Collecting Vintage Guitars: Everything You Need to Know About Selecting the Ultimate Functional Design Object The beginner’s guide, courtesy of Nashville's George Gruhn—the ne plus ultra of high-end vintage guitar dealers.
We’ve drawn all the venom from the phrase, painful drop by painful drop. We’ve applied it to presidents, cardiologists, weathermen. Crammed it into every help-wanted ad for a barista or programmer or call-center employee. It’s easy to forget that “rock star” once truly meant something.
Think back to the barbaric yawp of Robert Plant or Axl Rose, when the rock star occupied a particular societal apex not seen before or since. Rich as Rockefeller, famous as any actor, and more desirable than either because he answered only to his fearsomely rebellious and youthful self. He blazed fiercely but briefly, then he was replaced. Anybody could be next. All you needed was a guitar, preferably an electric one that could be cranked into an overdriven scream by a stack of Marshall amplifiers.
Vintage V300 Acoustic Folk Guitar
The first electric guitars appeared shortly after World War II, but the apogee of development and craftsmanship occurred in the latter half of the 1950s. “I opened my shop forty-eight years ago, ” says George Gruhn, “and the guitars that I’m looking for now are the same ones I was looking for then.” Gruhn, widely considered the dean of the guitar-collecting hobby, operates Gruhn Guitars in Nashville, ground zero for the stratospheric high end of vintage-guitar deals.
He says that management and ownership changes at major American guitar makers, coupled with skyrocketing demand that could not be fulfilled by building instruments the old-fashioned way, essentially killed the quality of guitars during the 1960s and 1970s. Musicians like Eric Clapton and Michael Bloomfield responded by walking into pawnshops and buying sunburst-finish Gibson Les Pauls made from 1958 through 1960. A blurry photograph of a “Burst” Gibson on the back of the 1964 album Bluesbreakers with Eric Clapton launched the vintage-guitar craze.
By 2007, speculators had raised the price of those guitars into the low seven figures. The book “Million Dollar Les Paul” by Tony Bacon tells stories of cash-only transactions in dimly-lit parking lots and a shadow industry devoted to the counterfeiting of Bursts. The market correction that occurred afterwards returned some sanity to the hobby, but prices are still high enough to daunt all but the most committed players.
Black 62 Strat Style Sx Vintage Electric Guitar
It only takes a few minutes with a genuine vintage Fender or Gibson to understand why. They were made with wood from old-growth forests, seasoned in open-air workrooms for decades. Give the body of a 1959 Les Paul a rap with your knuckle, and you can feel the sympathetic vibration at the top of the headstock. According to Gruhn, the guitars made today have largely returned to the standards of assembly quality found in the 1950s, “but the wood isn’t there.”
“This is all newly grown wood, heavily restricted by import regulations, dried artificially in a kiln, ” says Gruhn. “The tone isn’t the same.”
The best part of a vintage guitar? Unlike a vintage automobile or a piece of antique furniture, an old Les Paul is still capable of rocking as hard as it did in the hands of Keith Richards or Jimmy Page. Stored and handled correctly, that should be just as true fifty years from now as it was fifty years ago. Perhaps that’s why Gruhn is seeing an increase in sales, despite the fact that many of the oldest Baby Boomers are no longer actively adding to their collections.
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Guided by Mr. Gruhn, we’ve picked three top-shelf vintage electric guitars covering the spectrum from classic to glam. All of them would be fine additions to an existing collection, or investment-grade pieces for a budding connoisseur. And any of them will make you feel like a rock star, regardless of your day job.
The standard-bearer: 1959 Les Paul “Burst” Approximately 1, 400 sunburst Les Pauls were made between 1958 and 1960. Less than 650 of them were 1959 models, which had bigger, more playable frets than the 1958 “Lester” but a more comfortable neck than the 1960 version. Even the roughest examples will be worth well over $100, 000. Convincing fakes outnumber originals, so take your time and buy an example with a few decades’ worth of ownership history.
