07.14.11

Another long day among the foreign-made guitars

Posted in Made in China, Rock 'n' Roll at 12:50 pm by George Smith

Yesterday I foolishly decided to take an old Gibson SG to Pasadena’s Guitar Center.

The idea, since I don’t use it very much anymore and it’s an old American-made piece when Gibson was still in Michigan, was to trade it in for something new.

Big mistake. GC Pasadena spent an hour and half photographing it digitally, then sending them off to the Hollywood store for consultation. All for the sake of an offer that wasn’t worth making.

It’s a Gibson SG, stamped as a Les Paul Custom on its truss rod cover plate, with all original hardware. And it plays wonderfully.

It is obviously from 1979 — that is, it looks great but it also appears well played. And as fairly common for thin neck SGs of this age it has a minor, almost imperceptible, neck repair near the tuning peg head.

Whatever that damage was it had happened to the guitar before I bought it in 1986. And the instrument performed perfectly at all dive bars it was asked to in the Lehigh Valley in subsequent years.

What I hadn’t taken into account, and what I’d forgotten I’d written about on this blog, was that instrument valuation, like everything else in the US, has turned into a racket. One in which only certain pieces, never or almost never played — hidden away in closets, are coveted appreciating assets for various among the plutocracy and those serving it.

You know, the annoying guys — lawyers, semi-high end people in Internet businesses, early retirees, assorted shoeshine boys to the heads of investment firms, the types you sometimes meet at a show in a high-rent place where they serve expensive drinks.

“I used to play guitar a lot and I have …” they always say, wanting to get into a penis-measuring contest before you turn to the amp and make like you’re checking connections until they go away.

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Tied with this was the always-on observation that the American made guitars are now all for the plutocracy. You go into the store and the US pieces worth having are all hung up on the wall out of reach without help, or behind the counter, or in the special glass-walled room where you can be kept under observation.

The off-shored stuff, however, is for you.

So, too, you see the big Fender amps — like some Frontman model kind of dressed up to look sort of like a Fender Twin — out for the peons.

In the back among the used gear is a ’74 Fender Twin, really beat-up looking from the time when CBS owned the company, priced among the pearls, almost three times the amount of the new foreign-made stuff.

There are, unfortunately, no pictures of the old Fender manufacturing facility after it was expanded by CBS in California during the early Seventies. And that’s a shame because it actually employed a lot of people. As opposed to employing a lot of people in China and Mexico.

An aerial view of it in “The Soul of Tone,” a coffee table book on Fender, shows old pre-CBS Fender filling nine medium-sized warehouse-type buildings. CBS then immediately doubled the company’s manufacturing floor space.

Imagine that!

With a little stroll across the floor we come to the rack of Fender Telecasters. Hidden among them is one US-made model distinguished immediately by its price above 1k.

Everything else is distributed between Chinese and Mexican origin, the latter being the new middle-market price point.

My friend asks me where they’re all made. I tell him to look at the headstock or the serial number.

I point out a Telecaster with a “Nashville Deluxe” sticker on it. It’s worked as a premium model for those who can’t afford premiums, a non-standard Tele with three pickups instead of the usual two.

My friend, taking my tutorial, looks at the headstock for the tip-off.

“Nashville Deluxe — Made in Mexico,” he laughs.

Not good enough for the plutocrats. Want it?

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