The Future's Uncertain... And You Know The Rest

Oh, what the hell is that? It's like the oddest features of four different guitars together. What do the switches do, anyway? The body is clearly a Les Paul Standard --- maple top, one-piece mahogany back --- but it's got really weird horns like an SG. The neck looks like a Gibson neck with an extra fret and a "shredder" headstock. The pickup combo is from a Stratocaster, more specifically from the HSS "Fat Strat" that became popular around 1985.

Well, it's all of those things, plus more, as I'll explain below. But this isn't my typical "look at my newest guitar" post. Some of what I'll talk about is universal and applicable well beyond anything as relatively unimportant as a particular musical instrument. Strap your weirdo axe on and let's rock.

I want to consider the future. That's really all we can do --- we can consider it. We cannot know it, not until it arrives. We can predict some things with absolute clarity. The sun will rise. Photosynthesis will continue. Jonny Lieberman will do something like bitch about the North Pole supposedly being underwater due to global warming, forgetting that he just got done taking a tidy paycheck for driving a $200,000, twin-turbo V-12 SUV to the Arctic Circle and therefore directly contributing more to the problem than anybody to whom he's complaining. Seriously. I've seen more self-awareness in carp facing a mirror underwater.

But I digress. We can't know the important things about the future. Like --- will I have a job? Will my son be safe? Will Katy Perry just give up and do a nude photoshoot like we all want her to? The future is in flux and it isn't settled until the moment it becomes the present. Quantum entanglement, butterfly effect, and all that. For now we see as through a glass darkly. You get the idea.

The fact that the future cannot be known with any certainty does not mean that you won't be rewarded for being accidentally right about it, or punished for being accidentally wrong. It's more than just what stock you pick or which house you buy. It's as random as this: In 1998 I was looking for temporary work. I was hired over the phone to do some secretarial labor about 40 miles from my house. Times were tight, and I've never gone without a job just because the right one wasn't available. I said I'd take it. Then they called me back and said that it wouldn't start for a week. I told them that I needed to go to work tomorrow and I'd do anything, even clean toilets. So they got me another interview. By sheer chance, it was with a hospital Year 2000 project. It paid twice as much to begin with and it started the next day. Through that job I met people and made connections that I rely upon to the present. I bought my house and my Porsches with people I met on that job.

I like to tell that story because it's a case of Virtue Rewarded and it casts me as a heavily-scarred Horatio Alger instead of the callous trust-fund brat I'm always sketched as on VWVortex. (In reality, I have no trust fund, I haven't inherited a dime from anyone, and I haven't taken a dollar from my parents since the Clinton Administration.) But it could have just as easily gone the other way. It's possible that at the other job I would have met someone who founded a successful business and I could have made millions of dollars with that person. I can't know. I might have ruined my life, more or less, by demanding to work the next day.

You hear the phrase future time orientation a lot nowadays. It's meaningful. The more future time orientation you have, the more success you have. I'll admit that I don't have much. I have enough that I don't sit around and shoot up and I make sure that I always (well, usually) have enough money to pay my bills, but I don't have enough to keep me from putting five-figure guitars on a credit card or keep me off a motorcycle or keep me from calling people who think they are anonymous on the Internet on their home phones to talk about removing their eyeballs with a spoon. I'm about halfway between Warren Buffett and O-Dog from Menace 2 Society, with a slight tilt towards the Dog. All the self-improvement I could possibly achieve in this area has, in fact, been achieved, usually at considerable cost. That's all there is.

If you want to succeed in this world, you need high future time orientation but you also need to be right. I know people who have painstakingly worked and saved and invested badly and now they're in the toilet. When the market crashed pretty hard a few years ago, some of my friends immediately lost more money than I'd ever wasted on leasing luxury cars. I made sure to call them from one of those luxury cars and remind them of that fact. "Hey, I'm driving a Land Rover that is worth about what you lost on Microsoft stock last week." I have a friend who worked her fabulous tail off to become an angel investor in a few multi-million dollar houses in a can't miss new luxury suburb... in 2008. Now she lives in one of the homes so she can take a literal bath the same place she took her financial one.

Work hard. Save. Be right. That's all it takes.

Return with me to 1985. The Heritage Guitar Company, which was founded by four former Gibson employees who stayed behind when that company took its labor to union-unfriendly Nashville, Tennessee, were ready to go to work. They had a bunch of the machines Gibson had left behind and they had a few old hands who were willing to show up and work in the basement of the old factory. They'd pooled their savings and their knowledge. Work hard. Save. That part's covered.

But what about be right? They had to come up with a product line. In hindsight, it's easy to say, "Jesus, guys, you're two years away from Appetite From Destruction. The 1959 Les Paul is about to reclaim its position as the most important guitar in the world, and you've got the machines, the people, and the know-how that made it the first time around! Get cracking on a perfect 1959 replica!!!!" This is easy advice to give and I've heard it repeated a million times.