The alternative: The 1957 Fender Stratocaster fixed the problems of the 1954-56 models, most notably the Bakelite parts that dissolved over time, while retaining their quality and distinctive sound.
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The artisan: D’Angelico New Yorker From 1932 to 1964, John D’Angelico made the world’s finest archtop guitars in his Manhattan shop. Although archtops are not considered rock-music guitars, they were often used in the fusion-jazz that paralleled rock’s development in the 1970s. Today, $15, 000 should get you a decent one, but D’Angelico’s more elaborate efforts can sell for significantly more.
The wild card: 1982 Charvel Van Halen Guitar dealer and builder Wayne Charvel was the source of Eddie Van Halen’s touring guitars during the band’s salad years. He sold the name to Grover Jackson, who built high-quality “Superstrats” in the 1980s before cashing out and sending production overseas. Gruhn figures a Charvel-by-Jackson could be worth as much as $20, 000. But beware: as with the Burst, counterfeits abound.
The alternative: Sorry, kemosabe. There’s only one Eddie Van Halen. And if you want an axe that The Man actually played, even briefly, be prepared to pay the better part of six figures.Typically, we think of golden-era instruments that have survived since the 50s and 60s: tiger top Les Pauls, Fiesta Red Strats and Blonde Teles. We all know these museum-grade axes, but is that really the whole story?
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Far from it. Today, as ever, ‘vintage’ can mean different ages depending on what’s being assessed. For example, with furniture, it’s normally anything over 20 years, whereas with other collectibles it can be 50 years or older. There’s always a hard line drawn at the 100 year mark, which of course denotes an item becoming an antique.
With guitars, there’s a little bit of dispute. Many people opt for a thirty year cut off for vintage items, but others tend to draw their line at 1980, meaning everything pre-1980 is vintage and everything after isn’t. We don’t really subscribe to that idea since it hardly takes into account the forward momentum of time, which of course affects everything. 1980 is now some 43 years into the past, so our thinking is more onside with the ‘30 years plus’ moving cutoff line.
Using 30 years or older as our definition, we will find that what we initially considered to be ‘vintage guitars’ to be somewhat myopic compared with what the market has actually dictated over the years. The 80s have brought a whole slew of new guitar makers and boutique workshops, some of whom have now been around for almost four decades. For example, early period PRS guitars are extremely valuable, partly because the company is enormously well regarded and successful, and partly because PRS began in 1985, so those early years guitars are now legitimately vintage.
Rocktile Vb 1
Brands like Ibanez were once in trouble every week due to lawsuits from other manufacturers, because their copycat 70s instruments were so accurate, not to mention well made! Throughout the 80s, they changed focus and built more original designs such as the shred machines like the JEM. Due to the eccentric nature of many JEM models, guitars like the 1988 Floral JEM - which used a floral pattern made from fabric underneath the finish to provide the ‘paint job’ - are fetching thousands and thousands of pounds on auction sites. They are rare, they are unusual and they are now vintage, so there’s a real market for them.
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With vintage instruments from the top brands (Fender, Gibson & Martin before anything else, in general terms), it’s often the mere age of the guitar that will determine its relative value. We’ve all played - or heard stories about - stupendously expensive vintage guitars that are actually pretty bad to play, or at least quite ‘blah’ compared to newer equivalents. Vintage does mean more valuable, but it hasn’t ever really meant ‘better’.
Stagg Ses 60 Vintage Series S Style White Electric Guitar
Yes, we are talking about Squier, a low end budget subsidiary of Fender’s who ended up creating instruments that are actually better regarded than on-brand Fenders of the same period. As such, demand for certain eras of Squier - the Silver Series is often described in particularly flowery language - have risen far higher than anyone would have reasonably estimated. Whilst a 2002 Affinity series Strat is still just a cheap beginners’ guitar, a 1984 Fiesta Red Squier Stratocaster is a pretty big deal to the right people!
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For the last few decades, the guitar world has lived in a space where it’s not just a matter of new and old guitars. Many brand new instruments
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