Life as a collector of Electra guitars can be rather bewildering. Life as a collector of a subset of Electra guitars can be rather bewildering. I’m only interested in Matsumoku-built Electras and Westones from the “golden age” of 1976-1985. According to my spreadsheet, I own sixty-seven of them. Sounds like a lot, right? But I’m not close to having one of each. I don’t even have one of each different model, much less one of each model in each color.
I could bore you (further) to death by listing the ones I don’t have. The X910 Explorer clone. The X810 MPC semi-hollow. The Rock Strad. The X635 Special Edition bass. But as of yesterday, I’m one step closer to catching them all. Observe: the XV1RD “Lady”. Rare when it was new, frequently butchered and/or broken in the twenty-nine years since. But this one’s now mine, and I only had to drive three hundred and ten miles to the middle of nowhere to make it happen.