate said #0001; but like Richard Green’s, Seymour believed it to be non-original. Keep in mind, this was long before the vintage guitar craze had started; and was 15 years before the first Antiquity pickup was ever sold.
[/QUOTE]
So Gilmour’s Strat is a '57 Parts-o-Caster with a set of Duncan’s in it. Similar to the legendary guitars Duncan built for Jeff Beck from various parts and Duncan’s handmade, pre-production pickups. Wonderfully cool, but not a one-off first-year-of-production custom Stratocaster.
Now I wonder if the #0001 Gilmour guitar actually has TG '54 written on the butt of the bolt-on neck, or if the penciled initials are faked. These days, relying on pencil writing on an old guitar is dodgy at best.
