It's like having Antiques Road Show at your fingertips.
There's this guitar that my mom let me take last year, as I was once again muttering about learning guitar. Of all the instruments - normal and exotic - I play, I've always felt a deficiency for not having given guitar a try. It's somehow un-american or something.
Anyway, when I opened the case, I found the guitar strung tight, with (what look to be) heavy steel strings. Cursing a bit, I pulled it out and started giving a closer inspection. It turns out that not only were the strings so tight that they had pulled the bridge pins sideways, but the top looked like it may have gotten a small bulge. And on even closer inspection, right where the bridge joins the wood, the force was enough to cause the wood to begin to splinter and separate.
So much for learning the guitar on this instrument, at least for now.
Well, the semester just ended, and I've got a little more flexible time on my hands (a lot of which I am using to delete the thousands of "anal spycam" comment spams we've been getting, but that's another story), so I decided to think about getting the thing fixed. I know a luthier, but this is someone who crafts beautiful multi-thousand dollar works of art, and I've been kind of embarrassed to bring up my little relic with a guy I only know casually. On the other hand, chatting with musician friends, bringing up the words "vintage Gibson acoustic" made a few of them get a little drool-y thinking that I might have a Hummingbird or something. Hell, I even got a little excited myself thinking that at minimum, the instrument might be worth enough to make getting it fixed worthwhile. The only starting information I had was that my mother bought this guitar sometime between my siblings' births (starting in 1954) and mine (1968).
Enter the intertubes.
The Gibson site (not very useful) was my starting point. I thought that it would be a simple matter to plug in the serial number and at least get a ballpark year, or model. Those of you who know guitars are laughing at me right now, I know. For the uninitiated, Gibson has used several number designations on their guitars over the last century, and only some of them relate to model and year. Of those, only the ones after 1975 are searchable on the Gibson website.
On to obsessive collectors and internet capitalists! Seriously, these are the people who know the information, have compiled it, and are willing to share it on their websites, crossed referenced with helpful photos and diagrams. Scanning a bunch of photos of guitars from the 1950s and 1960s wasn't very helpful. Again, people who know guitars are laughing at me, because they know the vast range of models available.
It turns out that there is a way to match your serial number to a rough time period. Given what I knew about the guitar in terms of birth order, and having the six digit number stamped on the back of the pegboard, within a certain range, I figured that this instrument was from 1966.
1966, when my mom was 35 and had 3 middle school aged children, but as of yet no caboose. Plenty of time to take up a new hobby.
Even within the year 1966, however, I wasn't finding anything in pictures that looked like my mom's guitar. I started thinking that maybe this was a rare thing indeed, and that it really might be worth fixing.
Once again, those of you who know guitars are laughing at me. Another thing I have since figured out doing research about guitars on the internet, is that the more exotic and valuable they are, the more likely you are to find photos of them. Being highly coveted and hard to get, they exist only in pictures for most people, and those that have them are eager to display their prizes.
At this point I got out the flashlight, and started peering inside again, looking for something, anything that might help me further narrow the search. On first inspection I saw something that looked like a smudge, but this time, looking closer and quinting it looked like the word "LOO" had been stamped inside the guitar.
A clue!
Knowing that there was an L-series, I started looking through pictures. There are some really nice Ls, with great tone, beautiful work, and obviously, worth getting fixed. There is an L00 from 1936. Wow. I decided to download the Blue Book for vintage Gibson acoustics. And what I found was a picture of my mom's guitar, and a full description.
LG-0 - mahogany top, round soundhole, black pickguard, bound body, 1 stripe rosette, mahogany back/sides/neck, 14/20 fret rosewood fingerboard with pearl dot inlay, rosewood straight bridge with pearl dot inlay, white bridge pins, blackface peghead with screened logo, 3 per side nickel tuners with plastic buttons. Available in Natural finish. Mfd. 1958 to 1974.
And then the bad news. Average value? $250-$300, maybe $500 in mint condition.
Even so, it was my mom's guitar, and I wanted to have it fixed so I could I could play it, and for sentimental reasons. My mom got this guitar when she was about my current age, right before she had me. I remember looking at the guitar in its case - but not being allowed to pick it up - when I was very small. She kept it in her cedar closet. I can't ever remembering hearing my mom play the guitar, but I remember the red felt on the inside of the case, and the way it smelled like wood and oil. And I remember that it had no marks or smudges or scratches or anything on it. My mom's a perfectionist that way. She also would iron things that no other human would, with perfect creases and starch. But through the years, having been loaned to my brother and my nephew, the guitar has picked up a few ding and scratches, but remarkably few. It's as if the guitar was protected by my mother's will. Or more likely, we all know what happens when you violate the mom rules of preservation of things bought with hard earned money. Growing up in the 1930s with a single mother made my mother very thrifty, and to this day concerned about preserving things just so.
Except that whoever had their hands on the guitar last not only left it strung tight, but with the wrong strings.
In my research one of the things I found was that this guitar is a student model, not one of the best products Gibson ever made. Part of what made it accessible is that these were extremely light instruments, easy to handle and use. As a consequence, they were delicate - which strikes me as strange for a student model - particularly in terms of their susceptibility to torque. That is, some of the internet commentary I read says that the LG-0 should only ever be strung with extra-light or light (at the very most) strings, because their construction is such that they will literally come apart at the seams if put under the stress of being strung tight with heavy strings. In addition, they are not solid wood flat tops. Kindly, this means that their surface is veneer. Less kind (OK, snobbish) guitar aficionado sites mention the "p" word: plywood. Thus, my mother's pretty little guitar behaved as expected when put away with tight steel strings, something she was never designed for, and resisted for years (I say this because those strings were used, and thus the instrument had been played with them on there) until put away, still stretched to the limit.
So here I am with this guitar, which it turns out, isn't so great, but I'd still like to get fixed it I can, not least to have something on which to finally learn to play. If it's not prohibitively expensive, I think I'll ask around and see if anyone can fix it without killing my wallet or the tone of the guitar.
I called my mom, excited to share all the news about the information I had gathered, information that had been lost to the mists of time. "Before anything else," I asked her, "tell me if you bought this guitar in 1966." She said that sounded about right. I then went on to tell her all about my research, what I had found, and how I had gone about it, finally determining what the guitar was, and why what happened had happened. Now, I remember her guarding this guitar, keeping it safe and pristine, nestled in its case. So what she said surprised me. She said that maybe I could donate it to the school. After all, "I only paid eighty bucks for it."
Posted by binky at May 19, 2007 09:24 AM | TrackBack | Posted to Music | Random Thoughts