Where did they all go ?

[Slipperydick]

If Its not too daft a question, where have all the old Precisions/Jazzes/Mustangs/SGs etc. gone ?

If you consider that from the early seventies, and even earlier, there must have been thousands and thousands of good basses sold in the UK alone, Not just the Fenders and Gibsons, but the Hofners, Antorias, Ibanez’s, the good JapCrap - Some of which were great, or is that just my memory playing tricks.

I cant believe nearly all of em have been scrapped, why would they be ? Who would throw a well known make of instrument into a skip, and why ?

So how come they are so rare ? I can understand it with amps (just about), But not instruments.

So are they all in the lofts of old guys who stopped playing years ago, in Japanese collections or what ?

If you think about it, 70s and 80s Fenders for example, should be 10 a penny, and in boot sales everywhere.

[icastle]

[quote name='Slipperydick' post='1147728' date='Mar 2 2011, 09:35 PM']where have all the old Precisions/Jazzes/Mustangs/SGs etc. gone ?[/quote]

Pete Seeger has them?

Some of them inevitably end up in collections, some are damaged beyond repair and get skipped, others end up staying with their owners and I dare say some of them just end up on a bonfire during house clearances.

I don't think they generally just 'disappear', they just don't turn up very often.

[Cat Burrito]

Just because they are not for sale doesn't mean they are not still around. I think a lot were badly ignored & wound up being thrown. My friend runs our local music shop & he often sees beautiful instruments now only fit for the skip. The rest (I hope) are on Basschat!

[Slipperydick]

[quote name='BurritoBass' post='1147859' date='Mar 2 2011, 11:16 PM']Just because they are not for sale doesn't mean they are not still around. I think a lot were badly ignored & wound up being thrown. My friend runs our local music shop & he often sees beautiful instruments now only fit for the skip. The rest (I hope) are on Basschat! [/quote]

Given the value, or at least the going rate for em, and with the facilities available to sell them these days, what can go wrong that would make them only fit for the skip ?

Not all 70s precisions were great when they were new, but they were still playable, are still sought after and surely would still have a value, even if they needed work.

I can remember being offered a white second hand precision for £70 in about 1973, didnt buy it cos the tuners were dodgy. A new one was only £125 at the time, but I felt to turn up with it, when even well off mates could only afford Antoria copies, and when I could hardly play would have seemed big headed, so I paid £69 for a good Jazz copy.

Edited March 3, 2011 by Slipperydick

[icastle]

[quote name='Slipperydick' post='1147918' date='Mar 3 2011, 12:30 AM']Given the value, or at least the going rate for em, and with the facilities available to sell them these days, what can go wrong that would make them only fit for the skip ?[/quote]

Lack of understanding of just what it is that's being thrown in the skip?

Look at it from a non-musician point of view...
Fred Smith is emptying out 50 years worth of clutter from his great-grandfathers house and finds a beat up old guitar, paint chipped and worn off most of it and equipped with three rusty strings.

It could be Fender Precision Bass serial number 0000001 but Fred doesn't know anything about stuff like that so it goes into the skip because it's old and knackered...

[Musky]

Yep.

And it's worth bearing in mind that the market for 70's Fenders has only picked up in the last few years, and often wouldn't have been economically viable to drop a lot of cash on. If you managed to split the body on, say, a 1996 P bass, are you going to go to the expense of having it repaired and resprayed or would you just part out what you have left (or use the bits yourself for a project)?

[Quoth'd]

I think I have to hold my hand up and say that I'm guilty of this.

Way back when . . . I was 16, I decided to treat myself after I passed my GCSEs and decided that I'd like to learn an instrument & wanted it to be something different - so I walked into my local music store and took a look around. I settled on a bass that I liked the look of & after waiting half an hour whilst the owner creamed over a punter who just walked in to play albatros before walking out again, I finally got served.

I picked my new instrument some metallic blue thing by a company I'd never heard of called Fender, paid my £70 & took it home.

