TECHNICOLOR DREAM

The American motor vehicle’s impact on popular music and guitar culture simply cannot be overstated. From Robert Johnson’s Terraplane Blues to Ike Turner’s Rocket 88, Delta blues and R&B trailblazers named their songs after the futuristic metal machines rolling off the production lines to the north in Michigan. By the end of the 1950s, rock ’n’ roll singles such as Eddie Cochran’s Somethin’ Else were distilling the prevailing teenage angst of the era: you had to get the car or you could forget about getting the girl.

By the 1960s, the assembly line principles of the automotive industry had been applied to the recording process and the products of the Motown hit factory began to dominate the charts. Cars and motorcycles had driven their way into the fabric of pop and would remain there for many decades, with their influence extending to musical instrument design and even the names of the instruments themselves.

For example, before changing the course of electric guitar history, Paul Bigsby was a motorcycle racer, who worked at the Crocker Motorcycle Company machine shop as the foreman. It was a shared love of Western music and motorcycles that saw Bigsby and Merle Travis become firm friends and, well, you know the rest. Later, in 1962, as Fender debuted elegant new instruments borne out of the collision of surf music