“Are you ready?” Margouleff asked at the warehouse. He unlocked a door, and immediately a thick, corky scent hit me, the emanation of hundreds of aging guitars—the great variety of hardwoods, the glue and paint and lacquer, the oxidation of strings and coils, the leather straps and handles, and the sarcophagal musk of the cases themselves. Guitar collectors know and savor this smell. Margouleff has thought of hiring a perfumer to try to re-create it. “When someone brings me a guitar, the first thing I do is smell it,” he said. “Smell is a fingerprint. It’s how I tell if it’s real or not.”
Receding into the warm amber light of the warehouse’s middle distance, on both sides and a few tiers, were red-carpeted shelves of old cases packed as snug as library stacks. Here was a Beinecke of guitars. Margouleff explained the sorting system—make, model, serial number, with a chronological overlay. Gibsons, Fenders, Martins, Gretsches, D’Angelicos. In the open floor space were Oriental carpets, black leather couches and club chairs, dozens of vintage amps, coffee-table books, and an old Schwinn Sting Ray with a banana seat. It was not so much man cave as man arsenal, teeming yet tidy, the lair of a latter-day Count of Monte Cristo. The temperature stayed at sixty-eight, humidity at fifty per cent. Photography was forbidden.
I like that “old Schwinn Sting Ray with a banana seat” detail. This piece brims with vivid details (e.g., “the sarcophagal musk” of the guitar cases, “an early Stratocaster prototype, with a half-melted pick guard”; “a 1959 Sunburst model, its cherry-red finish faded to yellow”).
Paumgarten also visits the Met to view the first tranche of guitars delivered to the museum. This results in some of the piece’s most absorbing passages. This one, for example:
The guitars kept coming, like pitches at a batting cage. Before long, we reached the heart of the collection, the dawn of the solid-body electric guitar and, eventually, of rock and roll. “These guitars were really for music that didn’t even exist yet,” Margouleff said. Wheeldon presented the “Klunker,” an Epiphone Zephyr DeLuxe that, in 1941, Les Paul modified to be essentially a solid-body—he bolted a steel bar into the body and sealed the f-holes. Later, Gibson, which Paul endorsed, insisted that he put a Gibson decal on the headstock. But the case read “Mary Ford,” who was Paul’s wife and partner, and an ace as well. “Mary and Sister Rosetta Tharpe were the first two female rock stars,” Margouleff said. “The instrument itself isn’t sexist.” Add Mother Maybelle Carter and Elizabeth Cotten to this particular Mt. Shredmore, and the story of the guitar is no longer as dude-centric as conventional wisdom deems it to be.
And this:
The next solid-body specimen was designed in Downey, California, in 1948, by a motorcycle builder and racer named Paul Bigsby. Merle Travis, the country-and-Western hot shot, had asked Bigsby for an electric guitar with the sustain of a Hawaiian lap steel guitar. “Bigsby built everything, including all the casting, the inlay, winding the pickup coils,” Margouleff said. Downey was where Leo Fender first saw Travis playing a Bigsby guitar, which he then copied, to produce a prototype of the classic Fenders. Opening a battered case, Wheeldon unveiled the prototype, its white body paint chipped—an object not nearly as elaborate as the Bigsby and yet, in light of the Telecasters and Stratocasters to come, possibly more august. Next up was an original Fender Esquire and then an early Stratocaster prototype, with a half-melted pick guard. Its materials had been “self-destructing.” “There was a lot of trial and error with the plastics,” Margouleff said. “They were working with volatile chemicals and man-made junk. There’s a reason Stradivariuses are still here. They’re made entirely of wood.” A pristine 1954 Strat was next, its shape as familiar and enduring as that of a spoon.
And this:
But the cream of the collection, and Ziff’s particular obsession, was the Les Pauls of the late fifties, which, when they débuted, did not sell well. Wheeldon presented a 1959 Sunburst model, its cherry-red finish faded to yellow. This was the “Keithburst,” which Keith Richards played on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” the Rolling Stones’ (and, it is believed, the Sunburst’s) first appearance on American television, in 1964. “This was not a popular instrument at the time,” Margouleff said. “It was out of production.” He contends that Richards must have bought it in New York, on Music Row, though Richards has said that he got it in London. (In the early nineteen-fifties, the British government imposed import restrictions that affected American guitars, so they were uncommon in the U.K.) In England, Richards apparently shared it with Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page, among others, whetting their appetites for the older American instruments.
And most especially this:
Margouleff handed me the Keithburst and, plugging it into a small amp, urged me to play. One grows accustomed to never touching the art, but I hit some open chords, the few I know. By gum, whether it was the instrument itself or the ghosts of fingers past, the sound was rich and sassy, and moved me to make faces.
That last line is inspired. The whole piece is inspired – one of Paumgarten’s best.
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