Dead Guitar
When I was in a band I was the designated driver for our bass player, who lived in a nearby town and didn't drive. I'd pick him up, take him to rehearsals, during the drive we'd play music that we liked on my in-car cassette player, he got me into The Chameleons, I got him into The Church.
The bass player had an old school friend he wanted me to meet. This friend had been a professional musician since he left school. I'd never heard of his band, but they had toured Europe a lot and had released a couple of albums. One day he organised a meetup, so I drove down, picked him up and he directed me to this guy's house.
It was a newly built house in the style of a Georgian mansion in the middle of an empty field. Big, tall windows (double glazed) and a covered porch with columns, it was huge. I had never been in a house with fucking columns, man.
Inside was even crazier, there were two suits of armour in the massive hallway, either side of a central stairway that split off in two directions. The house design was firmly of that belonging to the lord of the manor in the 1800s, but it was brand new.
Weird.
We went up to the guy's bedroom which was about the size of my parents' house. In this room he had a double bed, two sofas, a pool table and loads of amplifiers and guitar cases just tossed around the place. It smelled strongly of stake cigarettes and patchouli oil.
We talked about music and he showed me a photo album of his band's adventures. I asked why they stopped and he went a bit quiet. I looked behind the sofa we were sitting on and behind it were three guitar cases, on top of which was a semi-acoustic Gibson. It looked like the one on the cover of Bebop Deluxe's album Sunburst Finish, but after it had been set alight and then left out in the rain.
The strings were solid rust, all the chrome had oxidised and the fretboard was caked in filth. It looked like he'd last played it whilst attempting an Army assault course and then just lobbed it behind his sofa for 10 years.
"Do you ever play this?" I asked.
"Not since I came off the road," he replied.
"Do you want to sell it?" I ventured.
"Yes?" he sort of answered. So I offered him £100 - which was a decent amount back then.
"Let me think about it" he said. I commented that it would be a shame for a nice instrument like that to remain neglected, I could spruce it up and make use of it, give it some love.
"I'll get back to you" he said.
I never heard from him again. After a while I enquired about him with the bass player and was told that we had caught him on a fragile day and he had said yes to selling his guitar because he didn't want any confrontation. Apparently The Road had taken its toll on him, mentally.
It boggled my mind that a guy with about 50 musty guitar cases was reluctant to offload an absolute wreck of a guitar for a reasonable price. How could he have so little regard for so many instruments I could never, on my measly wage, ever afford? Strange.
I wonder what he's up to now...