A Good Year For The Rosewood

As Fender releases the George Harrison Rosewood Telecaster, we retrace the fascinating story of this iconic model with Fender historian Martin Kelly and a gorgeous 1969 original from its first, all-too-brief run.

- By Rod Brakes

DARK, HANDSOME, AND understated, the Fender Rosewood Telecaster has much in common with George Harrison. Custom-built for the guitarist in 1968 by Fender craftsmen Roger Rossmeisl and Philip Kubicki, it suited him down to the ground, although it was high on the roof of the Beatles’ Apple Corps headquarters in London that this unique Tele design was unveiled, at the band’s final public performance on January 30, 1969.

The origin of the Fender Rosewood Telecaster likely stems from a meeting at Apple Corp in 1968 set up by Don Randall, Leo Fender’s original business partner and head of the company’s sales division. Keenly aware of the importance of product placement, and having courted the Beatles for some time, Randall visited the band’s Savile Row HQ, where he met with John Lennon, Yoko Ono and Paul McCartney.

“Don began supplying the Beatles with Fender equipment immediately following the meeting,” explains Martin Kelly, guitar historian and co-author of The Golden Age of Fender: 1946–1970. “During the recording sessions for the White Album, he had already gifted the band a left-handed Jazz Bass for Paul, a right-handed Bass VI that both John and George used, and blackface Deluxe and Twin Reverb amps. By the time the recordings that would become Let It Be began in January 1969, the group had been kitted out with brand-new ‘drip edge’ silver face Twin Reverbs, a Bassman amp with a 2x15 cabinet, a Fender Rhodes electric piano and George’s Rosewood Telecaster.