After playing with it a while I got together with some friends & we started a band - I picked it up fairly quickly & was soon looking for a better instrument as I didn't want to be seen with a bass made by a company called Fender - surely they had something to do with cars & wouldn't know anything about quality musical instruments.

Oh and the 2 long pickups looked cheap as you could see the metal bits of the poles - whilst all my mates had cool guitars which were all black or looked like BC Rich / Les Paul etc.

I ended up doing lots of nasty things with that instrument that ranged from numerous resprays to planing a chunk off the body (by accident) to deciding to take it fretless (lets not even talk about nearly frying the pickups when trying to tinker with the electronics).

I finally took it apart & it was left in my wardrobe for years until finally found a new home at the local tip.


It wasn't till years later that I actually came across a picture in google, did some research & found out that my first bass was an original, late 60's metallic blue, Fender Jazz bass. The shame


Perhaps there should be a test that you have to pass before your allowed to buy instruments - if your too young or dumb - to prevent you harming innocent instruments lol

[megallica]

[quote name='Quoth'd' post='1147967' date='Mar 3 2011, 07:34 AM']I think I have to hold my hand up and say that I'm guilty of this.

Way back when . . . I was 16, I decided to treat myself after I passed my GCSEs and decided that I'd like to learn an instrument & wanted it to be something different - so I walked into my local music store and took a look around. I settled on a bass that I liked the look of & after waiting half an hour whilst the owner creamed over a punter who just walked in to play albatros before walking out again, I finally got served.

I picked my new instrument some metallic blue thing by a company I'd never heard of called Fender, paid my £70 & took it home.

After playing with it a while I got together with some friends & we started a band - I picked it up fairly quickly & was soon looking for a better instrument as I didn't want to be seen with a bass made by a company called Fender - surely they had something to do with cars & wouldn't know anything about quality musical instruments.

Oh and the 2 long pickups looked cheap as you could see the metal bits of the poles - whilst all my mates had cool guitars which were all black or looked like BC Rich / Les Paul etc.

I ended up doing lots of nasty things with that instrument that ranged from numerous resprays to planing a chunk off the body (by accident) to deciding to take it fretless (lets not even talk about nearly frying the pickups when trying to tinker with the electronics).

I finally took it apart & it was left in my wardrobe for years until finally found a new home at the local tip.


It wasn't till years later that I actually came across a picture in google, did some research & found out that my first bass was an original, late 60's metallic blue, Fender Jazz bass. The shame


Perhaps there should be a test that you have to pass before your allowed to buy instruments - if your too young or dumb - to prevent you harming innocent instruments lol[/quote]

Great story - thanks for posting!

[paul_5]

[quote name='Quoth'd' post='1147967' date='Mar 3 2011, 07:34 AM']I think I have to hold my hand up and say that I'm guilty of this.

Way back when . . . I was 16, I decided to treat myself after I passed my GCSEs and decided that I'd like to learn an instrument & wanted it to be something different - so I walked into my local music store and took a look around. I settled on a bass that I liked the look of & after waiting half an hour whilst the owner creamed over a punter who just walked in to play albatros before walking out again, I finally got served.

I picked my new instrument some metallic blue thing by a company I'd never heard of called Fender, paid my £70 & took it home.

After playing with it a while I got together with some friends & we started a band - I picked it up fairly quickly & was soon looking for a better instrument as I didn't want to be seen with a bass made by a company called Fender - surely they had something to do with cars & wouldn't know anything about quality musical instruments.

Oh and the 2 long pickups looked cheap as you could see the metal bits of the poles - whilst all my mates had cool guitars which were all black or looked like BC Rich / Les Paul etc.

I ended up doing lots of nasty things with that instrument that ranged from numerous resprays to planing a chunk off the body (by accident) to deciding to take it fretless (lets not even talk about nearly frying the pickups when trying to tinker with the electronics).

