Presented by Fender
Score 4.5/6

Featuring Keith Richards, Bruce Springsteen, Vince Gill, Sheryl Crow, Andy Summers, Jack White, Joe Bonamassa, John 5, Julien Baker, and more. This new film celebrates 75 years of the world’s first mass-produced solid-body electric guitar – from the models that defined eras to the artists and builders shaping its future. Since 1946, Fender has revolutionized music and culture as one of the world’s leading musical instrument manufacturers, marketers, and distributors.

Above everything that could be said about it, this documentary, The Fender Telecaster: The One That Started It All, is a love letter to the Fender Telecaster. Before I get too far into things, I have to ask: is a collaboration album celebrating the 75th anniversary of the Telecaster going to be released? As a guy who watches a lot of movies and doesn’t play music, my top movies (in no particular order) featuring Fender guitars are The Blues Brothers, Eddie and the Cruisers movies, Crossroads, and of course Wayne’s World, and if we extend the list to guitars in general, we have to add Back to the Future. Okay, enough of me being a film nerd. The Fender Telecaster: The One That Started It All has recently been released on YouTube, now if you don’t have the time to watch an hour and seventeen-minute documentary on YouTube, check out Fender’s Talk Tele episodes; Keith Urban’s episode is definitely worth checking out. Now, considering that The One That Started It All doesn’t have an actual person credited as director, I feel that with The One That Started It All, Fender has opened itself up to the question: is this really a documentary? Though, if you press that line of questioning too hard, film studios like WWE Studios might have to answer questions about some questions about The Self-Destruction of the Ultimate Warrior. Though I’m sure the WWE would borrow a line a famous line from The Return of the Jedi: “What I told you was true, from a certain point of view”. It was interesting to see all of the musicians and all of the genres that they played. I knew some of the musicians featured and hadn’t heard most of the others. One of the great things about documentaries like this is discovering musicians that you haven’t heard of before. I loved the explanation of the evolution of the Telecaster, and it was interesting to hear that Leo Fender didn’t know how to play guitar. The lines about the toughness of Telecasters were funny, in a did it ever turn up in a Mythbusters episode kind of way. Considering I don’t know how to play a musical instrument I will admit there was a couple of times where I lost focus and had to rewind the documentary a couple of times. However, it was interesting hearing about the Telecaster’s influence on the creative process. But I think what might stay with me after watching this is probably the point that was made about Telecasters the versatility of Bread.