A 1959 Fender Telecaster, blond finish, white pickguard, maple fretboard, will set you back about thirty thousand dollars.

Jim Campilongo is known for playing a 1959 Telecaster, blond, white guard, maple board, and a few years ago Fender’s custom shop produced a Jim Campilongo Signature Model, based on the one he plays. It was priced at $4,499—not thirty thousand dollars, but four times the price of a regular Telecaster. The Custom Shop has fashioned signature models based on guitars made iconic by Jeff Beck; David Gilmour, of Pink Floyd; and Andy Summers, of the Police. The Campilongo signature model put him up there with them—anointed him a sultan of twang.

At the Living Room, in Williamsburg, the other Tuesday, Campilongo played the '59 Tele, not the signature model. I could see the guitar clearly—the body nicked and cut like a hockey rink, the fretboard worn to the color of chewed gum—because I was in the front of the audience.

In a sense, I was the audience. The Living Room is a black cubic space, with walls of dry-aged cinderblock, round café tables, and a capacity of about two hundred. At nine o’clock, eleven of us were there: Campilongo and the two other members of the Jim Campilongo Trio, three friends of theirs, three musicians from the band that had just played, an amply tattooed barmaid, a bald guy who set himself up in a chair at the lip of the stage, the better to observe the movements of the master’s hands, and me. As far as I could tell, I was the only person there who didn’t know the others.

Just after nine, Campilongo backed away from the woman he was talking with, skirted two empty tables, and stepped up onto the stage and past an upright piano without breaking his sentence. He is in his mid-fifties, tall and dashing, with thick gray hair. He had on jeans, a canary yellow shirt, a charcoal blazer, and an ascot; he looked “mod” and distinguished at the same time.

He slung the old Tele over his shoulder and flicked a Fender amp off standby. As the bassist and drummer—bearded guys in their twenties—set down a thumping two-step, he commenced to produce the gnarled, nasal, hot-wire sound of a Telecaster with the volume and tone pots wide open. There it was: the stinging treble, the spooky overtones, the snap and boom of the steel strings as Campilongo picked and plucked and bent them every which way with his fingers and thumb. We were the barest approximation of an audience, but he was showing off for us already: bending notes, touching the strings lightly to produce harmonics, twisting a tuning peg down and then up again to make the guitar burp like a baby.

The Telecaster, first issued as the Broadcaster, in 1950, was the first mass-produced electric guitar, and here was a Telecaster being played as well as it can. I hadn’t expected a command performance. Did it matter that there were so few of us? It did, and as I listened and sipped a pint of Guinness, I riffed ruminatively around the experience. This was a performer’s bad dream: The Night Nobody Came. It was an inadvertent return to a musical state of nature, where combos using straight-up guitars and satchel-size amps played in small rooms for their friends and neighbors. It was a slice of things to come—clear evidence of the sapping of the long, rich, vibrant New York ecology of live performance by the Internet and the real-estate market.

It was also the aficionado’s experience turned inside out. Usually you hear somebody’s music, take an interest, and learn more about the musician as your interest deepens. Not so with Jim Campilongo and me. In a sense, I really am his audience: a man in middle age whose living room is furnished with a lot of records and a custom Tele. Through the cult of the Tele—zealously promulgated in guitar shops, on Internet talkboards, and on YouTube—I had come to know an awful lot about Campilongo’s approach. But that cult is devoted to gear and technique, to sounds and riffs, to such an extreme that I had come to know Campilongo’s approach without knowing his music—without ever hearing it, really. When I arrived at the club I couldn’t name a single song he was known for. I’d hadn’t heard him play a song all the way through.

Now the sultan of twang was ten feet away, karate-chopping the Tele with his right hand. I was already a disciple, but I was hearing him for the first time.

The temple of the Telecaster in New York City is Carmine Street Guitars, run by the luthier Rick Kelly, who hand-makes Tele-style instruments out of wood reclaimed from such places as Chumleys Tavern, the Chelsea Hotel, and 184 Bowery, where Jim Jarmusch replaced the pine roofbeams in his loft a few years ago.

I own a Kelly T-style (pine body from Chumleys, copper pickguard, fir neck from the Chelsea Hotel), and in the time between when I put down a deposit and when I picked up the guitar, I dropped in on Rick’s shop dozens of times. There I was versed in the catechism of the Carmine Street sect (thick neck good, thin neck bad; low-wind pickups better than overwound ones) and familiarized with its pantheon. There are clippings taped to the window of Lou Reed, Richard Thompson, and Bill Frisell, all playing Kelly T-style guitars, and a tattered poster for Jim Campilongo’s Monday residency at the Living Room.

The Living Room, which opened on the Lower East Side, in 1997, became known for its out-of-town vibe, more Austin than Alphabet City—saffron-colored curtains, a battered piano, a counter where brownies and vinyl LPs were for sale—and it became a destination for actual out-of-towners after Norah Jones, who broke into the New York scene there after moving to the city from Texas, won eight Grammy Awards in 2003 for her album "Come Away with Me."

Campilongo began a weekly residency at the Living Room in 2005, and for the next eight years he played there Monday nights unless other work—say, a tour with Jones’s country-rock band, the Little Willies—kept him out of town. He would load Tele, amp, and stompboxes in the trunk of a car and ride from his apartment in Brooklyn to his home away from home. The residency lent him the aura of the virtuoso next door, one you could hear up close and shake hands with afterward. Musicians better known than he—Lou Reed, Emmylou Harris, Bonnie Raitt—showed up and joined in. As the Internet became a roost for musicians playing lo-fi videos, he took up residence there in a way that communicated the up-close, down-home ethic digitally. For every fan video shot at the Living Room, there’s one of him demonstrating his licks and gear in an even smaller venue (and links to these are posted on the Tele cult’s talkboard, tdpri.com). There he is testifying on behalf of a boost pedal from the Distillery. There he is working up the picker’s standard “Mister Sandman” on a rare 1952 Telecaster (serial number 0813) owned by a guy who invites people to come and play it for a series called “Live from My Living Room.” There he is describing the features of his signature model—top-loader bridge, “lip-less” bridge plate—in what appears to be his own living room. Scrolling through the YouTube results for a search of his name, you can see his hair color change abruptly from black to gray circa 2010—the way the Telecaster’s standard fretboard changed abruptly from maple to rosewood in mid-’59—but the stronger impression is of continuity, of the day-to-day effort put in by a working musician who plays all the time and sometimes gets paid.