The Current's Guitar Collection: Black Joe Lewis, custom Squier Telecaster
by Luke Taylor
October 09, 2013
When Joe Lewis stopped in with his band for an in-studio session at The Current, we asked him about his bright-red guitar. Here's what he had to say:
Are you playing a type of Telecaster today?
Yeah, it's custom. There's a guy back home [in Austin, Texas] named Tom Oatley, he works on guitars and he built it for me.
It used to be a $150 Squier, and we used to use it on a backup on the road. We had a few other Squiers, but by this time, we had bought nicer guitars so we ended up using them to smash on stage, for a prop.
This is the last Squier that we had. I went to Tom and I was like, "I want a red guitar, man." So he designed a pick guard, pulled all the insides out and put a Gibson P-90 pickup in there — I think it had been a Humbucker, originally — and then he just put a kill switch on it — on, off — and set it to where it's turned up all the way. So it's just one P-90 pickup and an on/off switch. That's all there is. There's no tone knobs or anything, so I just go with it, man.
Tom put all nicer hardware in there. The body has nice stuff on it, so it's almost a nice guitar, but I can tell it's not going to last forever.
What do you like about the tone of it?
I like bite and stuff that'll feed back. I guess the P-90s, the soapbar pickups, are a little bit less stable than some of the newer designs they've got. And I got into this kick where I wanted to get into using fuzz tone a lot, and I was trying to figure out how to get it to sound like the old Gibson Maestros they used to use in a bunch of old stuff — the Rolling Stones used them, Springsteen used to talk about them. They used to come with the amp, back in the day, so you'd get a Gibson Maestro with a Gibson amp. They're hard to find; I have found 'em, but people want a lot of money for 'em.
But on this one, I got the fuzz phase and then figured out the reverb for really good fuzz tone on a clean tone, so something like a Fender Twin -- I usually play a smaller, lower-wattage amp than a Fender Twin because I like 'em to break up -- but for fuzz tone, if you get a Twin and you crank it, you get the reverb going on it and you turn on the fuzz, that's how you get the really old, '60s-style kind of [stuff].
So that's why I went with the P-90 rather than a Humbucker because apparently, as Tom was telling me, it doesn't fight off the hum -- that's why they're called "Humbuckers" -- and the P-90s just take everything in. So I went with that. I like a really crunchy tone.
Any memorable stories about this guitar?
I've written songs on it. I probably wrote that whole record [Electric Slave] on it. I don't have an acoustic at home right now. I just play this all the time now. It's been with me three years now, almost. It's been a lot of places, a lot of gigs.
I play with my teeth a lot; it's one of my stage tricks. People like that.
What was your first guitar?
I couldn't afford a nice guitar for a long time after I started playing. First I had a big-ass Washburn guitar. And then I got an Ibanez; it looked like a Strat copy. I never got to play it through an amp because I didn't have an amp at that point, but the guitar was just a wooden body with no finish on it. I liked that guitar; it ended up breaking on me, though. Somebody knocked it over and the head broke off.
I got a Mexican Tele Deluxe, so that was the first nicer guitar I got. I still have it and I use that as my backup.
And then I got this one made. I'm going to stick with it. I like the way guitars look when they get worn out, so I'm going to stick with this one. As long as it works.
Who are your guitar-playing influences?
I like Lightnin' Hopkins. I used to listen to him a lot when I was learning. Elmore James. Hound Dog Taylor. I guess Jimi Hendrix, but everybody says that. Buddy Guy — I was listening to Hoodoo Man Blues back in the day, his Junior Wells stuff. *
I like Nile Rodgers, the disco player. He plays in Chic. He did a bunch of that disco stuff back then. He's really cool. Just really weird picking on the single-note stuff.
Those are probably the main ones.
*Buddy Guy was a session player on Wells' album Hoodoo Man Blues, although Guy was originally credited on the album using the thinly veiled pseudonym, "Friendly Chap."
