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.
Aren’t you supposed to wear sunglasses in the daytime? Wearing your sunglasses at night would be a bit Corey Hartish wouldn’t you say?
I mean indoors… I’ll edit that
I remember when that T.V. show History detectives found Bob Dylans guitar he played when he “went electric.” I remember thinking that here was a guitar that he had last used fifty years ago, at one concert. It sold for nearly a million dollars. It seems like a weird fetish to me to value these instruments at such high prices, as if you think you’re getting a part of their soul.
Warning robbers that you own a knife forged by a place that’s best known for reproduction coins from fantasy books is a good way to get robbed for your lunch money.
Though how would you weigh the value of delayed gratification? A dollar today (invested well 40 years) becomes $20 when I retire. A Miata today could become an Ariel Atom tomorrow.
But more than that, savings are security. In the next few years, I might earn enough from my investments to cover my living expenses. After that happens, I’ll feel ever richer than I felt the day I got my first salaried job.
The fantasy-coin thing is fascinating, isn’t it? I think Maringer got tired of dealing with knife people, such as they are. I’ve been a knife collector for a long time but the knife collecting community is full of nutjobs.
Call me crazy but if I had the kind of money to spend $1,000,000 or more on a guitar, I’d much rather spend the three grand you mentioned and then use the remainder for a private lesson with Mr. Clapton. I’m pretty sure you could convince him to spend an hour or two with you for a million bucks.
Clapton was quite a collector himself. Of course, it’s slightly different for him because in his day big rockers used to give each other guitars as a matter of course.
I listen to Bonamassa fairly often, but primarily on songs where he gets a pretty good tone out of the LP he’s playing. I don’t claim to have a super-sophisticated ear for tone that some absurdists insist on, but I do get enjoyment out of listening to a well-constructed tone, especially open notes on the guitar. Mostly, I suspect, because I wish I could make it sound that good.
Chief example would be the tone Clapton got out of his cherry 335:
https://youtu.be/FFofM7AEr5U
As a matter of fact, it was the tone from that video footage that convinced me to buy a Heritage 535. Sunsetburst with white binding, ebony fretboard, and MOP block inlays.
Clapton is the man who made me want to play guitar. He’s the major influence to my meager skills. I’ve always thought he had the right blend of musical sensibility and technical proficiency. His best stuff just sounds really good. Especially live.
You want tone? Give a listen to Hubert Sumlin on Howlin’ Wolf’s 300 Pounds of Heavenly Joy.
I’ve owned three H-535s and two H-555s, one of which was a NAMM show guitar. I really dug the inlays.
A few years ago I used my cherry H-555 to play “All Your Love (I Miss Loving)” at a pre-arranged blues jam. It was fun. But in all five cases, I found somebody to give me more money than I’d paid for the guitar in question. So now I’m playing the ES-339 Figured that I bought at Memphis six years ago.
“Maringer Vorpal.” It might be time to set aside the aesthetics and buy a gun.
(I enjoy your writing, have many pairs of Allen Edmonds and otherwise buy and do what I want, but sometimes you need the right tool, regardless of how common or redneck it might appear.)
The problem with me owning a gun is that there are a few people out there who have tried to “SWAT” me in the past, so I have to be careful of answering an intruder with a brandished firearm.
There are other problems too… I’m a peace-loving guy, dontcha know!
Snicker snack, motherf#cker!
They’re going to shoot you if you’re holding a knife too.
Shooting somebody in the close quarters of a house is tougher than it looks. I trained with Ignatius Piazza, Chuck Taylor, and Dale Fricke in close-quarters combat and I was surprised at how useless a pistol can be inside ten feet. As the person inside the house, you have a lot of choices in how the encounter happens. I maybe was once the kind of person to cover my living room with a short-barrel AR-15 or HK Mk23 but nowadays I think I’ll dial 911 and make sure the dispatcher understands I’m in fear for my life before I do anything responsive.
I dont have kids and nothing really valuable besides my firearms so I’d probably do the same while holing up in my room with my sig or 357 but i figured if they did come to my room the bang would scare them the hell away if i had to pull the trigger. Im also not too worried. I’m your size minus a few lbs but i got my gf a gun cause i do worry about her and I’m not sure a knife would cut it (no pun intended ) if someone meant to do her harm. (We dont live together)
I figured you lost your firearm rights somehow…
They’re really serious about removing tags from mattresses nowadays. I did the crime and the time.
