ALL THAT GLITTERS: THE STORY OF FENDER’S SPARKLE FINISHES

From hot rods to Hollywood, surf rock to the Bakersfield Sound, no finish captures the spirit of California’s golden era quite like a Fender sparkle. Equal parts eye-catching and enigmatic, the earliest sparkle guitars are shrouded in mystery and the paint process itself remains one of the most complex in Fender’s history. To celebrate the release of the Limited Edition Player II Series in three-color sunburst sparkle, we’re taking a trip back to where it all began – Southern California in the 50s and 60s – and paying homage to the sparkle guitars that started it all.

Above: A custom ‘58 Corvette sprayed by Dennis Swiden. Swiden sprayed many of the original Fender sparkles in the late 50s & 60s. Photo courtesy of Shvonne Stricklen.

If there’s one thing at the heart of any sparkle finish, it’s a hot rod. “It all goes back to the vets coming home after WWII,” says David Davidson, vintage guitar expert and owner of Well Strung Guitars. “They were hanging out in the bottom of the salt flats, trying to figure out how to get their cars to go faster.” And with that need for speed came a desire to turn heads. “With the invention of different types of paint material, they figured out how to get things like crushed metal and crushed glass through a spray gun and onto a car to create that signature flash.” 

By the late 50s, the car craze had spread across Los Angeles and right into Fender’s own backyard. It’s no coincidence the original Fender factory was in Fullerton, California – the heart of SoCal’s hot rod scene. Surf rock was also on the rise, fueled in part by car culture. Local acts like Dick Dale & His Del-Tones, Kathy Marshall (“Queen of the Surf Guitar”) and Eddie & The Showmen were penning reverb-soaked odes to their favorite rides. If you played in a surf band in the 60s, it was only fitting that your Strat® sport the same paint job as your favorite Ford or Chevy.

Television was also a staple in American homes, and surf bands outfitted with the latest Fender gear were making cameos on all the popular shows. “If you look at TV shows from the 60s – The Munsters, Gilligan’s Island, almost any TV show from that period – somewhere a band suddenly pops up playing Fender instruments,” Davidson notes. This was also the era of the beach party film, those campy comedies that sold the California Dream to teens across America with the promise of endless summers, fast cars and rock and roll. And where there was rock and roll there was Fender. “The first sighting of a sparkle finish I remember as a kid was in a movie called Muscle Beach Party, featuring Dick Dale & His Del-Tones. There’s a scene where the band is up there playing and everyone has a sparkle instrument – there’s a Stratocaster®, a Jazzmaster® and a matching Jazz Bass®.”

When people left the movies, it wasn’t just surfboards and hot rods on their minds – it was guitars.

SWIDEN’S SPARKLES

Above from left to right: An original Dennis Swiden sparkle burst Strat®; Dennis (right) & friend with a freshly painted sparkle Tele®; A young Dennis on his motorcycle in Fullerton, CA. Photos courtesy of Shvonne Stricklen.

Much like the cars that inspired them, a sparkle Fender was strictly a custom job in the 50s and early 60s – one that was handled outside the factory. “Fender was using a suction-style paint gun at the time called a Binks Model 7,” notes Davidson. “You poured the paint in a cup, the paint gun went into the cup and it sucked the liquid through a straw and blew it through the paint nozzle.” But there was a hitch. “The suction wasn’t strong enough to pull the weight of the metallic flake.” To top it off, a sparkle finish was – and still remains – a complicated job. While sparkle was certainly gaining in popularity, it still didn’t have the demand of an Olympic White or Fiesta Red. Lucky for players with sparkles in their eyes, SoCal was home to plenty of hot rod shops that were up to the task.

“It made perfect sense,” says Terry Foster, historian, collector and co-author of Fender: The Golden Age 1946-1970. “You’re immersed in the car culture in Southern California. Everyone has these cool customized cars – and it was pretty easy to customize your Fender guitar. Unlike other brands, you could unscrew it yourself. You didn’t have to do that much to take apart your guitar and have it sprayed. And everyone would have known someone that could do that work for them.”

Above from left to right: A Dennis Swiden sparkle Strat; A ‘58 Corvette sprayed by Swiden. Photos courtesy of Shvonne Stricklen.

