# Tragic guitar stories?



## Gilliangirl (Feb 26, 2006)

What's your worst guitar story?

I bought my first guitar when I was 16 (MANY years ago). It was a Mansfield (you're thinking... I've never heard of those, right?). Anyway, it wasn't a high quality guitar, but I loved it the way you love and never forget your first guitar. 15 years later I was getting ready to move out of my apartment and, in a weak moment, I put the guitar, its sticker-covered case, and all my old songbooks out to the trash. Of course, it was gone a few minutes later when I finally came to my senses. I have regretted that ever since. 

Got a similar tragic guitar story?


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## Lester B. Flat (Feb 21, 2006)

I remember the Mansfields. No great loss.  Just kidding. I know what it's like to get attached to material objects. 

I have several near tragic guitar stories but they all have happy endings. 

I once had a guitar ('56 Hofner) that was run over by a car. The case was demolished but the guitar miraculously survived. The biggest mystery is how it got on the road in the first place. (twighlight zone music) That was on my 17th birthday and I'm still scratching my head over that one.

I guess my worst moment was when someone was playing my Les Paul and dropped it and broke the headstock. I really wanted to scream at him but we were on stage in front of 300 people so my anger was put on hold. It was a real show stopper moment. I felt so bad I put it in the case, took it home, bought a strat, and did'nt get it fixed until 3 years later.


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## clarkee (Feb 12, 2006)

i had an old peavy predator.. lol.. locked in the strap.. went for a throw on stage and the strap busted.. flew off and hit someone in the audience.. that guitar disappeared fast!! good riddence lol


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## PintoMusic (Feb 5, 2006)

I can't type it out all over again but I blogged about it at:
blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID=11434921&blogID=93215064


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## speedster (Nov 11, 2009)

I had a late 50's and an early 60's strats back when I was a kid and eventually the guitars where lossed or thrown out during the various moves our family made back then.....

today they would be worth ???????????? 

Tragic... 

My son reminds me daily what an idiot I had to be back then .....but who would have guessed how the pricing has gone.


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## Mooh (Mar 7, 2007)

Nothing tragic, thankfully, but there have been severe accidents and near misses.

'70s Tele Deluxe gets hit by falling stage lights and ends up on the dance floor. Required neck reset and the tilt adjustment never worked right again.

Studio lackie, without my permission, takes my Beneteau 12 string out of it's stand and lays it on the floor so that someone else can use my stand. 2 or 3 takes later I hop off my stool and crack the top. Luckily it was an easy fix as it was close to the edge. Nobody with any brains touches my stuff anymore.

Festival stage hands, just doing their job, pulling cables during our set, topple a guitar stand with my Godin fretless Acousti-bass in it. Top is cracked, one machine head broken, and I had to play my parts on acoustic guitar...the show must go on and all that.

In a fit of teenage stupidity I let my first guitar disappear, and I don't know/remember where or how now, but it's gone. True, it was junk, a cheap plywood Suzuki, but my sister gave it to me and now that she's gone (cancer) it would have been a nice momento.

Peace, Mooh.


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## shoretyus (Jan 6, 2007)

Nothing to tragic ,,, but I only owned a Gibson for a little while 9kkhhd so I didn't have to fix any headstocks.... 


Stupidly traded a Martin D28S for a delay pedal..... kqoct... and really should have kept my first Suzuki 3's acoustic but I had a J45 and that D28S.. kqoct


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## Steve1962 (Oct 30, 2009)

For my 16th birthday, my Dad bought me a used '68 Les Paul Custom. I think he paid $400.00 for it. When I joined the US Navy two years later, I sold it for $600.00. I felt like great about it; hey, I'd just made two hundred bucks!

I saw one at the Arlington (Texas) Guitar Show in 2003, and the price tag on it was seven grand...


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## Skndstry (Jul 21, 2009)

You traded a D28 for a delay pedal and you say "nothing tragic"?! I beg to differ. 

After she had driven all the spirit and music out of him, my dad's gold-digging ex-wife drove him so far into the hole that he had to sell his '76 Martin D-28, and his '62 (I believe) Telecaster bass. 

This was the year before I started playing guitar. kqoct

The rub is that he knows the guy he sold it to, but the guy won't sell it back (can't say I blame him.)

