Highnumbers wrote: ↑Fri Mar 05, 2021 12:48 pm
Sauerkraut wrote: ↑Fri Mar 05, 2021 1:17 am
Highnumbers wrote: ↑Thu Mar 04, 2021 4:12 pm
Yeah, have to say that's a pretty evil thought.
(...)But they've sat on this collection for decades, totally off the internet and out of the spotlight. This is one such collection.
Why do that though? Why store away loads of rare guitars for decades? The idea that he (it seems safe to assume) kept them out of the spotlight makes it even weirder; why not at least photograph them for people to enjoy? I guess I just don’t understand the point of collecting. Is it meant as a life insurance policy? Was he going to donate all of them to a museum at some point? He does realise he’ll die one day like the rest of us? Was he trying to keep them out of hairy metalheads‘ malicious hands? So many questions...
I’d love to see a Louis Theroux documentary about someone like him.
At one point in the 70s and early 80s, these guitars were practically being thrown away. You could barely give away a Fender Jaguar in that era.
A lot of the people who took up collecting back then did it because it was easy and inexpensive to acquire guitars and in many cases I've heard collectors that speak of this era like they were bringing in refugees. Plucking instruments out of a skip/dumpster or from classified ads where literally nobody else wanted them.
And you're also talking about the same generation of people that don't feel the compulsive need to share every aspect of their lives online. I'm not surprised at all that some old guy doesn't "share his collection" online because the thought of photographing and publicly displaying this stuff online seems like an incredibly foreign concept to them (or even a security risk).
I feel like a lot of people just don’t understand the concept of collecting because they see it only as a recent phenomenon dominated by cynical entrepreneurs who don’t care about guitars beyond their investment potential.
In reality, collecting started before the mid 90s, which is when this cynical idea seemed to have really come about in earnest with people like Chinery, etc. and was made infamous by the ~2006 crash.
Most collectors are actually super-enthusiasts, way beyond anyone on most guitar forums. They care about history, preservation, music in general, and they tend to actually play guitar and support live music as well. In other words, they give a shit.
My guess is that the guy in question here is the kind of collector who has been collecting guitars for a long time, is the kind of collector who actually found original and rare guitars from their original owners (this takes actual work and time, unlike looking at Reverb or guitar forums) and who had to be passionate about it because it was probably not easy to track all these guitars down and the guitars weren’t really worth anything at the time. Offsets were still $500 back when comparable Strats were $10k.
Whatever you think about what happened, it seems pretty obvious to me that this guy had/has a passion for offset guitars and it probably took him a very long time to put his collection together. Seems like people here are just jealous of what this guy was able to do. I’d bet many of these guitars wouldn’t have survived to see today if they had been sold to just whomever.
If you want to know why someone wouldn’t post pics of their entire rare guitar collection online, see the original post, lol.