I finally took it apart & it was left in my wardrobe for years until finally found a new home at the local tip.


It wasn't till years later that I actually came across a picture in google, did some research & found out that my first bass was an original, late 60's metallic blue, Fender Jazz bass. The shame


Perhaps there should be a test that you have to pass before your allowed to buy instruments - if your too young or dumb - to prevent you harming innocent instruments lol[/quote]


I never bought Fenders as a youngster (with lots more disposable income), as I saw them as an 'old man's' instrument. Wish I'd bought one now, ah well, we live and learn. I went for anything that felt good that specifically wasn't a Fender. What have I ended up with - a very good Jazz copy. Seems that age finally caught up with me ( or should that be taste?).

[dmccombe7]

Had a late 70's fretless precision bought new and only traded cause I decided to go back to fretted and bought an Aria SB1000 if memory serves me correctly.
Also had a mid 80's jazz and traded that cause E string always seemed flat comapred to others. Saddles kept moving and general little niggles that I couldn't be bothered trying to resolve.

As mentioned before by someone - shame - i wish i had kept them.

Dave

[Dave Vader]

As I recall, when I was a young lad in the early 90s we were specifically told by the old timers that all 70s Fenders were sh*te and thus we shouldn't bother with them.
Which is a shame, as I could never afford the pre-CBS that I was told were the only ones worth having, and I passed over a lot of very cheap strats/p-basses/teles/jazzes. Hey ho, ended up with a lot of japcrap, and it all seems to be going up.

Oh, and a lot of 70s fenders are as sh*te as I was told, just a shame I've since played a heck of a lot of very nice ones.

[hillbilly deluxe]

When was the last time you saw a 70's Strat with humbuckers and locking trem,there were loads about in the 80's.I myself have been guilty of horrible crimes to guitars,namely trying to make a 68 thinline Tele into a double cutaway,when i was about 17...............bin.

[Low End Bee]

I remember from my youth working part time in a music shop the horrors that were bought in. It was the late 70s and 'vintage' stuff was just starting to be appreciated.

Examples. A 50s Les Paul Junior with three badly routed pickups, lots of switches and big brass bridge and nut. Hand painted Psychedelic paint jobs on 50s & 60s Fenders. Re-shaping of bodies by cutting off bits. Lots of stripping of finishes with a bit of DIY varnish for the natural look.
I recall us playing cricket with an old Burns bass of some sort as it was considered only fit for the skip as they were so unfashionable.

[BigRedX]

I think that a lot of us are guilty of being over-sentimental about old instruments.

I produce for you exhibit A:





An early 60s Burns Sonic Bass.

It's hardly in original condition. In fact the only original bits are the body and neck wood, the frets and the pickups. Everything else has been modified or replaced. If this was a Fender from the same era it would be pre-CBS and no doubt I'd be getting some horrified reactions to showing it in this state (and no doubt any serious Burns fans will still hate this). What you need to consider as that all those modifications and replacements have meant that this bass is still an instrument that I want to (and do) play.

When I bought it in 1981 it had already been extensively modified by its previous owner(s). The red/black finish had been stripped and the Burns badges on the pickguard and headstock removed. Also the electronics had been rewired including the addition of an extra jack socket and two more knobs which weren't part of the pickup wiring, but most likely design to give on-board control of some external piece of equipment.

I had to replace both the bridge and the machine heads almost immediately. Virtually every screw thread on the bridge had stripped and the whole assembly was bound together with wire. The machine heads for the A and E strings slipped as you reached their proper pitch (which had been disguised by tuning the bass down a tone!) I also had to replace all the electronics except the pickups as they were all very crackly sounding and anyway I had no use for the modifications.

