I often tell the stories (too often, no doubt!) of my two main guitars.
(yes, I do have a couple of others: a Maton 12 string — a beautiful instrument I’ve played very little in recent years — & an Ibanez Acoustic / Electric).
Nearly 30 years ago, in December 1975, I bought my Maton Coolabah 6 string. For $309 — when our daughter was 21⁄2 and our boys were 5 months old!
Gee, I sure can time things well.
It looks pretty worn, but it still sounds terrific, a very warm sound. It’s travelled everywhere with us, with me — all round Australia, 3 times to the USA, to Hungary, Hong Kong, New Zealand.
It had a major overhaul a couple years ago, courtesy of Fretco (excellent Adelaide guitar people): a fret job, new machine heads, the neck surface cleaned up, Maton AP-5 pick-up installed. We picked it up in the early evening, and put it in the boot of Dorothy’s Suzuki Baleno while we went to the ballet at Festival Theatre. Later, when we returned to the car, we found a smashed passenger-side window, an attempted theft of the CD-Radio (wrecked, but not taken).
But the intruders didn’t check the boot of the car. It would have yielded a guitar they could heave sold for maybe $1,000.
Many years earlier, in 1990, I bought my fluorescent pink Schecter guitar. I loved the feel of it, and the sound of it, but I wasn’t too sure about the colour. The kids (teenagers then) and Dorothy thought it looked really good, so I bought it.
Six months later it was stolen, along with an amp and some other bits, from our back shed (practice room) at Klemzig. I held little hope of its recovery, and went back to the same shop (John Reynolds Music City) to buy another Schecter. A lime green one is what they had. It was the same model, but didn’t feel or look as good. I’d almost finalized the purchase when I had a phone call from the police: “Mr Mann, we’ve found your hot pink Schecter guitar. It was recovered from a property in Norwood, together with some other stolen property. The man in whose house we found it said he’d bought it for $400 in a pub in Kensington.”
Maybe!
Anyway, ever since then I’ve said that the pink guitar is obviously the one God meant me to have. And the Maton too.
I really don’t mind being stuck with two guitars that look and sound so good.