Well, we've already talked about the guitars we've owned... how we got our first guitars... all that fun stuff... but what about the ones we don't have? The ones that slipped through our fingers?
My oddball vintage guitar obsession hit its peak back in 2004, when I was working as the Ebay sales dude for Guitar Center. I was a 22-year-old vintage keyboard obsessed punk rocker at the time, and had just started to fall in love with oddball guitars... I'd found my '66 Mosrite Ventures model and my '61 Harmony H78, and I decided I wanted to learn more about the men whose names were embossed on my tremolo tailpieces... especially Paul Bigsby.
To cut a long story short... in one of my Ebay searches for "just guitars," I actually stumbled upon a Magnatone Mark V, the last of the Magnatones designed (but not built, as I would later learn) by Bigsby. It was beat to death, but it was CHEAP... and a resto job on this puppy would have been nothing I couldn't handle (even at that time). Did I mention how cheap it was??
Long story short, I fell asleep at the wheel in the closing hours of the auction and let it slip through my fingers.
It wasn't long before Vintage Guitar or Premier Guitar (can't remember which) ran a BIG story on "the lost Bigsby guitars," and the price tags skyrocketed. That summer while on tour in Cincinnati I found a Mark V with a tag that, well, was a great deal more expensive than a lowly Farfisa-pounding punk rocker could handle...
C'est la vie!!