We've Reached The Vintage Guitar Singularity
I had to make sure it wasn't April first, but it's true: Joe Bonamassa says he knows where Eric Clapton's "Bluesbreaker" guitar is. This is a perfect storm of the stupidity, preciousness, myth-making, and faux-authenticity-obsession associated with guitar collecting. As such, it deserves a full examination, because understanding this story will help us all understand why rock is essentially dead and why our society's obsession with the signifier over the signified damages us all in ways we cannot fully comprehend or appreciate.
A very brief primer for those of my "car guy" readers who accidentally clicked the jump. In 1966, British white-boy blues artist John Mayall recorded Bluesbreakers With Eric Clapton. At the time, Clapton wasn't Clapton; he was just some fellow who had made a small reputation for himself playing live in London.
During the recording of Bluesbreakers, Clapton had an idea. He put his Marshall amplifier in a room that was separate from the one in which he was playing, "dimed" the amp to 10 on the volume knob, and asked the recording engineer to tape his parts that way. The engineer refused to do it; reel-to-reel tape was expensive and he was unwilling to waste it.
Think about that for a minute. This guy refused to spend $15 worth of tape on Clapton. If you want a genuine taste of what life was like in post-WWII Britain, well, there you have it.
Luckily for all of us, the producer assigned to the track overrode the engineer's decision. You may have heard of the producer; his name was James Patrick Page. With permission thus secured, Clapton proceeded to blast out some of the most memorable tracks in rock history. He wasn't the first guitarist to distort the instrument's tone; that honor goes to Ike Turner's "Rocket 88". But Clapton was the first one to realize that the harmonic and musical distortion of an overdriven tube amp could change the instrument.
The album captured the imagination of Sixties Britain. Somebody painted "Clapton Is God" on walls and subway trains. Within a year, the overdriven-Marshall sound was everywhere.
Also everywhere: a feverish re-evaluation of the Gibson Les Paul. The "sunburst" Les Paul had been discontinued in 1960, with fewer than two thousand of the model sold around the world. But it was a 1960 Les Paul in Clapton's hands, purchased used for $400 at a London music store. This was the beginning of vintage guitar fever. It started with Clapton. Shortly afterwards, Peter Green would use a 1958 Les Paul to record the first Fleetwood Mac album, and Mike Bloomfield would use a '59 to make "Super Session". Forty-five years later, a good 1959 Les Paul without provenance is worth $500,000. Peter Green's guitar, when it last sold, went for over two million dollars. Billy Gibbons has turned down a $5M offer for his.
And Clapton's guitar? Wouldn't that be the most valuable of all? It would be. However, it was stolen in 1966. Clapton replaced it with another Les Paul, then an SG, before moving to the Stratocaster that he has played ever since. The guitar was never recovered.
Fast-forward to the present day. There is one name that stands above all others when you talk about "enthusiasm" for the '58-60 Les Paul, and that is Joe Bonamassa. He owns a few original "Bursts", and he uses them to play a tepid sort of refried blues-rock to middle-aged audiences around the country. I don't think you can call him a "musician" so much as you can call him a "musical guitar collector", the way I would be if I could play better.
Bonamassa's fan base is mostly fellow guitarists and guitar collectors. It's the oddest phenomenon. I've heard that Joe himself is a great guy, but I can't stand what he represents and how he carries himself. He wears enormous nouveau watches, wears sunglasses indoors during the day, and generally prances around pretending to be a rock star. His music, also, is beneath contempt, sounding like everything and nothing in particular.
At last count, Bonnamassa has something like five different signature Gibsons, which is five more than Eric Clapton ever had. Until recently, that is; Gibson "reissued" Clapton's 1960 guitar in 2010. It was the second time that Gibson had reissued a stolen guitar; the first time was when they brought out a copy of Michael Bloomfield's guitar in 2009. "Crafted after a careful examination of hundreds of photos of the original," was the advertising tag line, and the fact is that when the Bloomfield guitar was eventually found it looked pretty close to the Gibson reissues.
With the Clapton Burst, on the other hand, Gibson had nothing to go on. There were no good photos of the guitar. In the end, they basically paid Clapton to sit down and vaguely remember the guitar he'd last held forty-four years prior. The guitars were a tough sell, to put it mildly, particularly since they cost $12,000, almost twice what you'd pay for a standard 1959 reissue Gibson that was in no actual way different and about eight times what you'd pay for a Les Paul Professional that sounds the same and looks very similar.
As you'd expect, Joe Bonnamassa's fans were heavily targeted by Gibson to buy the Clapton vague-reissue. Some of them were disappointed by the "lack of authenticity", perhaps not realizing that a "lack of authenticity" would be more or less the central quality of any item that was built on the vague recollections of an elderly man and a few distant photos that could have been of any Les Paul built from 1958 to 1961. The value of these guitars has fallen to about what you'd pay for any Gibson reissue, and even less; one sold in Japan for $3,300.
