“When we were finished gouging it with screwdrivers, spraying blops of paint on it, dragging it around the yard, and banging it on the driveway, we hung it up in a tree”: Adrian Belew on how he and Seymour Duncan made one of the first relic’d guitars

Long before the Fender Custom Shop had turned the relic’d electric guitar into an art form, way before Tom Murphy had cracked the formula for his aged nitro finishes from the Gibson Custom Shop, there was electric guitar pickup specialist Seymour Duncan, prog trailblazer Adrian Belew, and one Stratocaster that was about to become a piece of history.

This CBS-era Strat was to customised in the most barbaric form possible, and Belew has just shared some as yet unseen pictures to his Instagram of that fateful day, when he and Duncan turned a box-fresh instrument into one of the most notorious instruments in prog.

“Seymour Duncan just sent these cool photos from the day he and I (mainly he) battered and burnt the $285 Strat I had just bought,” writes Belew. “It had to have been one of the earliest examples of ‘relic-ing’ a guitar.”

It remains one of the most brutal examples of the relic job. Indeed, as the professionals will say, a relic is more than just guitar torture, distressing the finish in quick time to mimic a lifetime’s of hard play; it's an artisanal process. Speaking to Guitarist, Max Gutnik, chief product officer at Fender, insisted that it was no game for amateurs.

“You know, relicing is hard to do. It’s ironic because people think you can just drop it a few times and drag it down the street,” he said. “But it’s actually a really intensive process that adds a lot of hours to the guitar.”

Well, not that day in 1978 when Belew had called up Duncan complaining about how this Strat he bought from a Nashville guitar store had an ugly finish and he had a tour fast approaching with Frank Zappa.

Yes, Duncan was a technically a professional but this was outside of his realm of expertise. As Belew explains, Duncan was, however, a natural at this.

“He laid it in the grass, doused it with lighter fluid, and phoof! The relic-ing ritual began,” continues Belew. “When we were finished gouging it with screwdrivers, spraying blops of paint on it, dragging it around the yard, and banging it on the driveway, we hung it up in a tree.”

You will have seen this guitar in action. At the top of the page you can see Belew playing it on tour with David Bowie in April 1978 – not the metal slide on the index finger of his picking hand. The guitar is just months old but looks like it has endured decades of abuse.

Zappa was famously unimpressed. “If you wanted to ruin your guitar, Adrian why didn’t you loan it to a friend?” was his reaction.

But just look at those pics. They’ve taken on a meta quality, the prints aged by the passing decades, and that Strat hanging on the tree. What would the neighbours have thought?

Fast-forward 47 years and relic’d guitars are well and truly here to stay. It’s a finish that divides players and always will, but it is also a reflection of just how young electric guitar culture is.

The instruments that are old enough to be heavily distressed the old fashioned way – by players playing them, buckle rash, accidental dings and mishaps – are too expensive for most players.

A relic’d Strat straight from the factory, even from the Custom Shop, is at least more affordable, and whether you consider it cheating or not, it gives players a head start. After all, what are you going to do? Torch your guitar and hang it from a tree in the garden? Leave that to the professionals.