There’s always a“loophole
Some of the price could just be a way to launder drug money. Apparently that is done with art and car auctions as well.
Jack, how about a link to the story of the recovery of Bloomfield’s guitar?
I agree. I’ve run my boat hundreds of miles on inland lakes and rivers. Also from Tampa to key west and back. The old farts at the marina always talk about how cool it would be and how they should do that some day. Uh hello, you’re retired, do it now. I’m 31 and knocking out that bucket list. My energy and vigor now vs 23 makes me kind of sad I didn’t start even earlier.
We’ll have to catch a ride with you some time on that Tampa to Key West run. Sounds better than doing it on a motorcycle.
I thought about inviting you last time. I ended up doing it solo, which is a bad idea. The waves are nasty in the winter. And I didn’t know anyone else up for an adventure on short notice.
I’ll bet he makes nice coin on corporate gigs - and the Onion answers who his fanbase really is:
http://www.theonion.com/article/affluent-white-man-enjoys-causes-the-blues-1511
“I think a lot of Americans have been conditioned to defer their gratification and their experiences to retirement.”
I’m at that point in my life where I need to really start accelerating my retirement savings if I truly want to retire. But I’m also at that point where I’m still healthy enough to enjoy stuff that I might not be able to enjoy ten years down the road. It’s hard to overcome the many years of conditioning, though. I’m starting to loosen up, but it’s a constant struggle with both my nature and my wife. She doesn’t get the thought process because she refuses to accept that we’re getting older. I actually spend quite a bit of my idle time wrestling with this issue.
But I sure as hell ain’t buying some vintage whatever just because some other person owned it, however. I’ve never understood that, nor do I get the celebrity worship culture.
Maybe if it was the John Voight car it’d be different.
” creating media is easier than obtaining a genuine experience”
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Love this .
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Agree , doing your bucket list now is better , the down side is ; you’ll wind up old and broken like me , just retired and now a daylong Moto ride is nearly unbearable .
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Get to it young ‘uns ! .
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-Nate
I knew there was something not quite right with Bonamassa when I heard that they were breaking up Black Country Communion, and it was not because Glenn Hughes had the personality problem.
well apparently Eric Clapton knows where his stolen guitar is, too
fuck ’59 les paul’s and all their hype. it’s just a few pieces of solid wood glued together: nothing like the work it takes to build a violin, mandolin, or even acoustic guitar.
sure I’d take one if it was given to me, but I’d never pay more than about 5 grand for one. you can get guitars built just as good, or better, these days for that kind of money
Hell, my baby boomer retirement plan after my last divorce is they tip me outta my chair onto a gurney and pull a sheet over my face.
I have 7 guitars but have never found a way to play more than one at a time, unless a 12 string counts as two. My Ovation is for acoustics and my Epi Les Paul is my go-to electric. I can’t play well enough to make a $3000 guitar sound good.
Never considered a knife for home defense. Outdoor cameras, indoor firearms like a Wingmaster or S&W 629 in .44 mag. But I got the (current) wife a nice little Kel-Tec .380, just because. I have no gold inlaid guitars, but I have an old Grundig radio my Dad bought in when he was in the Army in Germany back in 1954. He passed away last year and nobody’s taking away my Grundig.
Thanks for the Vorpal reference…a new one on me, but interesting nevertheless. Perhaps a day late and a dollar short for this Old Geezer ™, but as a long time student of hand to hand combat and of edged weapon combat, the Sword looks like something I might still want to spring for.
FWIW, I once studied (at the low end of the totem pole, to be sure, but there nevertheless) with a Japanese iaido master who would do live blade combat demos at full speed, stopping less than an inch from intended targets, after rushing at each other the length of the mat. Amazing speed and control. When I was younger, I had very quick perception compared to many, but the blades moved so quickly that they were a blur…
The only thing I have ever seen from the Western world that is anywhere near comparable is the Marine Corps Honor Drill Team. If you ever get a chance to see them, you will be amazed. You can get tickets to their Friday evening shows at the USMC Commandant’s barracks in SE Washington.
But the iaido master, for all his skill, looked like just another ordinary Japanese businessman when not in the dojo.
“I pity the fool” that fails to heed your Maringer Vorpal warning.