Early in 1994, Steve and I were setting up Trifecta Studio in the basement of my rental house, and I was beginning to think about upgrading a few of my instruments. The fact that I was playing out more often with my band Mystic East pressed the point further. My no-name, pawn-shop hollowbody guitar was difficult to keep in tune, it tended to feed back into my amp a lot, and the pickups were a bit too tinny for professional use.

My bandmate James Haddox, who usually played bass in Mystic East, had some Christmas money burning a hole in his pocket and was looking for an electric guitar to play at home and occasionally with the band. He’d narrowed it down to a Fender Telecaster or Stratocaster, and asked me to come along with him to look at guitars and make a decision.

We made a couple stops in Des Moines and West Des Moines, eventually making it to Professional Music Center (at its original location at 23rd & University) where he played a couple Teles and Strats side-by-side. We agreed that for his playing style, the tremolo bar on the Strat was an unnecessary nuisance. He wouldn’t be using it, and it just added the possibility of knocking the guitar out of tune. It’s easy enough to remove the tremolo’s handle from a Strat, but he was already leaning toward the Teles anyway.

After playing the Teles a bit more, he had pretty much decided to get one, and turned to me for advice: should he get the candy apple red, the metal flake blue, or the cream white? I professed my preference for sunbursts and natural finishes, rather than race-car paint jobs. At this point the owner, Fred Boresi, who was putting away a new shipment from Fender, opened a case and asked, “You mean like this?”

In the case was a brand new Telecaster Plus in a beautiful natural ash finish. The Tele Plus had a different electronic setup than a standard Telecaster: it had a high-output Lace Sensor Blue in the neck position and a split-humbucker Lace Sensor Red at the bridge. With a second toggle switch near the volume knob, the player can choose between seven different pickup combinations. In comparison, a standard-config Tele has three selections, and a standard-config Strat has five.

James didn’t wind up buying a guitar that day, but eventually he chose a cream white Telecaster a couple years later, much like the one we’d looked at with Fred. I came back the next day to buy the Telecaster Plus. The original MSRP for the 1993 Telecaster Plus was $1099, but Fred let me take it home, in a hardshell case, for $800 plus tax. (Fred was usually pretty easy to bargain with.)

Fender introduced the Telecaster (initially called the Broadcaster) and its single-pickup cousin the Esquire in 1949, when they were among the first commercial solidbody electric guitars. The Telecaster quickly became standard equipment in Nashville sessions, and was a popular choice among blues and early rock players as well. Its sonic versatility allowed the guitarist and the engineers to be more creative, and the solid body allowed players to turn up the volume much higher before getting feedback in the studio or onstage. Fender followed up with the Stratocaster in 1954: its contoured, highly stylized body, tremolo bar and additional pickup made it the guitar of choice for many rock lead guitarists, while the Tele was often regulated to rhythm guitar status.

The basic Telecaster has been updated and reconfigured several times over the years, notably the faux-hollowbody Telecaster Thinline in the late 60s, and the dual-humbucker Telecaster Deluxe in the early 70s. Fender introduced the Telecaster Plus (version one, like mine) in 1987, alongside other upgraded Teles including the Telecaster Plus Deluxe (with a tremolo bar and locking tuners) and Telecaster Plus Modern Player (with an additional center single-coil pickup). The Tele Plus configuration was changed in 1996 (version two) to three single-coil pickups, much like a Stratocaster. All these models were discontinued in 1998 and replaced by the American Deluxe Telecaster. Alongside all these variations, the standard-config Telecaster has also been available, and practically unchanged, since 1949.

I’ve always been drawn to the Telecaster over the Stratocaster. It’s just a matter of personal preference: The Tele’s body shape is more reminiscent of an acoustic guitar, and I never use a trem bar anyway. With the pickup configuration in the Tele Plus, I have more control over the sound of the guitar before it goes through any effects or amplification. It’s a beautiful guitar that really turns heads when I play it out (not nearly as often anymore because I’m the drummer in my current band The Grape Ape Trust, and I play my acoustic Fender El Rio with Smith & Straughn or when I play solo). It’s fun to play, with its thin neck and light body weight (for a solidbody, anyway). And most importantly, whether I’m playing clean for rhythm or for country lead, or playing with distortion for rock or blues, it sounds spectacular.