AN ELECTRIC CONSOLE-LAP STEEL, DELUXE 8 STRINGMASTER

This 1960s Fender lap steel was gifted to Jeff Beck by pickup wiz Seymour W. Duncan in the early 2000s. According to Seymour, the pickups on the guitar are the prototypes for a set of pickups he developed for Johnny Farina of Santo & Johnny, the duo behind the chart-topping 1959 instrumental melody ‘Sleepwalk’, which became Duncan’s ‘Antiquity for Stringmaster’ pickups. Duncan told us that the pickups can be blended by a blend control knob under the bridge control. Interviewed by Rolling Stone’s David Fricke in 2010, Beck revealed that playing Santo & Jonny’s ‘Sleepwalk’ in his early days had been instrumental in discovering a vocal quality to his playing: Very early on, I used to play a thing called “Sleepwalk”. It was a great thing to have, after all of the rockabilly stuff we played in these village halls – to have a bunch of girls stare at you while you’re playing it, and then clap. Because they never clapped… But they used to stand and sway when I played “Sleepwalk.” I was only 15 or 16. But I thought, “This is cool.” And I’d get favourable comments from people afterward. They didn’t remember “Be Bop a Lula” or “Hound Dog,” but they remembered that. I lodged that in my memory – you can reach people with the right notes, in the right way. Beck would later record a cover of ‘Sleepwalk’ for the soundtrack to the 1985 film Porky’s Revenge, where he replicated the sound of the lap steel on a regular electric guitar. The lap steel can be seen in Jeff’s home studio in the 2009 documentary Rock Prophecies about rock photographer Robert M. Knight.