Back then there was no market for vintage parts. The only way you would have been able to get proper replacements for the items that need it would have been to cannibalise another Burns Sonic Bass which firstly I'd never seen, and secondly I could only just afford to buy this one - getting another bass would have been completely out of the question. So I did what everyone else at the time did. I replaced the parts that needed replacing with whatever was easily available. That meant Gotoh machine heads and a succession of bridges none of which were really suitable, but the current solution with its wooded plinth works better than any of the previous efforts. If I hadn't liked this bass so much I'm sure that it would have ended up in a skip or left behind after moving house because at the time it had pretty much zero value to most people.

It's only since the 90s that good quality instruments have become affordable in real terms. Back in the 70s and 80s if an instrument didn't do what you wanted you either part-ex'd it for something thought would, or you modified it until it did. If something broke it got replaced with whatever was easily available. People generally didn't have lots of instruments, so they made do with what they had, and made changes to it if they needed it to do something different.

Read almost any interview with a bassist in IM or SI in the 70s and if they had a Fender Bass pretty much the first thing they did was to remove the bridge and pickup covers and restring them with Rotosound round-wound strings. These things were seen as being out of date and unsuited to "modern" bass playing styles. And while the pre-CBS instruments had already achieved a semi-mythic status, everything after that was simply another mass-produced instrument and there was no value in preserving its original status.

And it's still happening today. Just take a look through the Repairs and Build Diaries on this forum to see people making changes to all sorts of instruments. Some appear to be reversible (provided you can still remember what you did with the original parts) but plenty aren't. Who knows which of those instruments in 20-30 years time are going to be desirable items? I'm guilty of it myself. I have a 90s Pedulla Buzz where I've replaced the standard pre-amp with an ACG01. For me this is an improvement, and it means that I'm still playing that bass. At the moment the second-hand value on Pedulla basses is a fraction of their new price. However in the future when they are no longer being made, we may well find that an all-original example will be a much sought-after instrument, and should mine come up for sale it will attract also sorts of comments about unsuitable modifications.

As a final note. I don't really find it surprising that a lot of 70s Fenders seem to have vanished. I helped out in my local musical instrument emporium in the late 70s and the quality of new Fender instruments we saw coming into the shop was shocking. Compared with the new original instruments they were also getting at the same time from Japan, there was simply no competition. All you were getting with a Fender was the name, The Aria Pro IIs and Ibanezes were of a much higher quality and cheaper to boot! If I'd had the money I'd have picked an Aria Pro II SB1000 over any of the new Fenders I saw without a moments thought.

[Happy Jack]

This is an all-original 1965 Hofner 500/2 Club bass:

[spinynorman]

[quote name='Happy Jack' post='1148219' date='Mar 3 2011, 11:51 AM']This is an all-original 1965 Hofner 500/2 Club bass:[/quote]

Whose loft did you find that in?

[Happy Jack]

One in Germany, where they don't find things in lofts, they find them in woodsheds. (Honestly.)

[Cat Burrito]

[quote name='Slipperydick' post='1147918' date='Mar 3 2011, 12:30 AM']Given the value, or at least the going rate for em, and with the facilities available to sell them these days, what can go wrong that would make them only fit for the skip ?[/quote]
I've seen a lot of acoustics that have been put in attics and the neck starts to bow, the body is raised by the bridge and they can't be repaired. A friend of mine was offered a late 70s Antigua Fender P-bass. When the old lady got it out from under the bed it had quite literally turned to mush. Incredible but true. I agree that most are probably salvageable but a lot of less experienced players probably think it's beyond repair if it has missing tuning pegs and no strings. Truss rod problems are also common for basses that haven't been stored properly. Just a few of the examples that I have seen

[TheGreek]

[quote name='icastle' post='1147924' date='Mar 3 2011, 12:58 AM']Lack of understanding of just what it is that's being thrown in the skip?

Look at it from a non-musician point of view...
Fred Smith is emptying out 50 years worth of clutter from his great-grandfathers house and finds a beat up old guitar, paint chipped and worn off most of it and equipped with three rusty strings.

