An extraordinary madeleine
June 1, 2016 1:07 PM   Subscribe

A few months ago, I opened an email that changed my life. I vaguely remembered an urban myth about a man who throws his wedding ring into the ocean. Ten years later, he sits down to eat fish at a local restaurant, cuts open the fish and there it is. That’s how I felt when I clicked on an email from someone I didn’t know called Keith Rushton. What he said to me was this: “I’ve got your electric guitar.”
The Guardian's film critic Peter Bradshaw got rid of the guitar he’d loved as a teenager during a clearout and regretted it instantly. He thought he’d never see it again—then an email arrived ...
posted by Sonny Jim (20 comments total) 14 users marked this as a favorite
 
I fear for the guy because some terrible karmic compensation must be out there waiting for him, to even the books. He pitched a perfectly good guitar into the garbage and the only thing I can say in his favor is, he seems to realize that he deserves nothing,
posted by thelonius at 1:16 PM on June 1, 2016 [4 favorites]


Aw, I have sympathy for him because I've felt that same desperate frenzy when faced with having too much stuff. For me, mostly when moving, but there's a point where you just want to get rid of stuff, and you just don't have any time or energy to deal with finding someone who wants it. If you are in a house you can just put stuff out by the curb with a sign, but if you are in an apartment sometimes it's just easier to pitch stuff.
posted by tavella at 1:22 PM on June 1, 2016 [4 favorites]


My first non-Sears electric guitar was a Kramer, which I bought used around the time when Eddie Van Halen was still big and still played a Kramer. He switched to Music Man not too long afterwards. I played the shit out of that thing between the ages of 17 and 22, probably always high and always very badly. I did love it though.

At one point the guitar fell and the neck broke right around the headstock. I managed to glue it and it was still playable. It broke again, and I glued it again. After the third time it broke I took it to a music shop. They said something about it not being worth it to fix it. I stripped the tuners off the headstock (four of them eventually wound up in a ukulele I made for the MeFi Secret Quansar) and kept the body of the guitar around for years in a box of other "junk" in my garage. It had three pickups (two humbuckers and a single coil, I think) and a Floyd Rose tremolo.

One day I cleaned the garage. I picked up the guitar body and thought "what the hell am I going to do with this?" and tossed it. It admittedly didn't have much value, the pickups and other parts were a bit rusty, though I'm sure they could have been cleaned.

Now I know what's involved in replacing a neck, just four screws. I could have re-used the body and/or all the parts. I am constantly regretting throwing that body away.

Sadly, it didn't have a label on it and it is gone forever.
posted by bondcliff at 1:41 PM on June 1, 2016 [1 favorite]


I keep hoping something like this will happen with my stolen 1984 Yamaha SBG-3000. Alas...
posted by j_curiouser at 1:56 PM on June 1, 2016 [1 favorite]


The only identifier I have on mine, other than a small golden logo drawn near the bridge, is a verse from a Mission of Burma song in the inside of the tremolo cover. Not a chance I'd recover it.
posted by lmfsilva at 2:03 PM on June 1, 2016 [2 favorites]


reflecting on my various crimes against guitars over my life, I guess I should not judge
posted by thelonius at 2:15 PM on June 1, 2016 [2 favorites]


I'm not really understanding this guy. It's not like he threw away an actual vintage Gibson, and there are inexpensive Les Paul copies aplenty available. Why didn't he just get a new one and quit pining over the old one?
posted by Greg_Ace at 2:17 PM on June 1, 2016


Glad he's rocking again, but guitar brands like Columbus in the 80s were awful and deserved to be thrown in the bin.
posted by Coda Tronca at 2:32 PM on June 1, 2016 [1 favorite]


He threw away a painstakingly made Japanese copy of a vintage Les Paul from the 1970s. These are now known as "lawsuit guitars" because Gibson sued various Japanese guitar makers in the 1970s to enjoin their production of "knockoff" guitars branded as "Columbus" Les Paul Gibsons or "Elektra" Howard Roberts Epiphones, for example. These guitars were as good or better than the American Gibson-Epiphones of the same vintage--not at all in the same class as Indonesian made Epiphone Les Pauls available today, which are merchandised by the Gibson USA company.
posted by rdone at 2:36 PM on June 1, 2016 [7 favorites]


My sister's house was robbed a few years ago, and the burglars took, among other things, my brother-in-law's beloved vintage saxophone, which had been a bar mitzvah present from his now-deceased parents in the early 1960s. He spent the next year lurking on EBay looking for it; thought he found it at one point, but the seller got spooked and took the listing down, and A wasn't able to get the local cops interested.

I cannot imagine his joy if he were to be reunited with that instrument.
posted by suelac at 2:54 PM on June 1, 2016 [1 favorite]


Wow, tough crowd. I don't think it had so much to do with the value (or lack thereof) of the guitar as it did that specific guitar itself. My first electric was a totally nondescript Squier Stratocaster that I traded in towards a much, much nicer guitar only a couple of years later... it was kind of a crappy guitar and I've never regretted letting it go, but I'm sentimental enough that I can easily imagine getting all verklempt if it somehow came back to me even though. When I was having an early/mild midlife crisis episode a couple of years ago I did the next best thing, which was to buy a Squier Strat off of craigslist. Except my new one turned out to be a really nice instrument.

