Funny guitar article. How true this is....
I just returned from the Chicago Guitar Show. These shows are really going down in popularity, it was small and everyone there was old. I must have been one of the youngest there. Looked like a weekend event organized by the local old age homes. Sixty year old guys with pony tails. I am telling you people, I have been saying this for years, the guitar is dying and fading fast. It will never be as dead as the accordion, the previously most popular instrument in the world but it will be nothing as we knew it in the past.
I saw and played lots of vintage guitars. It sure is hard to find one of these that are healthy and playable. This has to be the biggest scam in history. It is claimed that people are paying $10K and up for a warn-out warped piece of nothing. $30K for a used-up Strat with a tiny neck. $45K for an unplayable Les Paul. $4.5K for a 50s ES 175 with a sunken top and a hump in the neck, that is damaged beyond repair and makes the guitar totally unplayable.
I have a theory, these former used car salesmen who deal in vintage guitars, sell these things mostly among themselves. They artificially raise the prices and make themselves believe their own BS. Prices are going up because each time a dealer buys a vintage guitar from another dealer he pays more and then sells it for a little more to another dealer 6 months later. Amazingly, in this way the prices are climbing. I certainly did not see any lines forming to purchase or even look at any of these sad looking things.
Another sad encounter was seeing grown men, who have been
playing guitar for some 30 years, spend an hour drooling over PRS tops. Then they went over and looked at identical Suhr tops. Those Suhr things feel just like $300 imports, it was a real shocker. An award for marketing genius should be given however. Who buys this stuff?
Notice how every company has their own PRS? For the last 15 years it has been a prerequisite in the guitar world. Everyone must have their own PRS or you cannot call yourself a guitar company. You know the overly exaggerated flamed, quilted, intestine-looking, vomit-inducing, unnatural atrocities with the inch thick plastic condom over it and made by high-tech robotics. Apparently those guys said their
PRS guitars sound magnificent because they own several of them and love them. So you may want to check them out. When I still see this happening, I loose all hope. Sad situation.
I came to the realization that these guys have admittedly owned and sold a hundred guitars so far. Many of them live permanently on ****, yet they really have no clue about guitars. Its like they are 14 years old. This is because they have owned the same guitars over and over again. They have never been exposed to anything else and the current guitar marketing works wonders on them. Its meant for them and speaks to them, in their language.
Some of the world famous guitar boutiques were present displaying their stuff. Have you experienced the "Radio Shack manager" attitude these characters have. These people have a way of acting and a certain extreme arrogance about them that is totally irritating because it is so obvious they know nothing about guitars. The question I ask is how can they be so dumb? Why do they know so little? I came to the same conclusion. Their world is extremely limited. They sell the same guitars over and over and over again. They know nothing else. They also deal with the same types of customers. They sell the same guitars to the same types of people. What irritated me all these years about these guitar boutiques is the ignorance when walking in. Just realizing that you have entered a really stupid place, with stupid products and with very stupid people, who have no clue about anything and who try to make you think how smart they are. You enter a place where music does not exist, only this thick pollution of materialism and ignorance. Its as shallow as a figured veneer top. The store is filled with stuff yet its totally empty at the same time. Empty of substance. You may feel leaving these places like you have just spent 8 hours watching the Osbornes and actually lost a few thousand brain cells in the process. You are now stupider then when you walked in. Its not a good feeling. You may not have realized this because the more you know about guitars the more offensive these places are.
The bottom line is that the show was dead and in the next 20 years it will all be over my friends. When the 60 year olds who witnessed the arrival of the Beatles, are gone, the guitar will be just one of the many instruments, which was basically a cultural fad due to the overwhelming number of kids of the baby boom generation. For those of us still kicking around in a few years, we should be able to buy vintage guitars real cheap, if that's what you want to do.
So what do you think?