That someone was usually Dennis Swiden. A hot rod enthusiast and guitar player himself, Swiden worked out of his parents’ furniture shop in Fullerton and was friends with many of the surf bands on the scene. According to his niece Stacey, who fondly refers to him as Uncle Denny, Swiden once got a new Corvette (pictured above), stripped the paint and customized that, too. “Dennis was the original sparkle guy,” says Davidson. In fact, most of the vintage Fender sparkles in his collection can be traced back to Swiden’s hand. “Dennis was a furniture painter, but he used the same types of guns [as the hot rod shops]. A lot of midcentury furniture had metallic flake in the paint, so he was able to spray this paint and did a lot of outsourced work.” Fender was one of his biggest clients. “They were getting requests for sparkle guitar customs from surf rockers like Dick Dale and Eddie Bertrand – plus guitars for TV commercials, trade shows and teen fairs.” 

Often bands would request a full set of matching sparkle instruments, like Dick Dale & His Del-Tones, who once returned a Jazzmaster, Stratocaster and Precision Bass to Fender for matching green sparkle “Surfburst” finishes. “Dennis would pick up the guitar bodies from the factory in his car, spray them, and bring them back to Fender,” Davidson adds. Legend has it, Swiden became such a VIP he would park in executive George Fullerton’s spot at the factory.

BUCK OWENS & THE SILVER SPARKLE

A Fender ad from 1965 featuring Buck Owens & Don Rich with their sparkle Teles. Image courtesy of Terry Foster.

While Dick Dale, Kathie Marshall and Eddie Bertrand were riding the surf wave on the coast, country players were kicking up dust in Bakersfield. “You start to see it in that late 60s period – where it was the surf kids at first, then you have the country guys,” says Terry Foster. “They’re wearing their Nudie suits, they’re rhinestone cowboys, and that naturally turned into ‘I need a sparkle guitar to match.’”

Arguably the most significant sparkle Fender ever made was a Telecaster® crafted for one of those original rhinestone cowboys, Buck Owens. Together with his best friend and Buckaroo Don Rich, Owens pioneered the countrified twang that would come to be known as the Bakersfield Sound. And at its core, Foster emphasizes, “that sound is just Fender. It’s a Tele  through a high-powered black panel Fender amp, on that bridge pickup, played close to the bridge – there’s the Bakersfield sound.” 

And if the Bakersfield Sound had a signature finish, it would surely be a silver sparkle. In 1964, Fender built a special set of Teles for the country duo as a gesture of gratitude and presented them around 1965. Decked out in black “cowboy” rope binding with matching sparkle headstocks, the guitars featured an eye-catching sparkle finish made of crushed glass mirror. The pair can be seen playing the guitars in a vintage Fender ad circa 1965, pictured above, from Terry Foster’s archive. “Buck and Don are the only artists ever to appear in a Fender ad during that period with sparkle guitars,” notes Foster. “Fender would give dealers stacks of artists’ 8x10s that they’d give out to kids – and that’s the only time sparkle appeared in a pre-1970 Fender ad.” 

Sparkle guitars might be a staple in country music today, but it didn’t start out that way. “The average country guy in 1963 was pretty conservative. Before that music was pretty regional. The first big national stars playing Fender were the guys playing the Lawrence Welk show. There was no way Lawrence was going to have the fellas playing some sort of sparkle guitar on set.” But by the mid-60s there was a switch. “The bigger artists like Buck and the boys are wearing these flashy Nudie suits all over the country. They’re showing their creativity. And just like Nudie [‘The Rodeo Tailor’] didn’t make the same design twice – so you didn’t turn up in the same suit as someone else – it was the same with these sparkle guitars.”

While opinions differ on the original color of the glass sparkle Teles, Davidson and Mark Kendrick, a Founding Master Builder in the Fender Custom Shop, believe the guitars started out silver. “Fender experimented with the crushed glass finish and then cleared over it with a nitrocellulose lacquer. That’s why the guitars started out silver and then turned a kind of gold color, because the cellulose [lacquer] in the finish turned yellow with age – like an old piece of scotch tape in your grandmother’s photo album,” says Davidson.

Pictured above: The 1964 crushed glass Telecaster as seen in the Custom Shop.

