Eric Clapton has never been one to hold onto every guitar he owns and plays. He gave his While My Guitar Gently Weeps Les Paul to George Harrison, and his storied ’58 LP to Albert Lee. He also famously auctioned off his Wonderful Tonight acoustic for charity. Now, Todd Rundgren has revealed how he came to own his iconic The Fool SG after he’d used it on some of Cream’s biggest hits.
Built in 1964, the Gibson received an eye-catching paint job courtesy of Dutch design collective The Fool, and has become a totem of the psychedelic era and 1967’s Summer of Love.
The double-cut featured across Clapton’s Cream career, and his infamous ‘woman tone’ was cultivated on this vivacious six-string. It can be heard on seminal tracks such as Sunshine of Your Love, White Room, I Feel Free.
Discussing the guitar in the August 1967 issue of Beat Instrumental (via Julien’s Auctions), Clapton said the guitar had “a sweet sound. It is more like the human voice than the guitar. You wouldn’t think it was a guitar for the first few passages.”
Following Cream’s demise, Clapton passed the guitar on to his close friend George Harrison, who in turn gave it to guitarist and singer-songwriter Jackie Lomax. Rundgren is said to have been mesmerized by the electric guitar when he saw Cream at Manhattan’s RKO Theatre in ’67, but it appeared far less captivating – and far less worthy of $500 – just a couple of years later.
He says it was “in the worst possible shape that you could imagine” when he saw it, having heard that its then-owner Lomax was looking to sell it.
“The paint job was flaking all off,” he says. “The bridge had been replaced with a wooden bridge, and the action was super high because they were only using it as a lap guitar.”
The once near-luminescent axe was in a sorry state of affairs. And that wasn’t all…
“Eric had sweated through the paint job and into the wood; it was like balsa at that point, you know, just flaking off. And it wasn’t long after that that the headstock snapped off the guitar altogether.”
With the guitar in such a state of disrepair, Lomax and Rundgren struck up a deal: “He said, ostensibly, ‘Okay, if you give me the money, I’ll loan it to you, and then, I’ll buy it back from you.’ He never showed up to buy it back, until maybe three decades later, when he thought he could give me five hundred dollars and get the guitar back. But that’s what it cost me.”
“The first thing I did was to change it back to a standard bridge,” Rundgren says of his extensive restoration works. “I got rid of the wooden bridge, so it didn’t have the original bridge anymore, and I played it as is for a while. But eventually, the headstock snapped off, and I had to have it fixed.
“But there were very few pictures of the back of the guitar, and what the back of the neck looked like, so we had to fake a new joint where a new headstock was put on the guitar,” he adds. “And then, I played it for a very long time after that, and on various occasions, but it was rarely my main instrument because it was kind of fragile.”
Fragile but playable again, it went to auction in 2023 where it sold for $1.27 million, making it one of the most expensive guitars ever sold at auction.
Rundgren has also opened up on his experience behind the desk for Meat Loaf’s mega-selling debut album, arriving at a time when his leftfield sound left others scratching their head.
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