Oh well. The story has a happy ending - the harpy is gone, and we happily jam together once a week with some buddies, with or without the vintage guitars.


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## Ship of fools (Nov 17, 2007)

*I know*

I am kkjwpw but its funny because I was just thinking of you Gilliangirl and was wondering if you were still with us, its great to see you hear still.Ship... we need more ladies to help class this quiet joint up ( the acoustic section )


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## david henman (Feb 3, 2006)

...in the mid 60s, a store owner in saint john took a liking to me and gave me a guitar, saying "i want you to have this guitar".

it was a sunburst les paul, with paf pickups. i seem to recall they were minihums, but i'm not sure.

it was in absolutely flawless condition. he said he thought it might be a 59 or 60.

but, i could not get used to playing it. too heavy. too awkward. thick neck.

i was still living at home. the concept of being able to afford more than one guitar was utterly foreign. i guess you can see where this is going.

i sold it to a guy in a surf music band for $250 cash.

my brother's caution still rings in my ears: david, i don't think you should sell that guitar....


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## shoretyus (Jan 6, 2007)

Skndstry said:


> You traded a D28 for a delay pedal and you say "nothing tragic"?! I beg to differ.


Yeah,,,, sad that it was to make my girlfriend sound better in the band. She took off with the guitar player too. The guitar had some issues though. I lament for it sometimes but it was a hard one to play. D28S are 12 frets to the body and really wide neck. 

I don't miss the girl kkjuw


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## zontar (Oct 25, 2007)

The headstock on my classical broke when I slipped on some ice, but I didn't find it out until the next day when I grabbed my classical to take with me when I went to teach.

I left it in the case to warm up when I got there and when my first student showed up I figured it had been warming up long enough.

I went to grab the guitar and saw the headstock bunched up against the neck.
I barely was aware of the lesson.
After the lesson I looked at it again--hoping it was my imagination.

I loosened the strings, saved the pieces and called a friend of mine who was able to fix it.
While I waited I borrowed a cheaper classical and it was horrible playing it.

But it's fixed now and works great--and I got a better case as well.


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## blackcloud (Nov 22, 2009)

*Purple haze*

A friend of mine lent his pride and joy acoustic to another friend when he got it back it had been spray painted purple


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## Jim DaddyO (Mar 20, 2009)

My first guitar was a Kay SG copy. Plywood body and cheap single coils that only looked like HB's. It was stolen when I lived in Ottawa while we were visiting my Mom for easter.


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## Mike MacLeod (Nov 27, 2006)

Story 1. In '68 I bet a guy $10 I could learn to play the guitar and he gave me a Suzuki classical that had a foot sized hole in the back. I won the bet, and bought a better guitar. Gave the Suzuki to someone else who learned to play on it. Lost track of it then.

Story 2. While teaching guitar in a community centre, I slipped my new guitar it onto my back and the strap pin let go. Guitar hit the concrete floor and crushed a portion of the edge. I let loose an expletive that shocked some of the tender young ones.

Story 3. After having Michael Heiden complete a restoration on a 1950 Gibson L-4, I left in half-in half-out of the case and the lid slipped and the tooth of the catch chipped a nasty divot in the beautiful dark sunburst top.

Story 4. After confirming that the moving company would store my instruments in a heated facility overnight before the move-in, I learned they lied to me and my Laskin, which had up to that point been perfect was now all crazed with lacquer checking.

Story 5. After a late night jam on a bitterly cold -40 night one winter, I left the gas fireplace heater on full and my Spanish made Classical guitar out of it's case, only to wake up the next morning with a 16" split in the top. 

I'm sure there are others, but these pop to mind most readily.


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## xuthal (May 15, 2007)

blackcloud said:


> A friend of mine lent his pride and joy acoustic to another friend when he got it back it had been spray painted purple


Hope he kicked the shit out of his friend,i would,or try at least:sport-smiley-002:


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## mhammer (Nov 30, 2007)

Three:

1) Answered an ad in 1970 for a guy who was selling a gorgeous sunburst Firebird with gold hardware, banjo tuners, 2 mini-hums and a vibrola, for $150. He was in a Stones cover band and since Keef had switched to a Dan Armstrong, he had to as well. I showed up with $80 in my pocket, tried it out, and vowed to come back the next day at noon to buy it...which I did. Unfortunately, another guy had showed up 10 minutes after I left (with all $80 in my pocket) gave the guy a $10 deposit and said he pay him $160 for it. When I showed up, as promised, with all the money in cash, the guy told me the guitar was already spoken for.

