1959 fender esquire
a heavily modded machine that was a go-to guitar for slide work
the workhorse simplicity of this two-pickup Esquire belies its heavily modded history as one of Rory’s main guitars for slide work. “This guitar’s had so many changes,” Daniel Gallagher observes. “Originally, it was natural finish with a black scratchplate – which you can see on the Beat Club Sessions DVD– with white etchings on it from when he bought it.
“He put in the second [neck] pickup and made it a Telecaster, effectively. Then an incident happened at an airport where it fell off a loading trolley, then a van behind it with the next load of luggage drove over it. When he got it back, the body and finish were damaged. I think it was given to Chris Eccleshall to refinish and Rory said, ‘I need it back in two weeks, because I’m going on tour again.’ But in a certain light it looked green and Rory kind of felt Chris was taking the mickey because he was Irish. Rory took it as a sleight at first – but they made up and Chris painted it black.
“At a certain point Rory put in a third pickup and turned it into a weird Esquire/Tele/Strat hybrid. He changed the pickups in that middle position a lot. You can see it on a Rockpalast [German TV] show around ’77 with that third pickup in. This and the white Tele were his two main guitars for electric slide until the Gretsch Corvette. He plays a mean slide version of the track All Around Man on the new Blues record, with a Coricidin pill bottle. We have footage of him using the Esquire for that from the Old Grey Whistle Test from ’76.”