Sound the Eric Clapton holy grail klaxon: Slowhand’s 1989 to ’93 guitar rig is being auctioned off, and this is a big one.
ANALOGr is hosting the auction and has placed estimates between $2,500,000 and $3,000,000. One lucky collector will be able to set this up in their backyard and play the same 1988 Custom Shop signature Fender Stratocaster and the same Soldano amp that Clapton played at Cream’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction in January 1994.
Heck, the neighbors won’t mind, not once they see what you’re playing through (though if you can afford to drop $3m a guitar rig then perhaps the neighbors will be far enough away not to matter).
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This is is Journeyman-era treasure, and so it’s hard to know which item to get more excited about first. The Soldano SLO-100 was hand-built by Mike Soldano himself, and comes with a COA signed by the tube amp guru.
It’s paired with a full-stack – one slanted Soldano 4×12, one straight 4×12 – and they all come in that silver snakeskin vinyl covering that was the fashion of the time.
The Strat, however, has a sort of “Blackie” MkII mojo to it. This was built by the Fender Custom Shop’s founder and Master Builder Mike Stevens, and was the very first Clapton signature Strat. It’s finished in black with a white pickguard. It has trio of Lace Sensor single-coil pickups, and the onboard boost.
It looks like Stevens used a particularly nice piece of maple for the neck and fingerboard. This was for Mr Clapton, after all. But Clapton did enjoy a cigarette while he performed, and this guitar bears the scars from where he would place it between his strings.
This guitar was sold before in 2004 as part of Christie’s epic Crossroads Guitar Auction. Back then, Clapton’s tech, Lee Dickson, explained why this made this particular Strat special. Clapton was about to go on the patches.
“I think this is the last smoking guitar,” said Dickson “This to me is one of the killer guitars. It was played an awful lot through the early ’90s. It has no serial number on it because it’s the first [black] one, almost like a prototype. It was Eric’s suggestion at the time. He said we should really have a black one in the range. So this is the first officially sanctioned black [Clapton] Strat.”
The Clapton Strat was released in Torino Red, 7-Up Green and Pewter. In 2004, Stevens revealed that this guitar was originally finished in Pewter. And it most definitely was a prototype
“I remember this guitar well. It started life in Pewter as the Royal Albert Hall pics show,” said Stevens. “When it finally became black and beautiful I do not know, but I applaud it.”
Like Stevens says, this guitar was at the Royal Albert Hall, played with Cream – it was his main stage guitar from the summer of 1990 to March 1993.
Stevens left no stone unturned when designing Clapton’s signature Strat, and he was given access to the holiest of holies to get the neck profile just right, Blackie. Stevens had Blackie for two weeks, and not that he was paranoid, but he says it “never left my sight unless locked in my office in Corona or stashed under my bed with a pistol under my pillow while I slept.”
“When I finally copied Blackie, to finalize the Clapton series for Fender, I made two necks for Eric that were approved,” he said. “John Page, George Blanda, the electronic R&D guys and I all worked on this project. I built the necks and the carving templates and later helped get it into regular production. But then my job was to assemble my necks on these two bodies and make them play great!”
According to Where’s Eric?, this 1988 Custom Shop prototype Strat sold in 2004 for $231,500. It might be worth considerably more now. Might Joe Bonamassa be tempted to add Clapton’s SLO-100 to Gary Moore’s?
Head over to ANALOGr for more.
