Pawn Shop ’72
If there was ever a golden age of irreverent
and lawless guitar tinkering, it was the early
’70s. The holy grails of today’s vintage-guitar
fetishists were still largely regarded
as just used guitars, and dudes and gals
with the fever for home craft were a lot less
reluctant to attack a ’62 Stratocaster with
routers and carving knives. Fender, too, was
willing to tinker with what we now regard
as perfection. And the modernist minimalism
of the Telecaster and Stratocaster
were rethought with features like f-holes,
au natural finishes, and—in a nod to
higher-octane rock of the times—big, burly
chrome humbuckers.
In keeping with that vibe, the new Pawn
Shop ’72 is a cool, quirky encapsulation of
the period’s style. Tele and Strat purists who
consider the subtle changes wrought during
the ’60s an affront to Leo Fender’s genius
need not apply. But if you’re feeling a bit
brash, bell bottomed, and/or funky—and
you have the GTO gassed and good to
go—the Pawn Shop ’72 is your axe.
The ’72 has a clear family resemblance to
the ’51, of course, but it’s as if the ’51 left
high school as a greaser in 1962, joined a
commune after a road trip to the Monterey
Pop Festival, journeyed to Woodstock,
and then stayed behind to build geodesic
domes. The ’72 also looks wired for loud.
The Fender Enforcer humbucker in the
neck position is inspired by the pickups
Fender put in Thinline Telecaster models
in the early ’70s. And the same humbucker
that propels the nastier persona of the ’51
sits in the bridge position of the ’72.
Fender reveals a cool eye for other period-
correct details on the ’72, too. It’s got a
3-bolt neck (the bane of so many pre-CBS
purists), a bullet truss rod, ‘F’ tuners that
were typical of Strats and Teles of the time,
and a hardtail bridge like the ’51’s. The
white-bound f-hole is borrowed from the
’69 Thinline Telecaster and, like the ’51,
the ’72’s familiar Telecaster-like controls
conceal a hidden purpose. In this case, what
would traditionally be a tone knob is a very
cool pickup blender knob. As on the ’51, it
won’t do much for you if you’re looking for
mellow jazz tones or burly saxophone honk
of the sort you’d normally summon with a
Tone-knob tweak, but it does offer a lot of
hip tone-shaping possibilities.
The ’72 is a cooker, especially through
a potently projecting 4x10 Super Reverb.
It kicks hard from the bridge pickup and
slings Zep and Paul Kossoff tones whether
you’re jamming a big or small amp. The
neck-position humbucker—a visual and
sonic nod to the ’72 Thinline Telecaster—is
predictably darker, but it can be blended
with the more slicing bridge humbucker
to create a harmonically rich blend that
sounds fat, zingy, and jangly under the
guitar’s 25 1/2" scale. A little pedal overdrive
turned the ’72 into a perfect vehicle
for grinding open-tuned Black Crowes- or
Faces-style jams—ringing with a whole
spectrum of overtones and a string-to-string
definition that highlighted funky pull-offs
and snap bends. And moving between the
two pickups in the middle of a lead created
some very cool, almost modulating textures.
Unfortunately, the blend knob stopped
working (possibly due to a loose solder connection)
after a few hours of playing—and
before we’d shot the video review. Fender’s
Justin Norvell explains, “The model we sent
was from a first-production run and had
been deconstructed and rebuilt a few times
in the inspection and evaluation process. So
consider this a mea culpa for possibly rushing
the rebuild to get them out fast for this
first and exclusive review!”
The ’72 feels super slick under the fingers.
While the medium-jumbo frets and
C-shaped neck—one of the nicer necks I’ve
gripped in a while—enable fast fretwork,
they also make slow, lazy bends a joy. Because
it was set up with very low action, it took a
tweak on the truss rod and a few adjustments
to the saddles to get the action where I really
felt open notes were ringing in a way that
suits this cool, high-output pickup array.
The ’72 may not be everyone’s idea of a
looker, but if you dig the guitar equivalent
of a mag-wheeled custom van hanging cool
and low around your shoulders—and, more
importantly, if you crave the tones of that
time—the ’72 is great way to break away
from the pack.
Buy if...
Southern rock and high-octane blues with a Stratocaster feel just sound and feel right.
Skip if...
you can’t live without that Tone knob or single-coils.
Rating...
