EXTENDED VERSION
Everyone knows the clichéd story about the one that got away. You know, the high school sweetheart or the old car that everyone wishes they had held on to, but youth’s foolishness got in the way.
The one that got away wasn’t the prom queen or a hot-rodded car, it was a guitar. I worked in a greasy spoon restaurant to buy that guitar, I even had my senior pictures taken with it.
The special guitar is 1978 BC Rich Eagle Supreme. Very few of these handmade guitars were ever produced. Even today, you have a better selection of 1950s Fenders in vintage guitars shops then you do original BC Riches.
And they were pricey when new. An old sales brochure lists the price the my old guitar at $1599 in the late ‘70s. Remember, the average automobile cost a little over $6,000 during this time frame according to the US Department of Commerce.
Why did I want such an expensive, rare guitar in the first place? It wasn’t a Stratocaster or Les Paul, which are the standard guitars for any budding rock star.
I simply fell in love with the look of the early BC Rich guitars. They were so unique.
That fascination led to an unpleasant high school job — a waiter in greasy spoon restaurant. I knew waiters made good tips; I needed to save up some serious money to buy that guitar. I used to have to work the ‘bar rush’ shifts on the weekends. Now that was rough, especially when you’re only 17. Finally, in the middle of my senior year in high school, I saved up enough money to purchase the guitar just in time for enior pictures.
It wasn’t like it is now with the Internet, when purchasing the guitar. I had to track one done by calling all over the US to vintage guitar dealers. I found this guitar at a store called Outlaw Guitars in New Jersey. The price they wanted was pretty good, so I sent off enough money for them to hold it.
There were a couple bumps in the road before I could get the guitar. First, on a sneak trip out of town with a family vehicle, the timing belt slipped and he had to pay to get that replaced, plus find a shop to fix it the same day so no one would get suspicious when he wasn’t home on time. That repair bill put a big dent in the guitar fund. Then in December 1992, I finally saved up enough money to own the guitar of my dreams.
I paid extra money to get the shipped second-day air because my senior pictures were a week away.
But South Dakota’s unpredictable winter weather made getting the guitar on time a challenge. A December blizzard struck, grinding all Interstate traffic to a halt for a couple of days. I had to drive out to the UPS garage early in the morning on the day of my senior pictures and track down my neighborhood driver to pick up the guitar. I opened the box at the photographer’s studio. Those pictures were the first time I held the guitar. I was excited.
But I let my beloved guitar get away only a couple of short years later thanks to the foolishness of youth. I sold the guitar to fund the purchase of another. I really didn’t realize how rare these things really were. To this day, I’ve only seen a couple other examples in person. And this guitar is the only one I’ve ever seen in person with the fancier inlays and bound neck.
I have been playing guitar for 25 years, I spend vacations checking out vintage guitar stores in other locations, but out of all the guitars I have owned over the past twenty years, this particular one has always held a soft spot in my heart. And when the world went to the Internet in the late ‘90s, the search for his old friend began.
I always knew that it would be easy to find if it ever came up for sale. There weren’t that many ever made. If it ever came up for sale I knew it would be listed at some vintage shop or prominently featured somewhere on the web. Plus, I still knew the old serial number and the wood grain would make it easy to identify.
After a decade-plus of sporadically searching for the guitar on Google, a familiar site popped up at beginning of January.
I looked at the ad’s photo for about five seconds before I said to myself, "that’s my old guitar.”
The next day, I had my mother scan her copy of my senior picture so she could email it. After a quick comparison, I knew it was my old guitar; the high school sweetheart who got away.
Every grain of the wood was exactly the same.
After all these years, I wondered what had ever happened to the guitar. Did a collector have it? Well, the guitar led a very interesting life from the time I sold it until the present day. Besides a couple of close up pictures, the online advertisement also featured a photo of the current owner playing the guitar onstage at Madison Square Garden with rock legend Rod Stewert; the photo was from the late 1990s.
I called the number listed in the ad and spoke to the current owner. He said he a some attachment to the guitar since he played it onstage with Rod Stewart at Madison Square Garden. And when I spoke to him the first time, he was just leaving to go on tour in Europe for most of the month, but he would contact me when he got back.
It turns out the guitar belonged to Oliver Leiber, who is the son of the legendary songwriter Jerry Leiber. Besides his stint as Rod Stewart’s guitarist, Leiber is also an accomplished record producer and songwriter; he even produced and wrote a number of former American Idol judge and ‘90s pop star Paula Abdul’s biggest hits. He’s currently member of the band fDeluxe, which features former members of Prince and the Revolution and Morris Day and the Time.
When Leiber returned home a few weeks later, I recited the serial number from memory and it matched. That’s when we both knew for certain that there was no questions regarding the guitar’s history. On January 30, I sent Leiber the money for the guitar. One week to the day later, the guitar arrived in Sioux Falls from California.
There were a few wear marks that I remembered from when I had it before I noticed when I first removed the guitar from the box.
Now that the guitar is back home, what am I going to do with it? I plan on
playing it!
They’re great guitars and they’re meant to played. And this time I’m not letting this one go.
No comments:
Post a Comment