And that is where we could leave the story, except that Joe Bonnamassa claims to know where the stolen Clapton guitar is:
“It’s in a collection on the East Coast of America,” Bonamassa tells Guitarist. “That’s all I can tell you and that’s all I will say.”
Bonamassa is himself a guitar collector with an extensive collection that features several of the highly valued Gibson Les Paul Standard models produced from 1958 to 1960. “It still exists,” he says of Clapton’s Les Paul. “I haven’t seen it, but I have it on good authority from people who have.”
There's something unbearably pathetic about this: Wannabe Rocker Says He Knows People Who Have Seen An Old Guitar. But then you start to look at the business case. Did Bonnamassa break his silence to force someone's hand? We're talking about something that might be worth five million bucks or more to the right buyer. Maybe Joe wants to buy it cheap. Maybe he wants to play it. Maybe he has a friend or associate who wants to put it in a climate-controlled vault somewhere in the BRIC countries.
There's one little problem, of course: Eric Clapton is still alive. He lives about five miles from me, as a matter of fact, with his young Columbus-native wife. The guitar is his property. So any deal that includes this guitar will have to include him, unless the prospective next owner doesn't want to show it in public. Keep in mind that there are a lot of people who secretly own very expensive or valuable vintage instruments. Not everybody is as stupid as I am, taking videos of myself playing a Private Stock PRS with 24-karat inlays and essentially inviting people to rob me. (Note to potential robbers: Before entering the house, consider familiarizing yourself with what a "Maringer Vorpal" is, for your own safety.)
So Bonamassa could be playing a very complicated game here, essentially offering to broker a sale between reclusive, unimaginably wealthy Baby Boomers. Or he could be trying to be the hero who returns the guitar to Clapton, which would raise his stock with a lot of music fans who presently loathe him.
Last but not least, we have the unholy specter of another Clapton reissue, this time endorsed by Clapton... and Joe Bonamassa. There is precedence for this; I own the Peter Green Gibson R9 reissue which was sold is both "Melvyn Franks VOS" and "Gary Moore Aged" variants. The story of the Peter Green reissue is a story for another time, but the point is that Gibson is no stranger to a multiple-endorser series of essentially the same instrument.
It would play out something like this:
* 80-100 "aged" versions for the Japanese collectors, called "Clapton Aged" and sold for $15k; * 300-500 "VOS" versions in an unpolished but undamaged finish, called "Clapton Vintage Old Stock" and sold for $8995; * an unlimited run of "Joe Bonamassa Clapton Reissues" for $2995.
Gibson would cash out Clapton to the tune of half a million bucks, with Bonamassa getting a quarter million for himself. Then Clapton would agree to bless the sale of the guitar to the next owner for an honorarium of perhaps two or three million dollars, with ten percent of that going to Bonamassa.
After all the guitars are sold, we're talking about maybe twenty million dollars changing hands. All of this over a guitar that sold for $400. Why? What's the point? It cannot be that people want to sound like Clapton; you can duplicate the Bluesbreakers tone with about three grand worth of equipment if you need it to be all-analog and maybe a third of that if you'll accept a digital signal processor in your sound chain. And "sounding like Clapton" requires a lot of study and effort. Buying a Clapton reissue, or even the original 1960 Clapton guitar, won't teach you how to play "Hideaway".
In the end, it's once again about purchases as a substitute for experience:
* owning the Clapton guitar is easier than learning to play like Clapton * owning a massive McMansion is more comforting than hiring a real architect and taking a risk on his decisions the way that Edgar Kaufmann did * getting a tattoo is less scary than serving in the Marine Corps * buying a Ferrari 488GTB isn't nearly as risky, financially or personally, as running a Civic in the Continental Tire series * consuming media is easier than creating media * creating media is easier than obtaining a genuine experience
My brother recently wrote about the "secular afterlife" of retirement. I think a lot of Americans have been conditioned to defer their gratification and their experiences to retirement. But what's the point in that? Are you going to start racing at the age of sixty-five? Are you going to hike the PCT at seventy? Go around the world in your eightieth year?
We are all ephemeral. Transitory. Each moment past does not return, and there's less time to stamp your impression on the world than you think. Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers. Given the chance between accomplishing something today on the cheap or having a gold-plated bedpan in thirty years, you should choose wisely. Oh, there's one thing I left out of that Guitar Player article:
Clapton, now 71, released the album I Still Do this past May 20. It features several new compositions, two of which Clapton composed, plus covers of tunes by Bob Dylan, JJ Cale, Robert Johnson, Leroy Carr, Skip James and others. The guitarist recently revealed that he is suffering from incurable damage to his nervous system that has left him struggling to play guitar.
Given enough time, not even Clapton can play like Clapton.