2) My first home-made guitar had a pine body traced from a LP Jr., and the neck from my Kent, with a solid brass wraparound bridge-tailpiece that my dad helped me machine. When I finally moved up to a _slightly_ better home-made guitar (butcher-block maple body traced from a Tele), I went out to the driveway and had my sister take pictures of my smashing it against the ground, Townsend style. Unfortunately, while she was biking over to the drugstore to drop off the film, it slipped out somewhere and was never found. So I have no pictures of that first one.

3) In 1976, I bought a gorgeous blonde Epiphone Windsor in Hamilton, that had a mahogany neck to die for, and gold everywhere. We figure it was around 1959. It was similar to the blonde one you see here: http://www.provide.net/~cfh/windsor.html except that it had one New Yorker pickup, that I later gave to Mark Knopfler (who I hope did something useful with it). Not being as sensible about vintage stuff as I am now, I installed two home-wound humbuckers, redid the electronics, and made a new pickguard (with creme binding), so that it looked like this: http://i414.photobucket.com/albums/pp228/Mark_Hammer/old_epi.jpg (avert your eyes, and direct the young ones away) Well, long story short, we had a young child at the time who got into everything and we were living in a modest apartment, so I stuck the guitar in its vinyl gig bag inside our apartment locker. Through the chicken wire I gather it must have looked like a rifle bag from the outside (a thin body) to someone walking through the apartment locker bay. Somebody must have waited until the coast was clear and climbed over the top of the locker to take it, because there was no sign of damage. We had an insurance rider on it, and the insurance company was gracious enough to honour it and give me $500. Unfortunately, even though I had only paid $50 for it at a pawn shop, replacing it was going to take another $1000 on top of the $500.


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## Mike MacLeod (Nov 27, 2006)

*The one that got away*

My buddy Dave who owned an auction house called to say that an interesting guitar had come in. I went to see it and found a late 40s New York Epiphone Broadway with D'armond Sliding pick-up. The thing had all the hang-tags, and had never been played. It came with the original "crock skin" case and a fitted canvas over-case! Never been played - oh, I said that! 
Well the auction started and I bid and bid and bid. It got to $800 and I dropped out and another guy got it. We were the only two bidding. My wife kept digging me in the ribs and said "Buy it, buy it!" I chickened out! Who knows what it would have taken to get the guitar. Certainly less than the value today, but it was 20 years ago. Ah well! I still have my Emperor.


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## Steadfastly (Nov 14, 2008)

blackcloud said:


> A friend of mine lent his pride and joy acoustic to another friend when he got it back it had been spray painted purple


This was a friend? What was wrong with him?sigiifa


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## harrym (Jan 19, 2010)

Back in 1968 I had just got married and I bought an acoustic from Sears for about $60.00. I had played in a band before that and had to sell my stuff. Anyway, that was all we could afford at the time, "we was po folk then". I was playing it one day and she threatened me jokingly because i was bugging her. Well, I kept it up and she went kick me, I turned and she kicked a hole in the side of the guitar. We both laughed. Still got the wife but the guitar is long gone. The nice thing about this, I got to buy a better guitar.


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## Steve Adams (Dec 31, 2009)

the most tragic of guitar stories I have is when Lenny had his neck broke, stevie fixed it, however, he said lenny would never be the same, a short time after, my hero was killed in claptons helicopter....TRAGIC!


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## Scottone (Feb 10, 2006)

I had a 70's Ventura Bruno (Gibson Dove Copy) which was my first decent guitar.

After college, I left it at my parents house and it eventually got put down in the basement. At some point, the basement flooded and it got soaked and basically fell apart.

A few years ago, I picked up a mid-70's Ibanez Concord Dove copy which is is pretty similar (and probably from the same factory), but I still miss the Ventura.


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## Bryan (Jan 14, 2008)

*Pete Townsend Move*

Way back , Way back........... when I was a teenager I had a Takamine Dreadnought . In a less than stellar moment while I was playing I got carried away and did a Pete Townsend on it ; I kick myself about that move . Youthful enthusiasm or better put youthful stupidity . Nowadays I carry and move my guitars around like newborns .


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