Problem is, in 1985 the founders of Heritage didn't know who Saul "Slash" Hudson was. They knew that the best-selling guitar maker in the country was an outfit called Kramer Guitars. You see, Kramer Guitars were ostensibly the instruments of choice for a certain Dutch guitarist who liked to put tape stripes on his stuff and who played with both hands on the fretboard. The two big players of 1980 (and 2013) weren't relevant. Gibson was in the middle of a complete management-induced collapse. Fender wasn't even making guitars in the United States. They were importing them from Japan. The market had gone batshit cray-cray. Precisely nobody cared about the Les Paul. Not even Jimmy Page was playing a Les Paul at the time. Not that anybody cared about Jimmy Page in 1985. Clapton was playing a Strat. Mike Bloomfield and Peter Green were dead and institutionalized, respectively.

The guys at Heritage didn't know how to make "super-Strats" or Kramers or anything like that. (They'd figure it out over the years to come, creating some guitars that sold okay at the time but are currently not highly valued.) They knew how to make regular Gibsons. Hollowbody jazz boxes. LP Special/Junior "planks". And yes, they knew how to make a maple-topped Les Paul.

The guitar at the top of this page is a 1987 Heritage H-207DD. It represents an attempt to combine the popular features of a mid-Eighties guitar with the unique selling points of Heritage --- which, at the time, were things like flame maple tops and and one-piece mahogany backs. It was meant to be an upscale alternative to something like a Kramer Baretta which is a complete piece of junk when compared heads-up with the Heritage. 1987 was the third year of production for the company, and like the two years before it, it was a low-volume year. Things were touch and go for a while. The 207-DD was an attempt to see the future and build something people would want.

The future has its own plans. Les Pauls, Gibson 335s, and big jazz boxes came back in a big way, particularly overseas. The Japanese, with their particular zest for authenticity, recognized Heritage's guitars as being more truly "Gibson" than the Nashville Gibsons were, and they began buying the majority of the company's production, a situation that continues today. By the time the owner of this 207-DD got it into his hands, he probably also had a copy of Appetite For Destruction, which put a knife into the heart of the super-Strat era. At that point, he probably wished he'd just bought an H-150, which was (and is) the Heritage equivalent of the Les Paul Standard played by Slash to the present day.

So that's the future for you. Twenty hardworking Midwestern salt-of-the-earth men in an old factory basement have their livelihoods preserved by a bi-racial British immigrant drug addict who once suffered the indignity of having Steven Adler ejaculate on his leg during a particularly incoherent three-way on a dingy floor-mounted mattress. (Yeah, Slash put that in his autobiography. I'd have left that out. But having said that... for the record, Steven Adler even never fired off in the same ZIP code as your humble author.) Twenty seconds after the beginning of "Welcome To The Jungle", everybody in the country knew the rules had changed. The Strat was dead, the Les Paul was ascendant once more. Even though Slash did the original tracks with a BC Rich Mockingbird. We don't talk about that. It isn't part of the legend.

Which leaves our weird LesterStrat here. In a world where Guns N' Roses doesn't make that record, is the 207-DD the leading product from Heritage into the Nineties? Or does the company go bankrupt? Or do they devise something else that's even more successful and is used on the next hot record and all of a sudden Heritage is the biggest guitar company in the world? We cannot know. The future collapses into the present and then it's all just wishing and dreaming for something that can't come true.

I was too sick to attend the annual Heritage Owners Club gathering, known as the Parsons Street Pilgrimage, last week. I'm more hurt and upset by that fact than I wanted to let on at the time. Once a year they open the factory up and we talk to the luthiers and then we play music and it's special and it's important to me. Now I'll have to wait another fifty-one weeks. It doesn't feel fair. It was like being left out, like sitting in the classroom during recess while your friends are outside playing that game that kids are no longer allowed to call "Smear The Queer" because nowadays we encourage fourth-grade boys to explore their bisexuality and have sex with men and God knows what else. I'm putting my kid in the most insanely religious school I can find and if I even hear they sanction anything in the way of sex besides ignoring it and/or feeling extremely guilty about it I am going to hop off whatever female journalist or hairdresser or Thai massage girl I'm violating at the moment and march right in to express my severe and financially significant dissatisfaction.

Sorry. Got distracted for a moment. Anyway. I got left out because I couldn't stop coughing up this stuff that looks like Gorilla Glue. But I wasn't too sick to surf the Web, and I happened to find this Heritage for sale. It's been left out of the company narrative as well; a recent post on this model on the owners forum didn't turn up a single owner or even anybody who admitted to having seen one. Left out. A victim of history. The shop said it was assembled to typical Heritage standards and from the pictures you can see that the wood is top-grade front and back, the kind of stuff Gibson saves for the reissues when they can get it at all. A nice guitar, doomed to irrelevance by circumstances beyond its control.

I have low future time orientation. It was no trick to buy this thing in-between coughs from my desk yesterday afternoon. It's scheduled to arrive on Friday. I doubt it will be a sonic revelation. Probably more a case of "oh yeah, I can see why this didn't set the world on fire." That's okay. If you've been to my house and met my roommates and seen how I live, you know that here in Powell we kind of operate an Island of Misfit Toys. It's populated by the brilliant, the broken, the unwanted, the reclusive. There's a 944 in the garage, for Christ's sake, and a bunch of 32-bit Ataris in the basement. We celebrate the offbeat here, I suppose. I'm King Moonracer, this is my island. The Heritage 207-DD has no place in history, but as it sleeps in the long rows of cases in my basement, next to the Westone Spectrums and the volute-neck Gibsons and the solid-state Roland amps, it will, at least, have a home.

[gallery ids="478,477,476,475,473,474"]