It’s safe to assume guitar players with legendary levels of stock can play any guitars they want. And yet, as they made their names as trailblazing players, Prince, Robert Fripp and Metallica’s Kirk Hammett all did so with off-brand copies of Gibson and Fender classics.
Prince’s Hohner-made Mad Cat Tele copy is certainly the most famous of the bunch, sitting proudly in the extravagant guitarist’s vast collection of personality-matching instruments.
From his array of Cloud guitars to his Vox-HDC-77, Prince owned and played many six-strings that have caught guitarists' eye, but few rarely got used as much as his knockoff Tele.
The guitar most notably featured during hisRock and Roll Hall of Fame performance in 2004, where he showed why Rolling Stone should have put him on its list of 100 Greatest Guitar Players Of All Time the year before.
The Mad Cat deviated from the typical Telecaster template in many ways. It sported an ash body with a flamed maple top, and a walnut strip in the middle, a hardtail bridge more often seen on a Stratocaster and a leopard-print pickguard.
Hohner made just over 500 Mad Cats during the '70s. Prince allegedly acquired one late in that decade from a gas station for a measly $30.
He eventually made many modifications to it, installing Fender Vintage Noiseless pickups and later replacing them with Kinman Traditional pickups. A wireless receiver was built into the body of the guitar for the Purple Rain tour, a mod that his Purple Sadowsky Tele also received at the same time.
And then there's Robert Fripp, who opted for Japan-built Tokai and Fernandes copies of Les Paul. He's rarely seen without his Goldtop Fernandes, which sports a Seymour Duncan bridge pickup, a Roland synth pickup in the bridge position, and a Fernandes Sustainer at the neck, alongside a whammy-friendly tremolo system. All of it points to why Gibson’s recipe wasn’t satisfying his needs.
Like his former King Crimson bandmate Adrian Belew, Fripp eventually made guitar synths a key part of his sound, a trend that continues through to his Tokai LP-type, which boasts a similar set up, with the Roland GR-1 synth system.
“Why? Because it does two or three things that nothing else does,” he tells Guitar World. “The GR-1 has a fretless bass sound that is breathtaking, which I would use to have fun with Tony Levin. Tony would be doing some upright slides, I might slip in some fretless. Tony would look up wondering where the bass sound was coming from.
“It’s also stunning in terms of low-end for soundscapes, and it also has a piano sound, which I haven’t really used since 2003, but which was astonishing. I used it a lot in all the ProjeKcts.”
It does perhaps seem a little unfair to include Kirk Hammett in this trio of big brand dodgers considering his recent work with Gibson and the fact he is the current owner of Pete Green’s iconic “Greeny” Les Paul. However, before he had oodles of cash to throw at vintage gear, he’d shaped Metallica’s sound on a Fernandes FST-13 Stratocaster copy.
His FST-13, nicknamed Edna, was most notable during the band’s Ride the Lightning days, just a year after their bumpy start to touring life. The same guitar later appeared on the cover of Metallica’s $5.98 E.P.: Garage Days Re-Revisited.
Hammett may have made the jump to Gibson since, but he helped put Fernandes — which sadly filed for bankruptcy last year — on the radar of metal guitar players across the world in the early ‘80s.
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