Geoff Duncan

This weekend I started to think I might be plugged in. Hip. Down. The man, man. Starting Saturday morning, unbidden, I began receiving phone calls and email messages: "Hey, I was thinking of finally selling that Les Paul and getting a Tele, any idea what it's worth?" followed by "Hey, I'm thinking of selling my 335 and getting a Les Paul I can take on tour this summer—any leads?" followed by "Hey, I've been looking for a good 335 for a while and come up dry—know if there are any out there?"

I'm condensing and paraphrasing, of course, but it was an odd moment of synchronicity, like the planets—you know, the Guitar Planets—were aligning and I was the cosmic puppet master controlling some mythical six-string orrery. None of these folks knew each other, and yet I controlled their fates. Through me—and only through me, mwah ha ha!—would their guitar dreams come to fruition!

Anyway. In the space of a couple hours, a series of phone calls, and a handful of email messages, I managed to set up a three-way sale of three vintage guitars and make three players happy. The details are a little tricky since one of the sellers is in Canada, but the essentials of the deal were finalized today and, assuming it all works out, everyone will get the new-to-them instruments they wanted.

Slightly scary: if someone else had been checking his email, I might have been able to line up a fourth unrelated guitar acquisition over the weekend. ¡Díos mio!

So here's the weird part: I'm pretty used to folks asking my opinion on certain flavors of electric guitars and basses, and even some acoustic instruments. Standard questions: which ones to buy, which ones to keep, which ones to sell, how an instrument can be improved or upgraded…that sort of thing. I do some setups plus minor maintenance and repair work, mostly for friends and acquaintances, and generally just try to be helpful. It's partly earning karma points, but partly it's a way to play (and sometimes mess with) everyone else's stuff. Let's face it: there are some cool instruments out there: I may not want to own many of them, but I'm happy to goof around with them and learn what they're about.

But I've never held myself out as a potential source for instruments. And yet these three players, working musicians all, more-or-less simultaneously thought of me.

Frickin' weird.

[For the terminally curious, the axes were electric guitars: a '71 "fat" Tele, a kinda road-worn but nice '66 Gibson Les Paul, and a very slick '88 custom Gibson ES 335. (No, these weren't straight swaps: some money is changing hands with the instruments.) The deal which never got off the ground involved an '78 Ibanez SA-100: not a collector guitar, to be sure, but some of those "post-lawsuit" late-70's Gibson-derived Ibanez instruments are great players.]