As one might imagine, working with crushed glass was no easy feat. “George Fullerton once told me the process of finishing those guitars was a real pain,” says Kendrick. “The glass would settle at the bottom of the spray cup, so they constantly had to agitate it by hand and the glass wouldn’t flex going through the siphon tube and out into whatever it was they were spraying. Metal flake, on the other hand, would flex a little, so it would atomize better and be more evenly applied. Today, the flake is made out of polyester, which flexes even greater so the finish comes out more even.”

By 1966, Fender had officially brought sparkle in-house and presented Buck Owens and his Buckaroos with a more refined set of Telecasters, along with a matching Jazz Bass, all in metal flake. Unlike the original crushed glass models, which had a rough, almost pebbled texture, the new ones were covered with polyurethane and smooth to the touch. Buck and Don played the sparkle Teles throughout their careers – perhaps most famously on the popular country variety show Hee Haw. By the time the first episode aired in 1969, half of America was watching in color. All that glitters may not be gold, but those sparkle Teles sure looked good under the studio lights.

Today, one of the original crushed glass Teles – once owned by Fender executive George Fullerton – is in Davidson’s collection, and another hangs behind glass in the Fender Custom Shop. It’s a fitting home for what is quite possibly our first in-house sparkle – a guitar that captures the spirit of innovation that has defined Fender from the start. Over the years, Fender and the Custom Shop have created sparkle guitars for everyone from Dick Dale and Marty Stuart to Brad Paisley, Jack White, J Mascis and Blu de Tiger. In 2024, 60 years after Fender presented Buck with the first crushed glass sparkle Tele, we released the Limited Edition Buck Owens Telecaster; a hot-rodded red, silver and blue sparkle that tips a hat to the one that started it all. 

21ST CENTURY SPARKLE

Some of Custom Shop painter Jay Nelson's sparkle sprays on the rack.

While sparkle finishes are no longer strictly a custom job, they’re still extremely difficult to execute. “In 1998 or ‘99, I sprayed all of Marty Stuart’s sparkle Teles – which were inspired by Buck,” says Kendrick. “I literally sprayed them outside under an old tree because I didn’t want it to contaminate anything in the spray room. And I’m not kidding you, it was three or four months later, I had been done with spraying them and getting them into the production process, and I found a blue sparkle in my ear. It’s a messy process. When I was done with it, that tree – depending on the time of day – looked like Blue Christmas.”

The process has been refined since the early days of the Custom Shop, but it hasn’t necessarily gotten easier. “It’s still incredibly difficult in production to do sparkles,” explains Allen Abbassi, Director of Product at Fender. “The sparkles themselves fly around in the air and contaminate all the other paints. We either have to do a sparkle run and then clean the entire booth, which is a huge undertaking, or we do a special run on the weekend, when they aren’t running any other guitars. That’s why you don’t see us doing it more often.”

Dennis Swiden may have been “the sparkle guy” back in the 60s, but today the crown belongs to Custom Shop Painter Jay Nelson. Nearly two decades ago, Nelson responded to Fender’s ad searching for an automotive painter, and the rest, as they say, is history. His trajectory makes perfect sense, given Fender's ties to hot rod culture – and the influence of that world is evident in Nelson’s custom sparkle sprays like Electric Lettuce Green and Burgundy Sparkle with Cherry Burst. Unlike Dennis Swiden and other painters of the early era – who typically sprayed over existing Fender finishes – Nelson starts from scratch. He first applies a metallic base coat in a shade close to the final sparkle, then layers on two sizes of metal flakes: a smaller one for coverage and a larger one for that final show-stopping shimmer.

While sparkle finishes are rarely done outside the Custom Shop, we made an exception for the new Limited Edition Player II Series models. Inspired in part by this Custom Shop 1963 Stratocaster, the three-color sunburst sparkle is available on our Stratocaster, Telecaster, Precision Bass  and Jazz Bass – and offers a striking twist on a classic Fender finish.

Six decades since Swiden’s surf sprays and Fender’s crushed glass prototypes, sparkle is still turning heads. “If there’s one or two sparkle guitars on a rack of things I’ve completed and I’m pushing it down to the dry room, people will just stop,” says Nelson. “They see it every day – but if there’s a sparkle guitar they say ‘hey what’s that one?’ It just jumps out and gets you.”