How Jeff Beck sparked Fender’s first Graffiti Yellow finish – and the Strat Plus design that helped revive its ’90s fortunes

UK auction house Bonhams has recently listed a 1986 Fender Stratocaster in Graffiti Yellow, previously owned and played by Jeff Beck. It is a guitar that had a key role in a number of Fender’s ’90s innovations – most of them sparked by Beck himself.

The instrument not only features the first Graffiti Yellow Finish, but also formed the template for the Strat Plus and, on top of that, it was one of the Fender Custom Shop’s earliest builds.

Given Beck is one of the most iconic Strat players of all time, it’s strange to consider that he didn’t start working with Fender until 1986. The guitarist had met the firm’s president Bill Schulz and director of marketing Dan Smith a few months previous and got in touch to request they build him a Strat that he could use on his forthcoming Japan tour.

Luthier George Blanda had just been hired to found the Fender Custom Shop and was duly tasked with creating something that fit Beck’s specs.

“Jeff’s main request was for a really huge neck and for the guitar to be yellow, the exact yellow of the deuce coupe in the movie American Graffiti,” Blanda recalled in an interview with Xhefri Guitars.

Beck was a hotrod devotee and owned his own 1932 Ford in the same yellow finish. Not for the first time, automative design influenced guitar aesthetics and Beck intended it as a tribute.

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“There was discussion about what new features Jeff would be most interested in seeing,” says Blanda. “So about five or six yellow guitars were made – everything from a ’62 Strat reissue in yellow to a high-tech Japanese Fender Strat called a 5700 – and everything in-between. Jeff ended up taking the ’62 reissue with an oversize raw wood neck.”

As with the rest of the firm’s 1980s Corona-built ‘62 Reissues, it initially featured an American Standard tremolo, a vintage-like 11-screw white scratchplate and ’60s-style Alnico V pickups.

Blanda says they had to talk Beck into even letting them seal the monster neck on the Strat, but the guitarist relented and then quickly took it out on tour with Jan Hammer in Japan in 1986. In doing so, he debuted the first Graffiti Yellow finish – so named for the film that inspired its creation.

It was a finish that has reappeared throughout the years ever since – on everything from its American Standard builds, to Custom Shop models and even the Tom DeLonge Stratocaster.

Later, after much back and forth, the Graffiti Yellow Strat became retooled, intended as the basis for a potential Jeff Beck signature model: gaining a new neck, Sperzel locking tuners, and a Wilkinson roller nut, alongside a ’50s-style eight-screw scratchplate.

Beck ultimately decided against using it as a signature model and returned it, but as Blanda says, Fender took the template – equipped it with the newly designed Lace Sensor pickups – and used it as the Strat Plus design.

“Around this same time, several factors came together that dictated that the Strat Plus be finalized,” says Blanda. “My memory is that during a meeting Bruce Bolen held up the [rejected Beck signature] guitar and said, ‘Here is our Strat Plus right here, it has everything it needs.’ Everyone sort of went, ‘Oh yeah, it is what it needs to be!’”

In Beck’s typically contrary style, he decided he would then use the Strat Plus models (though they didn’t bear his name) and eventually returned to Fender to develop a signature model in the early ’90s. Amusingly, given he spec’d the color in the first place, Beck also decided not to offer a Graffiti Yellow finish on his resulting signature.

The ‘original’ Graffiti Yelllow Strat, meanwhile, was returned to Beck and received multiple tweaks, becoming a Strat Plus of sorts in 1990, complete with the patent-pending Lace Sensor pickups that remain in it today.

Beck kept hold of it until 1994 when – in true rock ‘n’ roll style – he gifted it to the current owner, British pilot Suzy O'Hara, in exchange for flying lessons! (Indeed, the guitar hero had a habit of gifting guitars, most significantly the Telecaster Beck gave Jimmy Page.)

It’s certainly a Strat with a story to tell – one that simultaneously encapsulates both Fender’s drive to claw back its crown after its ill-fated CBS era and Beck’s desire to keep pushing the envelope.

Now the instrument has come to market via auction. The price for all that history? Well, Bonhams is predicting a sale in the region $75,000 to $100,000.

For more information on Jeff Beck’s Graffiti Yellow Strat, head to Bonhams