I'd love to be reunited with the only instrument I ever actually finished building, a fretted cigar box guitar of no particular aesthetic, musical, or monetary value that was linked from a MetaFilter FPP back when I was still a lurker, and stolen out of my unlocked truck in my driveway literally the day after I finished building it five years ago. I'm sure the thief got laughed out of a pawnshop with it and chucked it in a dumpster.
posted by usonian at 3:03 PM on June 1, 2016 [3 favorites]


Yeah, I took him to be lamenting its loss because it connected him to his youthful self and rock desires, not because it was all that valuable of a guitar
posted by thelonius at 3:05 PM on June 1, 2016 [2 favorites]


He pitched a perfectly good guitar

Here's hoping he holds it like a baby in his arms, and never lets it come to any harm.
posted by TedW at 5:55 PM on June 1, 2016 [2 favorites]


good to see someone caught that!
posted by thelonius at 8:04 PM on June 1, 2016


Have definitely pitched a 1978 Telecaster Deluxe across a stage before, but---getting rid of it? Hells naw.
posted by resurrexit at 8:06 PM on June 1, 2016


Someone once told me of a Japanese word for an act of deliberate self-sabotage (like, the strange pull I have sometimes to toss my house keys down a drain) that overcome us occasionally. I think throwing beloved items out comes into it - doesn't everyone have something they threw aside in an impetuous moment and never recovered again, that still brings a tender pang to the heart-area? (Mine is a jade necklace my mother gave me, that I literally threw in the garden.)
posted by Gin and Broadband at 11:28 PM on June 1, 2016 [2 favorites]


That's an utterly fair price to pay to have your guitar restored, and kept in storage for 20 years.
posted by Too-Ticky at 3:41 AM on June 2, 2016


They said something about it not being worth it to fix it. I stripped the tuners off the headstock (four of them eventually wound up in a ukulele I made for the MeFi Secret Quansar)

You made a ukelele for your Secret Quonsar? Just so you know, you will be my secret quonsar this year, because I will be bribing the quonczar whatever is necessary to make this happen. I can't wait to see what I get.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 11:32 AM on June 2, 2016 [1 favorite]


Warning guitar pedantry/nerdry ahead:

He threw away a painstakingly made Japanese copy of a vintage Les Paul from the 1970s.

Maybe, maybe not - at least as far as "painstakingly made" goes. Part of the reason Japanese guitars were often less expensive than US-made guitars was a higher level of automation in manufacturing - they could make good instruments with less skilled labor.

These are now known as "lawsuit guitars" because Gibson sued various Japanese guitar makers in the 1970s

Pre-Internet, and especially pre-ebay, "lawsuit guitars" mostly referred to the copies of Fender or Gibson guitars made in Japan by the Hoshino Gakki Gen Company, sold in the US under the brand name "Ibanez." As far as I have ever been able to discover, Ibanez was the only company actually sued by a US manufacturer, although other companies may have been sent C&D notices over logo scripts or guitar names.

Link to the Ibanez "Lawsuit" history.

Some of the better-known/better-made Japanese copies by other companies (Tokai, Burny/Fernandes) were also sometimes known as "lawsuit" guitars, although these companies were never actually sued.

Many of these were actually quite good, especially for the price compared to what Fender & Gibson (who were both suffering through a variety of manufacturing & management problems during the 70's and early 80's) were producing. (I own an Ibanez Rocket Roll Sr. that is just fantastic.) So word got out among players that you could get a darn good clone for a lot less than a US "name" brand.

As word spread further and time went on, prices for these "lawsuit" guitars started to rise, partly because most Japanese companies had moved on to more original designs, or altered the designs enough to prevent legal trouble, and the "exact clone" guitars were no longer made. Unscrupulous and/or ill-informed used-guitar sellers, especially on ebay, noticed that these relatively obscure guitars were commanding relatively high prices, and started calling virtually any and every guitar made in Japan between about 1968 and 1985 a "lawsuit" guitar - even if they didn't particularly resemble a US company's guitar. To the point where "lawsuit guitar" is a pretty meaningless term these days.

The other complication when considering Japanese-made guitars is that most of the factories produced guitars for or exported guitars under multiple brands (ex: FujiGen Co.), and record-keeping was not exactly meticulous. Plus, many of the brands had different models with different quality of construction, so one "Brand X lawsuit" guitar might be excellent, while another "Brand X lawsuit" guitar might be made out of, literally, plywood. (I had a Crestline "Les Paul" that I traded away for an Iain M. Banks book, and I definitely got the better end of the deal there.)

This page suggests that Columbus guitars were made by the Matsumoku Company, which in turn suggests that the author's guitar probably was at least better than average. OTOH, most Googling about the brand suggests about a 50-50 split between "awful junk" and "best cheap axe I ever had", so who knows? It seems to have been a UK-only brand, and I don't think the UK has gotten quite as obsessive about obscure guitars as the US market.


In any case, after all that, yeah, the piece was far more about the guitar as symbol than the guitar as guitar.
posted by soundguy99 at 4:03 PM on June 2, 2016 [3 favorites]


Someone once told me of a Japanese word for an act of deliberate self-sabotage (like, the strange pull I have sometimes to toss my house keys down a drain) that overcome us occasionally.

Not sure about Japanese, but you seem to be describing the imp of the perverse.
posted by TedW at 4:48 PM on June 6, 2016 [1 favorite]


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