Classics: Jarret Crawford ’59 Fender Stratocaster

In 1991, Q104.3 and WNEW 102.7 nudged 10-year-old Jarret Crawford through his first steps to guitar infatuation. Songs by Pearl Jam, Nirvana, and Smashing Pumpkins led him to Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page, Eric Clapton, and Stevie Ray Vaughan. Soon, he wanted to do more than just listen. “So, I borrowed a guitar from my uncle – a cheap Strat copy with the Hollywood sign painted on it (laughs). But my first proper guitar was a ’94 Richie Sambora Strat with a Floyd Rose, which I bought new at Rondo’s Music with my confirmation money.” It proved perfect for strumming with high-school friends. “Dan, Joe, and Alexa!” he recalls fondly. “We shared a lot of licks and riffs.” After playing in a “very short-lived” band, Crawford set the guitar aside while attending college, graduate school, then starting a family. But by his mid 30s, he was itching to step back in, so he bought an Epiphone Les Paul Standard and an import Strat. Turns out, they were gateways. “The dam broke,” he said of the years that followed. “I’ve owned more than 100 guitars since.” He started buying vintage pieces in 2018 and currently has an all-gold ’55 Les Paul Standard that holds “favorite” status, a refinished ’55 TV Junior, ’63 ES-335, and a ’64 6120. Like most collectors, he regrets having sold or traded a few pieces, especially a ’61 dot-neck ES-335 and a ’53 Deluxe modded by the late Alexander Dumble. In the last five years, his collection has become more Strat-centric. “Since 2020, I scored a refinished ’57 Mary Kaye, an incredible maple-board ’59, a slab-board ’61, a ’63 refinished in Candy Apple Red, a ’64 Olympic White refin, and three other ’64s in sunburst.” In May of 2025, Crawford was looking to replace one of his sunburst ’64s despite it being completely original with no issues – spaghetti logo, clay dots, greened pickguard, original case. “What more could a guy ask for, right?” he said. “I liked it, but I didn’t love it; what it had in collectibility it lacked in character, and I really wanted a player-grade Strat that felt more like ‘me.’ I had just missed on a pre-CBS Strat and was angry-scrolling one day when I saw an ad that had been up for only a few minutes.” Advertised as a refinished ’59, it caught his attention mostly because it had an ash body. “That meant it was originally blond or was an earlier body paired with a slab-board neck and green pickguard. The price was low enough that I knew I’d be safe regardless of the details.” Once in hand, Crawford disassembled the guitar, mostly to confirm the neck was from ’59. He noticed a light overspray and, with the exception of the low-E tuner and a couple saddle screws, the hardware was all original. The neck plate serial number was from ’59. But there was something odd… “The three-ply guard didn’t match the body, and the control cavity had the earlier shape without the shoulder for the additional pickguard screws; that meant it would not have been paired with an 11-hole guard.” Searching for a body date, he found “12/54” in the vibrato cavity, but he believed the neck and body had been paired for a very long time, given the paint transfer from the neck pocket to the neck. One theory was someone sent their ’54 for a replacement neck and/or a refin after Fender had started using rosewood fretboards in mid ’59. Such stories aren’t uncommon. “That said, I saw no indications it was a factory refin, though it is the proper two-tone sunburst,” he reasons. Things got even more interesting when he sent photos to a vintage dealer. “He not only confirmed the body as a ’54, but also that the pickups’ slightly taller D-string polepieces meant they were from ’54. Oddly, though, the polepieces had been ‘unstaggered’ – someone pushed the third and fourth nearly flush with the rest. I’ve asked around and haven’t been able to determine if that’s something you’d do if you were a lefty playing a right-handed guitar, but it’s something I hadn’t seen before. I did ask a collector friend, who told me it’s done to make the output more even; he called it ‘flat-pole tone.’ “My dealer friend also mentioned the impressions in the body under the pickguard. I hadn’t thought much of it – I presumed ‘J.H. ’69’ probably indicated the body had been refinished in ’69 by someone with the initials J.H. He noted that equipment used by Jimi Hendrix was sometimes given his initials or marked with ‘JHEXP.’ And then an amazing coincidence clicked – I’d purchased the guitar from a guy on Vashon Island, just across Puget Sound from Seattle.” Thus began a quest. “I had two leads – the seller, who hadn’t owned it long and didn’t take it apart, and an envelope in the case that mentioned ‘Jimmy Spakowsky’ and a ‘Doily party.’” He called the seller and sleuthed online, discovering the guitar had been owned by Michael Spakowsky, who (with his brother, Jimmy) was in a rock/rockabilly/country band called The Doily Brothers, which drew crowds in the Vashon area throughout the ’70s until Michael’s death in 2014. “Their biggest gig was opening for Alice Cooper at the Paramount in Seattle in 1972,” says Crawford. Michael Spakowsky went on to become a renowned maritime portrait painter who, in a 2012 interview with The Beachcomber, said he completed two pieces each week for 40 years and sold them locally for $600 or less. “Unfortunately, this is where the trail went cold, and my attempts to contact Michael’s next of kin have not been successful,” says Crawford, who now fronts the indie-rock band Loose Panic, which plays original music at gigs in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. His main stage guitar is a Novo Serus J in Ice Blue Metallic Sparkle because “…it looks amazing under the lights.” When he and the band are recording, he digs into his vintage instruments and mostly plugs them into a ’67 Deluxe Reverb and ’65 Super Reverb. What status does the Spakowsky Strat hold? “I play it regularly, though I haven’t had a chance to gig with it yet. I might take it next time because it’s punchy and cuts through a mix. It’s easy to find the in-between positions on the three-way, too, and each delivers the tones you’d expect. The neck shape is fairly typical for a ’59 – a bit narrower in the first few positions compared to a ’63 or ’64 – though not as narrow as the maple-board ’59 I previously owned. Also, it’s rounder and narrower than your typical ’62 to ’64 Strat. I recently had Billy Penn do a refret, so it now plays perfectly.” Do you have a collectible/vintage guitar with an interesting personal story that might be a good fit for “Classics?” If so, send an e-mail to [email protected] for details on how it could be featured. This article originally appeared in VG’s November 2025 issue. All copyrights are by the author and Vintage Guitar magazine. Unauthorized replication or use is strictly prohibited.