Bill Frisell owns an abundant and impressive collection of electric guitars — as you’d imagine.
Among them, however, is one that’s particularly close to his heart: a blue Telecaster owned by the late Robert Quine, a close friend.
The two were introduced by jazz drummer and journalist Chip Stern years ago. Early in their relationship Quine — who worked with Lou Reed, Richard Hell & the Voidoids, John Zorn and many others — showed Frisell his Electro-Harmonix 16-Second Delay pedal. Soon after, Frisell made the pedal the centerpiece of his pedalboard throughout the decade and into the ’90s. “It was like it was made for me or something,” he said.
The Telecaster, meanwhile, was presented the last time Frisell visited Quine at his apartment on St. Marks Place in New York City, a couple of years before he passed away in 2004 at age 61 from a fatal heroin overdose.
“We were having a little jam session thing, just messing around, and he was like, ‘Oh, look at this. I just got this Tele, and it’s pretty cool,’” Frisell tells us via Zoom from his home in New York. “It was a Custom Shop model or something like that, kind of an early ’60s copy of a Telecaster.
“So I played it, and it clicked. It was really comfortable and fit the way I was thinking at the time. I think Quine was kind of amazed at how easily I took to it.”
Some time after Quine died, Frisell learned from his friend, the guitarist Marc Ribot, that Quine’s guitars were at Carmine Street Guitars, the West Village shop run by luthier Rick Kelly.
“Marc told me that Rick had all of the guitars, and a bunch of them were for sale,” Frisell explains. “At that point I had never actually met Rick; I’d been in there, but I’d never met him. But he knew of me through Quine, and I went in there and we commiserated about the sad story. It was just so great to connect with him, finally.
“Then I started looking on the wall and was like, ‘Oh, shit, that’s the one I played at Quine’s house the last time I was at his place.’ So I had to get it. I don’t know if that’s morbid or something, but I thought it would be a nice thing to have to remember him. And it’s such a great guitar.”
It’s even greater for Frisell, perhaps, thanks to a few modifications he’s made since acquiring it.
“I ended up changing the neck pickup on it,” he says. “It’s a Ron Ellis, which I really love. To me it’s as close as you can get to the old PAF pickups from ’59 or whenever. I changed the bridge, too, and put on a Mastery bridge. I still have all the old stuff, though, so I could put it back in there if I wanted.”
Frisell did not play the Quine Telecaster on his new album In My Dreams; instead, he used another heavily modified Tele. But the model remains his preferred instrument at this point.
You’ll see a picture of some guy with a Gibson and find out that in the studio he was playing a Telecaster. It’s so versatile.’
— Bill Frisell
“I have a number of Telecaster-type guitars,” he reports. “When you look at all the music that’s been made on a Telecaster — whatever kind of music, from Led Zeppelin to Barney Kessel — it’s just all over the place. You’ll see a picture of some guy with a Gibson and find out that in the studio he was playing a Telecaster. It’s so versatile. You’re only limited by your imagination.
“And on the practical side, it’s so easy to travel with it. I can carry it on my back and just check it under the plane, and I don’t have to worry. Maybe they’ll break it, but if they do I can just screw it back together. They can take a lot of abuse from the airlines and all that. I can’t do that with an old Gibson Super 400.”
Quine’s influence isn’t limited to Teles, either. He’s also directly responsible for one of the Stratocasters in Frisell’s collection.
“This was in the early ’80s,” Frisell recalls. “I wanted to get a Stratocaster, and Quine took me to Manny’s Music on 48th Street. He knew all the guys who worked there.
“So we went in and got to go into this room where they had all these boxes of new guitars. We went through a bunch of Strats, and Quine picked one out for me. I still have that guitar, too.”
With In My Dreams just out, Frisell will be hitting the road during March for a few concerts with the sextet that made the album, as well as a series of “official” 75th birthday shows, including a special performance on March 22 at the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
