THE 1965 STRATOCASTER

The year was 1965. The price of a movie ticket was $1, “Wooly Bully” topped the charts and America watched the evening news in color for the very first time. US involvement in the Vietnam war escalated, while Martin Luther King Jr. led historic civil rights marches from Selma to Montgomery. In June, the first American walked in space and a month later, Bob Dylan walked on stage at the Newport Folk Festival – sunburst Stratocaster in hand – and split the sixties wide open.

With apologies to Dylan, the times they were a-changin’ – and the Stratocaster was about to change right along with them. On January 5, 1965, after a year of quiet negotiations, Leo Fender and Don Randall sold Fender to CBS, marking a watershed moment in the company’s history. It was this transitional year in particular – when guitars and basses combined “pre-CBS” parts and design with early CBS-era changes – that gave rise to the legendary 1965 Stratocaster.

DAWN OF THE CBS ERA

“There was so much happening and transitioning in the country at that time,” says Allen Abbassi, Director of Product at Fender. “Dylan going electric, civil rights, Vietnam. TV and Fender being bought by CBS were the beginning of the shift. And the cool thing about the 1965 Strat is that it has all these features that were about to change in just a few months.”

Plans were quickly put in motion for the construction of a massive new factory in Fullerton, California, adjacent to Fender’s original nine buildings at 500 South Raymond Avenue. However, as the saying goes, change doesn’t happen overnight – hence our much-mythologized “transition era.” “Leo was still consulting for the company and there were still a lot of guitars built the old Fender way,” Abbassi explains. “They had a lot of works in progress – necks and bodies that were still true made-by-Fender parts.”

A letter from Don Randall informing dealers of the sale to CBS. Courtesy of Terry Foster.

A defining feature of the ‘65 Strat is Leo’s original “small” headstock paired with a new, large gold logo that ran throughout the CBS era. That logo – created by Bob Perine, the graphic designer who also played a hand in creating Fender’s famous “You won’t part with yours either” campaign – first appeared on the Jazz Bass when it debuted in 1960. However, it wasn’t widely adopted until the sale to CBS.

The combination of the small headstock with the large gold logo is a rare feature. It lasted only from mid-1965 until the end of the year, when CBS introduced the larger headstock that became a hallmark of the era. “It was a short window,” Abbassi notes. “You don’t see a lot of vintage Strats with small headstocks and the larger 70s logo in gold. It’s a really cool look.” The shift coincided with the growing popularity of television – and the rise of color TV. Many believe the new design was at least in part an effort by CBS, the nation’s largest broadcasting company at the time, to make the Fender logo more prominent on screen.

Of course, the large logo on the headstock is just a small part of the ‘65 Strat story. The transition-era Strat featured several key changes over Fender’s earlier models, including a switch from clay to pearloid fingerboard dots, a white three-layer plastic pickguard replacing the “mint green” celluloid and “gray bottom” pickups in place of the “black bottom” ones. These details are all faithfully recreated on the American Vintage II 1965 Stratocaster – from the gold transition logo to the Pure Vintage 1965 pickups.

Back in 2012, Mike Lewis, late VP of Product in the Fender Custom Shop, identified several highly rare 1965 Strats to accurately recreate the model. He ensured every detail was correct, from the precise location of the tuner holes on the headstock to the “patent pending” stamp on the saddles. “We followed the original recipes for colors; the neck shapes are vintage 7 ¼ radius with round lam fretboards [made of a single piece of rosewood that has been glued to a neck that has already been curved] and smaller frets. Some of the machines used to stamp the hardware are the original machines from the 60s – it’s everything.” Short of purchasing a vintage ‘65 Strat, Abbassi notes, “It’s as close as you can get to an original today.”

MADE FOR TV

The CBS takeover coincided with the single greatest demand for electric guitars the industry had ever seen. “At the time Fender was backordered something like 150,000 units on the Mustang alone,” notes Abbassi. “They needed to increase the output of the factory tremendously. So naturally CBS adjusted the manufacturing process.”

Terry Foster, historian, collector and co-author of Fender: The Golden Age 1946-1970,attributes much of this demand to “The Beatle Effect.”Negotiations for the sale began in earnest just a few months after The Beatles made their first US appearance on the Ed Sullivan show – which, notably, aired on CBS television – and launched the world into a heightened state of Beatlemania. It became the most watched TV program of all time, with over 73 million viewers. When the band made their second appearance the following month, nearly half of America tuned in. “All of a sudden, you have all these kids who want to be rock stars,” Foster says. As a result, sales of electric guitars and amps skyrocketed.

George Fullerton’s shipping record for the first CBS-era trade show in 1965. Courtesy of Terry Foster.

While Fender was by no means a mere mom and pop operation in 1964 – with hundreds of employees and multiple buildings across Fullerton – by the time CBS took ownership in early 1965 production at the factory had doubled. Though some speculate this increase in output might have impacted the instruments, George Fullerton’s detailed shop notes – which were later acquired by Foster for his archive – reveal that executives remained committed to maintaining high standards of quality and craftsmanship.

“The truth is they would scrutinize everything. Anytime a dealer would call and say something was happening with certain guitars they would look into it.” For example, “A dealer claimed that all the Olympic White guitars were turning red. They investigated and concluded that a customer must have come into the shop with a poorly dyed red shirt, which transferred onto the finish.” Foster continues, “The genius of Fender is not just the design of the guitars themselves, it’s in the machinery they developed to build them at scale, by people who didn’t have deep woodworking skills. They were able to train people to be very productive very quickly. That didn’t change [with the transfer to CBS], it’s just that the scale of production changed.”

FOREVER AHEAD OF ITS TIME

More than television, politics or ownership changes, the single greatest influence on Fender guitars was – and still is – artists. CBS, which controlled television and radio, also owned Columbia Records – the label that introduced the 33 ⅓ long-playing album. “That’s why you start seeing artists like Bob Dylan, The Beach Boys and The Band featured in Fender ads,” Foster explains. “They were very focused on how they could pair their guitars with artists.”

Fender had been the instrument of choice for artists long before the CBS era – and the Stratocaster was well on its way to becoming rock’s greatest electric guitar. In the summer of 1967, after an unforgettable set at Monterey Pop Festival, Jimi Hendrix returned to the stage with a hand-painted 1965 Strat for his final song, “Wild Thing.” “This is for everyone,” he said before dousing the guitar in lighter fluid, giving it a kiss and – in what many consider the ultimate rock and roll sacrifice – setting the guitar ablaze. Dylan may have split the sixties open, but Hendrix lit them on fire. Considering the rarity of a transition-era Strat now, collectors today might very well have stormed the stage.

Six decades later, the American Vintage II 1965 Stratocaster offers a remarkable take on a guitar from one of the most transformative years in Fender history and American culture. Watch as Matthew Scott explores the model and the legendary artists who made it their own.

[INSERT MATTHEW SCOTT VIDEO HERE]