The fact that Jimi Hendrix bought probably well over a hundred different guitars. Yet, there are only 7 guitars whose whereabouts are actually known.

Isn't it strange that one of Rock's premier guitarist's gear is actually little known about and scarce? (kind of like his music, nice job Janie...)

Just wondering.


-The Screamin' J

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"Could you take the stain from this pair of pants, and put in on this pair of pants?"

yeah, he destroyed at least one during major shows.

Good point.

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The Hendrix family has done a remarkable job delivering Jimi's recordings to the public. Ever hear of Dagger Records? Authentic Hendrix? They're still releasing stuff nobody's ever heard before.

Your comment makes no sense.

You know why?

Because people didn't start obsessing about "gear" until AFTER the rock revolution, which brought a whole huge crowd of soon-to-be-middle-aged-guys into the music stores instead of the model railroad hobby shops where they belong, where to this day they drive themselves slowly mad trying to figure out what they can buy/swap/modify so they can, for one dazzling moment, play that lick they loved when they were 14 and know it sounded just like the record... hoping, I assume, that the lightning that runs through creative people will one day also run through them.

They also didn't have a huge number of boutique companies serving the aftermarket, with pickups, bodies, trem blocks, cryogenically treated pots, each manufacturer more than happy to reflect and amplify the growing compost heap of lore at the heart of the electric guitar mythos. Back when Jimi was buying those guitars, they were cheap, and you pretty much had to play them the way they came.

So, nobody was keeping track of the gear because gear just wasn't that big a deal to the audience. But there's also the fact that nobody knew that Hendrix would go from a fast-rising guitar player to The Naked Emperor he is today... even his biggest fans could not have envisioned the shrine to Jimi that has been built in the minds of electric guitar players. I mean, if you knew Jesus was going to get back up in three days, you would have done a better job of hoarding his stuff, right? But you didn't. so you just threw out his old clothes.....

True -- but that guitar IS still accounted for.

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Hi hendrixfan99:

Yes, I do know something that's weird. It follows on from this:


A weird thing about those clothes is that now the latest scientific analyses have been permitted by the Vatican it turns out after all that the Turin Shroud is indeed 2000 years old. But they found conclusive proof that it didn't belong to Christ. Even weirder: it turns out it belonged to Pontius Pilate.

What a coincidence: how weird is that?

Cheers - C

SlapChop,
How true. My 72 Strat cost $285 with a case. Nobody cared at all. People didn't "need" 5 different Strats to get by. It's a brilliant marketing plan (scam) that Fender has. You don't even need the time to "customize" your Strat because it comes off the line already modified. The only problem is it's not a one of a kind. It's a mass produced guitar that everyone else has. It's not your individual tone. It's pretty sad really that there's no one experimenting any more. I'm glad Les Paul is still alive. At least you can still see an actual inventor every Monday night in NY. I saw him twice and he's awesome. At 93 he doesn't play like he used to, but he's still amazing to see perform.

Check it. My early 60's Strat - I dunnno, '63, maybe, who knew? - that bought in 1970 I got for under 2 bills with the case. I ended up trading it in a couple years later on an early 60's Gibson ES-330, sunburst with chrome P-90s. I don't have that anymore, either. They were just old guitars then.

I suspect Jimi gave many of those guitars away, smashed a couple, burned several (I think he pulled that gag more than once), and the people who ended up with the fragments, for the most part, didn't know they were holding Holy Relics from the Church of of the Purple Haze.

Uhhh...

Big Jay, I was talking about the audience, not Hendrix, and why nobody cataloged everyone of his leftover picks. Jimi's attitude about his gear doesn't enter into it. Myabe he should have had a Last Supper and told the faithful, "Now, make sure that everybody knows where all my guitars are, because the preists are gonna need 'em..."

And I didn't say the pursuit of tone was gimmick invented by guitar companies, either. It's just herd behavior. Everybody wants to sound like the cool guy, and starts gathering Cool GUy stuff to say just as fast as they can, even before they know what they're talking about. Before long, there's a compost pile of made-up misinformation.

Now, say you're a pickup maker. Are you going to swim upstream against the endless clamor coming from the guitar stores? Hell no... you're going to tell them what they want to hear. They holler and yell and cajole and cry for thin, thin nitro, so finally you're gonna sell it to them, at a premium, and with the story they want to hear.

But the point I try to make over and over, and which seems to irk you in some way (since you frequently seem to be trying to catch me in some kind of contradiction), is this:

Even if all this ephemera about wood and fingerboards and whether or not those are REALLY the initials of Abigail the Fairy Godmother on your pickups was true, KNOWING IT WOULDN'T MAKE YOU A MUSICIAN. It would make a a model railroader, a speed shop rat, a guy who knows a lot about what to buy.

I think everything that gets in the way of learning about music is stupid, including knowing how to identify a real '55 Strat and figuring out which "tone woods" are best and the whole nine yards. BEcause none of that is about music. it's about money. (WHich explains the '59 Les Paul, BTW... they don't all sound magical, they don't turn you into a great player... they just cost a lot and demonstrate one's ability to spend a lot... this is true for ALL collectable items.)

You know, it occurs to me that guitar forums never turn out to be about making music. They always turn out to be about buying things.

You know what I always say: "Nice checkbook. Let's hear you play."

No need to thank me.

No need to get insulting, either. Not all of us have had the advantages of your obviously superior education.

And your inflation formulas aren't applicable to the point being made. The point is that same guitar appreciated much, much FASTER than the rate of inflation, thanks to misinformation and collector lust. But at the time we bought ours, they weren't considered anything special.

And they weren't. Where your inflation formula DOES pertain is in this: you can buy a better-made, better sounding, better playing Strat brand new today for a lot less money than you could buy in 1956 (with inflation taken in account).

You guys know what's weird...?

How an innocent discussion somehow turns into a hijack victim by SlapChop or BigJay, or any guys with more than one capital letter


-The Screamin 'J

_________________
CURRENT RIG:
2008 Squier bullet stratocaster modified with Rumpelstiltskin pickups -> Dunlop GCB-95 Original Crybaby -> Fender Vibro Champ XD

"Could you take the stain from this pair of pants, and put in on this pair of pants?"

handrixfan, there's no hijack. Your question was, "Isn't it strange that one of Rock's premier guitarist's gear is actually little known about and scarce?" And I gave my opinion on that subject, which is that the guitars are scattered or destroyed, mostly because nobody knew or cared that fans in the future would be interested in the whereabouts of Jimi's last Kleenex®.