MIAMI VICE

Nile Rodgers riffs on his famed Hitmaker Stratocaster as Fender releases a limited-edition replica.

- ART THOMPSON

BESIDES BEING KNOWN for playing a white Strat for his entire career with Chic, Nile Rodgers has used the same 1960 Fender on nearly all the albums he's produced for artists such as David Bowie, INXS, Duran Duran, Diana Ross, Madonna, the Vaughan Brothers, B-52s, Mick Jagger, Steve Winwood and many others. Now Fender has announced a limited-edition replica of the iconic instrument - the Nile Rodgers Hitmaker Stratocaster which will feature such NR touches as the mirror pickguard, Gibson "speed" knobs and, or course, the smaller than-standard body that remains one of the guitar's mystifying elements.

"There are all these different stories I get from people at Fender, who are pretty knowledgeable, but you know, they weren't there when that happened," Rodgers says. "The person who put that guitar together may have had any number of reasons for making it like that, but my guitar is smaller than a regular Strat. A friend of mine, Richie Sambora, came up with a theory that it's actually a Mary Kaye Strat [the first custom guitar that Fender produced, circa 1950]. I was like, 'Are you kidding me... Mary Kayes are like the most-prized Strats, and the guy screwed it up?' If it is a Mary Kaye, it would be funny because I also bastardized it. But it could have been the body mold for a Mary Kaye. Who knows? I know the neck is from 1959 because a person at Fender told me that one of the guitar-assembly people back then had written profanity on some necks - like every Strat has a person's initials or some kind of identifier and supposedly, as a disciplinary action, Leo Fender didn't let them sign any '59 Strats. So for a whole year the necks had no signature or "1959" inside. That may be the reason why as soon as they took my guitar apart they went, 'Oh, it's a '59!' But I didn't know anything about that."