It could be Fender Precision Bass serial number 0000001 but Fred doesn't know anything about stuff like that so it goes into the skip because it's old and knackered...[/quote]


Many years ago, I was at a guitarist friend's flat when one of his friends I didn't know told me about an experience he'd had while doing some plumbing in a customer's loft..

He had been working in there for a while when he came across a battered old guitar case in the corner of the loft but didn't open it to see what was inside. He asked the lady about it and she replied "oh it's my son's..he emigrated to Australia years ago..you can have it if you want.." He didn't open it and try as he may (well that's what he said) she wouldn't take anything for it. I think he was working for the Council at the time as he didn't mention a charge for the work that he did.

Anyway, he puts the case in the van, does a days work forgetting about the case till he gets home in the evening - opens it up - 1966 Gretsh Countryman guitar in near mint condition...

First chance he got - Off to Denmark St - several thousands of pounds better off..

I asked him whether he gave the old lady anything for it once it was sold.."how much do I give her?" - if he gave her a tenner say, he's really taking the p**s especially when he's several £K up - if he gives her a few hundred quid, will she suddenly get curious as to it's real worth and try to get it back??(think of the hassle..) Does he give her half, does he give her most of the money and keep a "commission", will she involve the son (in Oz) when she finds out it's real value..??

Tough predicament...




In the end he gave her nothing..he reasoned what the mind doesn't know, the heart won't grieve over...Sorry, no happy ending here..well not for her anyway..

[skankdelvar]

An amp tech told me about one of his customers who'd owned a 60's Ampeg B15 fliptop - valve job. It broke down, so this guy took it down the tip.

This was 3 years ago

Edited March 3, 2011 by skankdelvar

[Count Bassy]

Got to remember that most of those binned were binned before the existence of the Interweb or E-bay and together these have sent the knowledge of and the price of old instruments through the roof.

If you had an old bass you didn't want 30 or even 15 years ago, and didn't live close to a music shop, what did you do? If you didn't know someone who wanted it you'd probably throw it away.

[spinynorman]

In the 60s I had a japcrap 12-string guitar. A friend sat on it and snapped the neck. It was repaired, but never really recovered and over time the neck bowed. It didn't have an adjustable trussrod and it seemed the only thing to do was junk it. More recently, when I first started using eBay, I bought a Crucianelli 12-string, which turned out to have a nicely bowed neck and similarly lacking in the truss rod dept. Local luthier wouldn't touch it, so I put it back on eBay, with full disclosure. Someone in Canada bought it, for more than I paid, at a time when the exchange rate was totally in our favour. No idea what he did with it, or whether the enormous cost was worth it.

[Cat Burrito]

[quote name='Count Bassy' post='1148673' date='Mar 3 2011, 05:55 PM']Got to remember that most of those binned were binned before the existence of the Interweb or E-bay and together these have sent the knowledge of and the price of old instruments through the roof.[/quote]
A good point. When I first got into ashtray covers on Precision basses I sent a cheque via Airmail to the USA and waited 4-6wks for delivery. That was only 15yrs ago.

[Slipperydick]

[quote name='skankdelvar' post='1148662' date='Mar 3 2011, 05:47 PM']An amp tech told me about one of his customers who'd owned a 60's Ampeg B15 fliptop - valve job. It broke down, so this guy took it down the tip.

This was 3 years ago [/quote]

In the 70s a lot of valve amps got scrapped, cos valves were considered old fashioned, by some music shops, or at least that was the sales pitch. I can remember repairing a Bass AC30 fro a guy that played accordion through it, 6 months or so later he offered it to me for £15, which is what a large retailer in Birmingham had offered him for it PX against a Yamaha combo.

At the same time, some so called amp engineers - not techs them days - didnt like, or werent very cofident working on transistor stuff.

But with Guitars and Basses, I reckon most people recognise Fender or Gibson, punters in Workie clubs probably wouldnt consider a band any good if they couldnt see one or the other on a stage, along with a Premier or Ludwig kit.