Jimmy Hendrix knelt down, lit the lighter, set his Fender Stratocaster on fire, and smashed it in front of the whole Monterey Pop Festival audience.
Prince joined Tom Petty, Dhani Harrison, and others to pay tribute to George Harrison. He played an absolutely jaw-dropping, soulful, and technically brilliant solo, then casually threw his guitar straight into the air and walked off.
These were truly the moments in which the rock stars made history. But they would never have performed similar guitar-burning shows with guitars they held special to their hearts. And believe it or not, almost every star had one. Let’s explore the stories of the most iconic rock guitars and their owners.
Yngwie Malmsteen's The Duck
The Swedish heavy metal and hard rock player Yngwie Malmsteen purchased “The Duck” in his teenage years.
The guitar was originally a 1972 Fender Stratocaster, to which Yngwie made some changes. First, he scalloped the neck of the guitar inspired by a 17th-century lute. Additionally, he replaced the standard frets with jumbo frets, and changed the bridge and neck pickups with DiMarzo pickups. Also, the original Olympic white color faded into Aged Vintage White.
It’s not hard to spot where the name Duck comes from. The singer decorated his guitar with various stickers over time, but among the first ones was a Donald Duck on the headstock. The guitar is also marked by cigarette burns and other damages.
The Duck sounds in many songs, and, as Malmsteen says, it’s one of his finest in terms of sound.
Eric Clapton’s Blackie
However, the Duck is not the only famous Fender Stratocaster. One of the most well-known English rock and blues guitarists, Eric Clapton, swore by his “Blackie”. The story behind Blackie is rather coincidental and began when Clapton walked into Sho-Bud guitar shop in Nashville. In the back of the shop, he saw a row of vintage Stratocasters from the 50s, all of them for three hundred dollars and less, and decided to buy all of them.
Ultimately, he gave some of them away, leaving him with three models all of which he played.
He loved his ’56 black Strat the most, but while he liked its body, he preferred the neck of the ’57 model and the other guitar pickups. That’s why he took the Strats to a famous luthier and had Blackie built up from their components.
Blackie had done a good job performing on a lot of live shows in the 70s and early 80s and was used in one of his albums for 15 years. However, in 1985, it stopped serving due to its worn-down neck. In 2004, Blackie was auctioned and sold for $959,500, marking a record for the most expensive guitar in the world at that time.
Prince’s Cloud
Out of all Prince’s guitars, one specific stood out—the iconic Cloud. It first appeared in the globally successful movie Purple Rain and quickly became one of his most recognizable guitars.
Cloud was built by Minneapolis luthier Dave Rusan who had known Prince since he visited his music store as a young, aspiring musician. Although Rusan barely received guidance except for a bass guitar Prince had purchased in 1976, the result was phenomenal—a white guitar with a hard rock maple body and a set neck, EMG pickups, spades on the fingerboards, truss rod cover, and jumbo frets. For the Purple Rain tour, Rusan crafted additional three backup Cloud guitars that looked almost identical even though he didn’t have the original as a reference. Prince was satisfied with the results, and only requested the third guitar’s neck to be made slightly narrower. The instruments often needed to be repaired as Prince sometimes threw them in the air at his shows.
Each of the three Cloud guitars has a different destiny. The first one was repainted yellow, and is held by the Smithsonian museum. The second one was auctioned off for $563,500 in 2020, and the third one with the narrow neck is lost.
It didn't take long for people to start asking for replicas. That’s how Rusan Originals came to life, which has built approximately 40 replicas of Prince’s Cloud. Each handmade piece takes 100 hours to be put together with every detail in mind.
Brian May’s Red Special
In the early 1960s, long before Queen had formed, a teenage Brian May and his father built a guitar from scratch, using materials from home.
The neck was carved from wood taken from a 100-year-old fireplace mantel, while the body was made using a chunk of tabletop, with an oak insert to strengthen it. May even used materials like mother-of-pearl buttons for the fretboard inlays and a motorbike valve spring for the tremolo system. He wound the pickups by hand and engineered the guitar to be highly responsive, giving it the expressive, singing tone that became his signature.
The guitar was replicated multiple times by many other crafters, and even May uses some of them as a backup on tour.
Keith Richards’ Micawber
Keith Richard’s Micawber was actually a 27th birthday gift.
Just before Rolling Stones started working on the Exile On Main Street album, Eric Clapton gifted a 1950s Telecaster to Richards, which has become his most famous guitar. If you’re asking why it’s named after Charles Dickens character, though, you won’t find the answer—Keith never gave an explanation for this.
From a technical point of view, the original Telecaster featured a single-coin in the neck. After the ’72 tour, though, Keith replaced it with a humbucker facing backwards.
The guitar has an open G tuning, with the 6th string removed.
Jimmy Page’s 1971 Gibson EDS-1275 Doubleneck
Many remember when Jimmy Page was standing on stage, jamming his unforgettable solos switching two fingerboards. The double guitar Gibson EDS-1275 was made upon his request by the manufacturer.
Not all parts of the guitar were customized, though. The guitar kept the cherry color, a mahogany body, and the mahogany necks with rosewood fretboards typical of Gibson production.
So, what’s exactly is the story behind this famous double-neck instrument? While recording the famous Stairway to Heaven, Page had to change his six-string and twelve-string guitars in the middle of the song. But on stage, this would’ve been annoying, much like pop-ups of live dealer casino sites or fake systems alerts on the internet. That’s why Page found a solution in the Gibson model, making just a minor adjustment to the guitar, swapping out the humbuckers on the six-string side of his EDS-1275 for coverless Seymour Duncan pickups.