Music is one of the great triggers in the human mind.  It can immediately send someone to a place and time with colors, tastes, feelings and sensations as vivid as when they first happened.  For that reason, music never becomes dated.  It never becomes old.  If it was something that was a part of your life, it becomes alive again when you hear it.  If it was before your time, it is something new.  The vast majority of people living today were born in the last fifty years… the years of the Stratocaster and its effect on the music of the world.  It has touched us all.

As stated, this “documentary” is misnamed.  It’s more of an ongoing discovery process.  Our intent isn’t just to make a presentation that is informative, it’s to celebrate this amazing instrument with the help of the artists who have been touched by it.  Dick Dale, the founder of Surf Music, was not thinking of making history when he would play his Strat at the Rendezvous in Balboa, California.  But his recollections of that time and what this Strat meant to him are as contemporary as John Mayer talking about the first time he coveted his brother’s Strat and knew he had to have one.   Eric Clapton’s love for his Blackie II has the same passion that made Jimi Hendrix manipulate his Strat into a left handed instrument.  Buddy Holly’s demand for excellence in his instrument was no less than what Mark Knopfler expects from his Strat.

It would be interesting to put this “documentary” into a time capsule, to be opened in another fifty years.  You can bet that the artists of 2054 will identify with the intense devotion artists of today have toward the Stratocaster.

We intend to drive that passion into the audience.  Using the archival footage and, more importantly, the music background (both licensed and created) along with contemporary interviews, the viewer will be engaged and immersed in this world.  We make no secret of the fact that we want to attract as broad an audience as possible.  The Fender company has supported us in this venture not just because they want a promotional tool out there (Lord knows, the Strat doesn’t need it), but because they have pride in this amazing instrument and know that our thinking is along theirs: make it ENTERTAINING.  A celebration.  Not of a fifty years gone past, but of another fifty years to come with the Fender Stratocaster.