It is December of 2000 and I am in trouble. Even as the corpse of the dot com boom is being necropsied, my wife is giving me hell for my out-of-control addiction: obscure guitars. With good reason. I have managed to disturb the equilibrium of a corner of the guitar marketplace to no one’s disadvantage but mine.
It started as a quest for information. Hold on for a little inside baseball, the payoff will be worth it. When I was 14 I wanted to play guitar but was afraid to admit it. My friend bought one, and when I saw it I was instantly in lust: the Fender Stratocaster, an iconic guitar favored by Hendrix, Clapton, Van Halen, and dozens of other legendary players. When I played it, I fell in love. The Strat looks good, feels better, and sounds like chimes and diamonds and unicorns and electric angels.
The Cankenstein Inheritance
Fast forward. I am in my 30s, have started taking lessons, and do well enough that I feel eligible to buy a real guitar to replace the unspeakably bad one I had inherited from a meth head who is the greatest player I ever knew personally but who pawned every decent instrument he had for crunk. It is destiny that I will buy a Stratocaster, but an impostor appears at the last moment.
When I go to the store and ask about Stratocaster prices, they ask if I mean Fender or Squier.
Heh?
There weren’t Squier Stratocasters when I was a kid. Fender deduced in 1982 that they should compete with themselves. They emerged from the lab with a lower priced Strat under a different label, hence Squier. If you’re confused, the Fender/Squier thing is roughly equivalent to Toyota/Lexus. Same company, same spirit, some of the same parts, but the Lexi are presumably higher quality autos than Toyotas.
I ask the kid at the guitar store what the difference is. Why buy a Squier instead of a Fender? I get an earful of gobbledewhatsit and end up knowing even less than I did when I came in. I entered the store sure I wanted a Fender Stratocaster, and emerged empty-handed and headachey. I spend months asking other salespeople the same logical question, and never ever get a good answer. Because how do you answer it honestly without sounding like a cad or a cannibal? I did not in fact that itch scratched for another 12 years, when I ask it of a bigwig at Fender and he says with gorgeous brevity: “Parts and tolerance.” Eventually I buy a Fender, not a Squier, even though I don’t know why. (In case you’re a guitarist and are wondering: buy a Squier if you’re unsure or don’t have a lot of money. They’re amazing for the money. If you have money, get the Fender. They’re somewhat prettier, sound a bit better, and don’t go out of tune too easily.)
OK, the payoff. Almost there. I have some extra money so I end up buying some Squiers just so I can compare them to my Fender, and maybe explain the dealio to anyone after me with the same question. Aspergeresque nerd and Stratocaster devotee that I am, I research Fender in more depth and discover hidden in a barely documented corner of a legendary giant of rock and roll history the instrument of the damned. It’s the Fender Performer, it looks like it was designed at Spacely’s Sprockets, and is considered at best the Edsel of the guitar world. Fender came out with these for one year, 1985, and no one seems to know why. Rumor has it that only 300 were manufactured and that not all of them were sold.
Obviously, I have to get one. If everyone else hates it, I have to assume I’ll like it.
Guitar dealers know nothing of the Performer. They come up on eBay from time to time, but at $500 a pop it’s the kind of thing I should be able to fondle before I buy it. Even in Los Angeles, though, no one has a clue about the Performer a mere 8 years after it was released, falling into the market with a dull racist thud. (I think it failed because it was made in Japan, and there was a strong anti-Japanese prejudice back then on the part of guitarists, but it’s another story.) After a reasonable wait and calling stores as far away as Texas, 1800 miles from my California perch, I break the first rule of guitar buying, which is to play the actual instrument before you buy it, and take a chance on eBay.
The Fender Performer is sublime. Ugly, true, but easy to play and with a whole solar system of sounds. It is the most versatile guitar I have ever played, even now. Within moments of playing a Performer the first time, I decide I need to preserve as many as I can. I become a steward of history. I do not want the Performer to vanish like the dodo or the passenger pigeon or Sir Mix-a-Lot.
Missionary Position
I do, in fact, buy up a goodly fraction of the Performer market but before all is said and done I have personally driven up the price of Performers from $500 for a mint example to $875 for a nice one with a huge gash in the back from those giant belt buckles from the 70s that we’d all like to forget we wore well into the 80s. My wife, bless her, never complains about the fact that I buy way more guitars than I “need”. She is however infuriated by my ability to corner the market and therefore price myself out of it.
The lights go out on the dot com market around then, but the economy-threatening catastrophe does not prevent me from my Mission. My wife almost does.
She tells me, rudely, to come up with a better plan. I do. To the tune of several million dollars over the next decade. See? The payoff. Next time I’ll explain how we parlayed my sick obsession into a niche business no one thought we could charge for.
