singemonkey wrote:
It is sad. It should have given her financial security for the rest of her life. Still, as Vic says, you go with the first opinion, you're going to get taken. If only she'd hit up the interwebs or got someone to do it for her.
Well whoever bought it is going to give that store in the US a cut, 20 to 25%, of the eventual price. But assuming that they knew what more or less what it was worth they could have paid 40K dollars and still expected a good profit.
In general, the impression I get is that few of these instruments get played in the real sense. I mean that people won't take them out and gig. People won't play them every day. Among players, it's more likely to me that they take them out every now and again and have a little go and then gently put them back in the case and lock 'em up.
Well some collectors/investors just cut straight to the chase and will vacuum pack the guitars and put them into very secure storage. However it may be that some owners of, for example, 1950s strats are like the people who own Stradivarii and make them available to be played and heard.
Seems to me that the only people who play them regularly are people who've had them for a long time and/or have enough money that losing them isn't a serious financial blow. I remember reading Martin Barre of Jethro Tull saying he gave up playing his '59 'burst live in the mid-'80s when he started having to buy it its own plane seat. And they were worth a lot less then. I wonder, for example, whether even Jimmy Page plays his actual guitars or one of the copies that Gibson made him.
It's very likely to me that Billy Gibbon played a Tokai at one point because his guitar was too valuable to play - that was before Gibson made it's re-issues and signature models. I think it was a similar story with Robert Frip. And I wonder how many of them had custom made replicas before Gibson was doing them.
It's the tool vs emotional value thing. Richard Thompson has a '59 strat that has basically been played into the ground. He still has it even though he never seems to play it, but I would think that the resale value has been substantially reduced. Not the least because it has a replacement bridge and is on at least it's 3rd neck (or was before he retired it in the mid 90s). As far as anybody knows he hasn't got the guitar restored or even made roadworthy again (it was in the Fender museum for a while) and he hasn't used it with any serious intent for at least 10 years. He regards them as tools. His attitude seems to be that that was a particularly good tool, but still a tool. He bought that guitar in the early 70s and it was his main guitar, often his sole guitar, in studio and on the road for 20 odd years. It might be worth quite a bit more now if he'd used it less, kept it at home a lot more.
I would not be surprised to find that a lot of these guys fly into the USA, buy half a dozen guitars, tour for 6 months, then sell the guitars on the way out again - especially with the cost of moving guitars around by air these days. Or they may have, if they tour a lot, different setups on either side of the atlantic. They may move one or two prized guitars around and rent or buy everything else.
