“I would love to get that guitar back. Every other Strat I picked up didn’t have the same feeling”: How Warren Haynes turned to Les Pauls after his favourite Strat was stolen
The theft of the Custom Shop Strat in the '90s forced Haynes to think differently
![Dickey Betts and Warren Haynes [right] trade licks onstage with the Allman Brothers Band at the 1993 New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival. Haynes's Strat would soon be stolen in New York.](https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/djC3tVwK7UrQ99fFYEtUtC.jpg)
Last month, Gibson put out an all-points bulletin in the search for the ES-345 that Michael J Fox’s Marty McFly played in Back To The Future. It has been missing since the movie wrapped in 1985. Gibson and the film’s producers want to get it back.
But that sweet Cherry Red ES-345 is just one of several famous electric guitars to have disappeared without trace. Some have been missing for decades. People have been looking for Eric Clapton’s “Beano” Les Paul ever since it was stolen in 1966 but to no avail. What would it be worth today?
The loss of Beano left Clapton in a bind. Luckily, he knew Andy Summers had one. In an interview with Rick Beato, Summers recalled a relentless Clapton who eventually got him to sell it. “He called me so many times,” said Summers. “I charged him £200 for it. It’s worth about two million now.” Clapton was back on track. Summers had moved onto the Telecaster anyway.
But sometimes a stolen guitar changes the course of music history. The theft of Warren Haynes’ Fender Stratocaster in the early ‘90s did. It made him rethink his tone.
He got his red Custom Shop Strat in the mid ‘80s and it become his go-to electric guitar. After joining the Allman Brothers Band in 1989, it would become a fixture. Speaking to MusicRadar, Haynes says he has never played a Strat quite like it.
“That particular Strat, it had a really beefy neck, it had the Lace Sensor pickups with the Clapton midrange boost,” he says. “And the neck was really wide. But there was something really special about that guitar. The Lace Sensor Clapton electronics had that variable midrange that you could add.”
That midrange boost was one of a couple of secret weapons on Clapton’s signature Strat at the time. There was the TBX (Treble Bass Expander) pot, and a variable midrange boost that the 1986 Fender catalogue described as allowing players to beef up their single-coil Strat sound into “the hottest humbucking sound around”.
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Haynes was a fan – his new signature Les Paul Standard has something a little similar, though it is an on/off toggle switch applying a clean 15dB boost. Check out the footage below from 1991 of Haynes playing Blue Sky with the Allman Brothers Band for an example of how good this Strat sounded.
He might have been able to find others with the same electronics but not with the same feel. While he played a white Strat circa 1990, that stolen red one pretty much ruined him as far as Strats went.
“Yeah, that’s a lot of it,” he says. “When it got stolen, I was already starting to concentrate more on playing Les Pauls and gravitating back towards the Gibson sound. And when the Strat got stolen it just kind of forced me to think differently because every other Strat I picked up at the time didn’t have the same feeling to me.”
Haynes hasn’t completely given up hope of getting it back. But it’s been 30 years.
“I would love to get that guitar back,” he says. “Yeah, I got a call a few years ago, someone thought they had found it, but it wasn’t the one.”
Haynes has a new album coming. The Whisper Sessions offers a stripped-down version of his 2024 solo album, A Million Voices Whisper, and features a trio guest appearances from his fellow Allman Brothers Band alumnus, Derek Trucks – including Real Real Love, a track from the late Gregg Allman’s songbook that was never finished.
You can pre-save The Whisper Sessions now. The album will be released on September 12 via Fantasy. You can read our full interview with Haynes, coming soon to MusicRadar.
Jonathan Horsley has been writing about guitars and guitar culture since 2005, playing them since 1990, and regularly contributes to MusicRadar, Total Guitar and Guitar World. He uses Jazz III nylon picks, 10s during the week, 9s at the weekend, and shamefully still struggles with rhythm figure one of Van Halen’s Panama.
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