Spotted a funny post at the Washington City Paper about finding an ad on Craigslist for a vintage 1957 Gibson Les Paul that the seller is offering for $145,000. Wow! But if you don’t have that amount of cash, you can see and play the vintage guitar for about an hour for just $500. Is that asking too much?
Huey Long was an original member of the Ink Spots and is now 103-years old. He’s also in poor health these days and recently fractured his hip bone. But at least now he has his guitar back.
Long had his custom-made D’Angelico acoustic guitar returned to him after a court order this week in a lawsuit he filed against film maker Nancy Tankelson. She was making a documentary about Long’s life and had been given the guitar a while back for use in her work, but she refused to give it back when he asked.
Thankfully, though, the court sided with Long and the guitar was returned to him yesterday. The Houston Chronicle has a video of his attorney bringing the instrument to the hospital, and it is a beautiful guitar. Long said in the lawsuit the D’Angelico, which he purchased in 1944, is worth more than $40,000.
Like a lot of people out there, I tend to think of retail chains like Guitar Center as evil and monolithic corporations. Maybe they’re necessary evil and monolithic corporations depending on where you live, but evil and monolithic nonetheless.
Then I saw where Guitar Center is putting out a CD featuring tracks by GC employees. We all know that a lot of the people working at GC are guitar players or other musicians who would much rather be doing something else, so this is kind of a cool thing to give them a shot at national exposure.
And then I saw where one of the tracks on this CD is actually by the Smashing Pumpkins. According to Billboard, the band helped pick the songs on the CD and then they included the song “SuperChrist” as a featured track. Billy Corgan told the magazine that even though they perform the song live, “SuperChrist” didn’t make the cut on their 2007 Zeitgeist because “We didn’t feel we understood the song.”
You wrote the song, correct? And you didn’t “understand” it?
The CD from Guitar Center goes on sale at a GC near you.
Spotted a pretty unique auction on eBay today for a 1966 Standel Custom Deluxe guitar. Standel was better known as an amplifier maker that started back in the 1950s, but the company branched out into the guitar business through a collaboration with Mosrite Guitars’ Semie Moseley.
The Standel Custom, introduced in 1966, does bear a striking resemblance to a Mosrite guitar. According to a piece in Guitar Player, it also featured a bridge and tailpiece mounted together on a piece of sheet metal (”nearly indestructible”) and had polepiece-less, low-output pickups.
If you plug one of these guitars into a Fender amp, there is hardly any sound. In fact, you can turn the amp up to 10, and it still won’t be very loud. This has prompted a few guitar snobs to proclaim Standels as “weak” sounding. However, there was a method to Crooks’ madness, as Standel’s amplifiers were designed for low-output pickups. So when you plug this guitar into a Standel amp, a gloriously clean, loud, and ringing tone emerges. Think of Les Paul’s direct-into-the-board tone, Wes Montgomery thumbing octaves into his solid-state Standel amp, or the squeaky-clean stylings of Chet Atkins, and you’ll get the idea.
Interesting sounding stuff.
As for the axe on eBay, the seller says it comes with the original case but is missing the whammy bar. The auction for this rare vintage guitar runs until March 6.
It’s Friday and you need something to waste away the hours in your cubicle until the weekend starts. Gibson Guitars blogger Aaron Lefkove is here to help. Aaron posted yesterday a collection of guitar-related YouTube videos (the Guitarmageddon he calls it) which should do the trick. He has Jean Baudin’s double-axe take on the Super Mario Theme, as well as the vocal effects stylings of Michael Winslow tackling Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin. My favorite, though, is Gerry Phillips playing Iron Maiden’s “The Trooper” with his hands.
Up against three songs from the movie Enchanted, I didn’t think “Falling Slowly” from the indie film Once had a busker’s chance in Dublin of winning an Oscar last night, but somehow the voters saw fit to reward the little film with an Academy Award.
If you haven’t seen Once yet, it is well worth the Netflix rental: A sweet little movie about musicians in Ireland coming together to make their dreams of recording an album come true.
I was surprised, though, to see Glen Hansard performing the song with the same beaten-up guitar he played throughout the movie. I thought maybe it was just a prop, but apparently it isn’t. You’d think now with an Oscar-winning song he might be able to afford a new one.
I’m not usually an advocate of spending a weekend or a holiday taking a tour of a factory; I figure if you’re taking a break from your day job, the last thing you want to do is go see other people at theirs. But if the factory in question is where they build Martin guitars then I might make an exception.
The New York Times has a good write up on touring the C.F. Martin factory in Nazareth, PA, but mostly for the characters you’re likely to meet there: hardcore guitar geeks and music fans. The tour takes in the whole manufacturing process, from soaking the wood through tot he finished product. The factory also includes a guitar museum and a gift shop.
My question is, do you get free samples at the end of the tour?
If you happen to be anywhere within driving distance of Waterloo, IA, this weekend and you have a hankering to hear some pedal steel guitars, you might want to take a road trip to the Northeast Iowa Steel Guitar Show.
The festival, which kicks off today with a free informal jam session, features more than 30 musicians performing on Saturday and Sunday at the Electric Park Ballroom. Among those slated to play are Ron Elliot and DeWitt “Scotty” Scott. Admission is just $10 a day and part of the proceeds will be used for scholarships at Jump Start Academy.
For more information, check out the festival web site.
Forget about the bake sale to raise money, one magnet school in Florida puts on a regular concert to keep its music program going.
The Douglas Anderson School of the Arts in Jacksonville has been raising funds for 15 years with an annual concert called the Great Guitar Gathering, which now draws big names and big crowds. This year the school is putting on the show at a 1,900-seat theatre instead of the school’s auditorium.
This year’s concert will feature performances by classical guitarist Ben Verdery and Pierre Bensusan, a virtuoso player from France. Here’s a small sample of one of his performances.
For more information about the Great Guitar Gathering concert, check out this post from Jacksonville.com.
I can’t count the number of “Best Guitarists” lists I’ve ever seen, but I’m not sure that the latest attempt by Gigwise to enumerate the top 50 players of all time would crack my top 10.
The list does have all the usual suspects — Eric Clapton, Keith Richards, Jimmy Page — crowded into the top 10 with Jimi Hendrix reigning supreme at #1, but I’m not sure how anyone can rank Kirk Hammett the #5 best guitar player of all time. (Unless the list was compiled by Kirk’s mum.) I would also question the inclusion of Matt Bellamy of Muse (#19) ahead of Eddie Van Halen (#26), Carlos Santana (#24), and Slash (#21).
And then of course there are the omissions. Chet Atkins and Les Paul, legendary players who helped redefine the instrument, failed to make Gigwise’s top 50, yet there’s Jack White at #29. (Hey, I like the White Stripes as much as the next guy, but this is supposed to be the top 50 guitar players … ever!) No Billy Gibbons. No John Lee Hooker.
And then there’s Vernon Reid — or rather, there’s not Vernon Reid on this list — who always makes my personal top 10.
How do you not have this guy on your list, Gigwise?
