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"I told him that we could get the same tone by setting his guitar up differently and using some different things. Once we started experimenting, he was pretty happy. He looked at me and said, 'How do you think up these things?' And I just said, 'Well, I'm your guitar tech. That's what I do.'"

What was the main difference between Number One and the Stratocaster known as 'Lenny'?

"Lenny was given to Stevie by Lenny [Lenora Bailey, Stevie Ray's wife from 1979 to 1988] and some friends. It was a different color [brownish-orange] and it had a maple neck. He used it on a lot of different songs, but I especially remember him using it on the recording of Riviera Paradise. It was a special guitar because it could scream and chime. Different guitars have different tones, and this one seemed to really work for that song.

"What he would do is, he could strike the strings near the tuning machines, then he would use the tremolo arm to make a kind of weeping sound. Lenny seemed to make this sound the best for him."

Somewhat ominously, there was an accident in New Jersey during a show, just a few weeks before Stevie's death, that almost destroyed Number One. Tell me about that.

"We were doing a co-headlining tour with Joe Cocker. For that show at the Garden State Arts Center, we were on first. The venue had these acoustic baffles for when orchestras would play, and they were monsters, maybe 20 or 30 feet tall and six or eight feet wide.

"They were all leaning against the wall and they were tied up, and at the end of the show, as we were changing sets for Joe Cocker, the stagehands were pulling the curtains and one of these huge baffles came crashing down on my workstation, where the guitars were set up.

"The guitars were basically holding the baffle up. It took a bunch of us to lift the thing off the guitars, and of course, the first guitar I checked on was Number One. Well, the neck had been broken; it looked like a Steinberger…the headstock was basically dangling.

"Stevie came out to see what had happened, and I was just lost for words - I didn't know what to say. Later, he went to his dressing room, and I went to see him. He gave me this big old hug. 'You could have been killed!' he said - because I was standing pretty close the guitars when the piece of staging came down. He forgot all about his guitar and thought about Rene. [laughs]

"Word traveled fast. I got on the phone to Fender, and they wanted to know where to send a replacement neck."

And Stevie was OK with using a replacement neck?

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