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Recent article about refinished Fenders in the Shads era...Any comments?

https://reverb.com/news/the-mystery-of- ... ars-solved

Remember what Hank said to a french magazine about the Strats they got in 1961 (translated by myself) :

Hank :
The (import) ban had just been removed, and people at Vox got an exclusive import contract for Fender products. The first packages contained some Precision Bass, some Stratocaster and Telecaster. This is why Bruce was shot with a Telecaster and Jet with a Precision Bass to promote the Fender range. Meanwhile two stratocaster and one Precision Bass were specially painted in fiesta red for us so we would all have a guitar of the same colour. We got them a few days later. So I gave back to Cliff my first Strat which wasn't really mine.

Didier

"ROMAN RED" oh lord not another name for THAT colour....

So my original 58 in red isn't Cimarron,Fiësta,Salmon....but all of a sudden Roman red
In the shipload of guitar books I gather in the past 45 years and websites....never ever I read about Roman red regarding a Fender custom colour.

More then 25 years ago The Guitar Magazine interviewed several ex Selmer employees and no-one could confirm the re-sprays in any form or record for the first part of the 60's ...
So I have the impression the sunburst guitars in GB that where re-sprayed when new, are just a way for the shop keeper to make some extra money.
Because in several publishings Don Randall tells the story of Fiesta for Britain and he mention it where shiploads of red,red and red "We hardly could keep up,we had to spray over already painted guitars to for-vile the demand"....
When Tony Bacon(for his book) spoke to George Fullerton about the colours, George pointed towards a red Jazz Master and said "But it’s a funny thing, this became our fiesta red, which became the best thing available in England. I don’t know about you, but we always had the idea that the English were kinda conservative people on colours, but that became their choice, they used to order them by the hundreds.

That was because Hank Marvin in The Shadows had one.

That’s it. So that became fiesta red. The Du Pont company made the colour fiesta red, you can buy it right across the counter. There again, that should have been a patent, that fiesta red colour. But who knows at the time you do a thing? "

So I reckon a lot of the fabled Selmer resprays are in reality factory ones.


Cheers Rob

What a great read and a new can of worms.