Jeff Buckley’s 1983 Fender Telecaster Toploader

This is without a doubt Jeff’s best-known guitar, but a little less known fact is that the guitar didn’t actually belong to him but to Janine Nichols, Program Director at St. Ann’s Warehouse, from whom he borrowed it in 1991. This happened just a couple of days after all of Jeff’s valuables were stolen from his apartment in Los Angeles, and following a Tim Buckley Tribute concert at which Jeff was invited to perform and was given the opportunity to meet Janine.

Specs, Mirror Pickguard

The guitar originally featured a white pickguard, but Janine later replaced it with a mirror one—allegedly inspired by Chrissie Hynde of The Pretenders. Hynde played a similar guitar back in the day, and Fender has since released a signature model based on it.

The second modification was the replacement of the original bridge pickup with what appears to be a Seymour Duncan Hot Lead Stack. This change was likely made by Jeff in late 1994 or early 1995, after the Grace studio sessions. This timeline is supported by photographic evidence—for example, a photo taken on August 6, 1994, shows the Telecaster with its stock bridge pickup, while most filmed performances from 1995 (such as Live in Chicago) show the guitar fitted with the suspected Seymour Duncan pickup.

Jeff used this Telecaster as his main guitar from the time he received it until his untimely death. It can be seen and heard on his only studio album released during his lifetime, Grace, as well as in most of his live performances, including Live at Sin-é and Live in Chicago (1995).

The ‘Hallelujah’ Guitar?

There’s some talk about whether Jeff actually used the Telecaster specifically on ‘Hallelujah”’, or if that was some other guitar. The source of these doubts seems to be a post over at GearSlutz forums which quotes Bryant W. Jackson (assistant engineer for the Soundtrack studio session), in which Jackson claims that he was present during the sessions and that Jeff used “Gibson Semi-Hollowbody” on Hali (Hallelujah).

He also points out in a different post that this was during the overdub sessions at Soundtrack, and that he was not present at the earlier sessions which produced most of the album (VintageGuitar forums – Jeff Buckley’s Grace).

Upon some digging, it is evident that Jeff did indeed record a bunch of different versions of Hallelujah, more than thirty during the first sessions at the Bearsville studio (MojoPin – When I Met Jeff Buckley), and at least one more at a later session done at Sony’s studios during which ‘So Real’ was recorded (Jeff Buckley – MTV Outtakes 1-15-95). However, this still leaves us clueless about the overdub sessions, and how much was done there to change to initial recordings. 

It is possible that Jeff dumped all the tapes he did previously of ‘Hallelujah’, and started from scratch using a semi-hollow Gibson (likely an ES-175 as Jackson pointed out). But, if one were to guess, without knowing anything about this story about the alleged semi-hollow, Hallelujah really does sound like a single-coil Telecaster topped off with some reverb, and it’s just hard to imagine Jeff playing anything else but that.

Jeff’s Telecaster Today

Jeff’s Telecaster was returned to Janine after Buckley’s memorial service on August 1, 1997. In 2011 it was put for auction, and reached the price of around $50,000. The buyer’s identity was unknown, but there’s a short video of it from 2012 posted by Dan’s Chelsea Guitars: Jeff Buckley´s Fender Telecaster 1983

More recently, the guitar was owned by Matthieu Lucas from Matt’s Guitar Shop, an Argentinian guitar collector. In 2020 however, Matthew sold the guitar to Matt Bellamy of MUSE. [A new chapter is coming for Jeff Buckley’s Telecaster!]