All Those Years Ago

It was 56 years ago next month – a time now known by anthropologists as the ‘Pringo’ period (or pre-Ringo for the unenlightened)… The ‘greatest band’ the world was yet to see was about to become ‘the most available backing group in Hamburg’.

The real upcoming star in Hamburg in June 1961 was Tony Sheridan.  And the fab three (Lennon, McCartney and Harrison) plus their ill-fated drummer, Pete Best, were summoned to a small studio in Hamburg to lay down a few backing tracks for the ever-ambitious Sheridan.

Stuart Sutcliffe, their James Dean-esque bass player, had taken the day off to go to the beach with the love of his life, Astrid Kirchherr.  He would officially leave the group within the next month.

Sheridan knew the boys and often joined them on stage at the Kaiserkellar and Indra Clubs during their gruelling, eight-hour sets.

With McCartney fresh on bass, seven tracks came out of that first session: the Sheridan-fronted ‘My Bonnie’ and ‘The Saints’; ‘Ain’t She Sweet’, sung by Lennon; and a Harrison/Lennon-penned instrumental parody (homage) to Cliff Richard’s backing band, ‘Cry For A Shadow’.

Three other non-Sheridan ‘Beatles’ tracks, recorded on the day, disappeared without trace.

The surviving tracks were released in Germany under the guise of Tony Sheridan and the Beat Boys (‘Beatles’ was dropped because it sounded like the German word for penis).

Sheridan also had moderate success with ‘My Bonnie’ in the UK.  But it wasn’t until the Beatles hit the big-time that everyone and his dog decided to release these early disks with titles as varied as ‘The Savage Young Beatles’, ‘Meet the Beat’ and of course ‘Tony Sheridan (tiny typeface) with The Beatles (huge typeface).

Even at such a young age (Harrison was only 18) the Beatles were at the top of their game.  And these early recordings give an insight into how tight the band had already become as performers. Yet despite the sharp learning curve in this post-war Sin City, the young Liverpudlians remained somewhat wide-eyed and innocent.

A lot of romantic tosh has been written about the Beatles embracing the moody highbrow French-inspired, Existentialist movement that Astrid Kirschherr and Klaus Voorman dabbled in.  I plead guilty to some of this, having exaggerated it in the script for the movie Backbeat.

I spent a few enlightened days with Astrid Kirchherr in Hamburg back in 1992 when I was writing Backbeat.  Astrid always seemed to have a knack for making her early days with the Fabs seem a lot more down-to-earth than history likes to remember.

“We were young kids who wore black clothes and thought Jean Cocteau movies were cool. Nothing much deeper than that.”

And the Beatles?

“They were lovely, young, ordinary guys who just wanted to play rock’n’roll, get drunk and have a laugh.”

Which, 50 years on, is still music to a lot of young ears.

Financial Instruments

At 16 years of age, I could stand in front of a music store all day, drooling at the unattainability of the various Gibson and Fender guitars that, at $200 plus, were way out of my budget.  I was in a band back then and would have given my right arm to play one of these beauties (It would have been a little difficult with only one arm, but I was young and foolish.)

In fact, I remember buying a Japanese Gibson SG rip-off and very carefully painting the Gibson logo on the headstock in white enamel paint. It looked pretty good.  And from a distance, in a darkened room, I was confident it would fool everyone.  The only problem was, it was bright blue and Gibson never made a bright blue SG.  But I did manage to fool myself for quite a long time.

Eventually I left the group for the love of a good woman, two years after John Lennon left his band for the love of a good woman (a different one). But unlike Lennon and the Beatles, my split, in the suburbs of Melbourne, Australia, wasn’t quite as newsworthy.

A lot of good women, a couple of marriages, a few different countries and three decades later, I decided it might be a good idea to revisit my dream of being a rock star.

That dream lasted all of 30 seconds.  But what I did discover was that my early obsession with Fifties and Sixties guitars had blossomed into a real love and appreciation of these instruments, the ones I could never afford to own.

I might not have had the desire to wear tight leather trousers on stage, in front of a Marshall 100-watt stack.  But something still tweaked my rock-knobs.

My 1954 Fender Stratocaster

So what did I do?  I went out and bought the daddy of them all (or at least the uncle of them all, if you’re a Gibson fan).  I purchased an original 1954 Fender Stratocaster – the first year the Strat was built.  It had a neck date of August 1954 and was signed TG on the butt of the neck, in pencil, by Tadeo Gomez — a name that can be found on many Fifties Strats and one synonymous with some of the finest Fender necks ever to be hand-carved from a chunk of maple.

Gomez’ initials are on the neck of Brownie, Clapton’s faithful old Strat, which was sold at auction in 1999 for $450,000.  I paid £22,000 for the honour of owning one of Leo Fender’s finest and sold it four years later for 35 grand.  During those years, the bug bit even harder and I probably bought and sold more than 30 high-end guitars.

I didn’t set out to buy and sell vintage guitars.  It just kind of happened.  For a couple of years I worked in an ad agency in New York and travelled back to London every fortnight to spend time with my kids.  The vintage guitar pool is far richer in the US, so I would research and buy a guitar every couple of weeks and bring it back to Blighty on BA.

The attraction for me was more about owning and playing these beautiful instruments for a short period of time than it was about making money. However, I was knowledgeable enough to know what was a good buy and (more importantly) what wasn’t.  So I made a profit on every guitar I bought and sold.  I even saved a tidy sum on import tax as I was bringing these bad boys back as part of my ‘private collection’.

In retrospect, it was also a smart way to change the dollars I was making in the US into pounds without all those silly bank charges.

 1959 Blonde Strat, 1962 Sunburst Strat, 1962 Candy Apple Red Strat, 1953 Les Paul Gibson

By 2008, the price of some of these guitars had skyrocketed. I looked at acquiring a ’54 Strat at a Texas guitar show for $115,000.  I didn’t buy that one but I did get hold of a beautiful, blonde ’58 Strat two weeks later from a dealer in Ithaca, NY, for $95,000 and a Blackguard 1952 Telecaster (in mint condition) for 75 grand.

The same guy was selling a 1959 Gibson Les Paul for $600,000 and I’d heard of other Les Pauls going for close to a million.  But all good things must come to an end. And when the arse fell out of the economy, the same arse fell out of the vintage guitar market.

I jumped early and got my money back on the couple of guitars I still had.  But that same Telecaster could now be picked up for less than half the price I paid a few years back.

That’s not to say there isn’t still money to be made in vintage guitars, as long as they’re 100 percent original.  (Any changed-out parts, no matter how small – even a re-soldered wire under the pick-guard – will render them far less desirable and knock thousands off their value.)

As the economy improves — and let’s believe it will — then the prices will rise exponentially.  The reality is that they’ll never make another 1959 Gibson ES 335 and there will never be another Leo Fender or Les Paul.  Tadeo Gomez died in 1986 without ever knowing how famous his initials would become in guitar circles.

In truth, the guitars produced these days are probably as well made as those from the Fifties.  But the passage of time adds something to these chunks of wood that is unquantifiable.  The French call it je ne sais quoi.  A more appropriate and musician-friendly word might simply be ‘mojo.’