LIGHT YEARS

GENERALLY SPEAKING, A signature guitar model offers fans an opportunity to learn more about an iconic instrument — from the woods to the electronics to the appointments — used by their favorite player and on some of their favorite songs.

But in the case of Fender’s new Custom Shop replica of Mike McCready’s famed 1959 Stratocaster, it was the artist himself who learned something new — for starters, that the guitar was actually built in 1960.

“I was shocked,” McCready says with a laugh. “It was like, ‘Was it all a lie? What happened?’ ”

What happened, as we now know, is began taking off. “It was the first guitar I bought when we started making money,” he recalls. “I was like, ‘Okay, I’m going to buy a vintage guitar, and I’m going to buy a ’59. Because I had read that Stevie [Ray Vaughan] had a ’59, and now I could afford one.” Sometime later, Pearl Jam’s longtime luthier in Seattle, Mike Lull, discovered after working on the guitar that the Strat was actually a 1960 model and notified the band’s equipment manager, George Webb. Seeing as McCready was by that point wedded to the fact that his main axe was, indeed, a ’59 (he even has a commemorative “ ’59” tattoo on his wrist), they decided to let the guitarist go on believing as much. “George didn’t want to tell me, because I was so invested in the ’59 thing,” McCready says. “He didn’t want to break my heart.”