And from the beat-up finish, the oxidized hardware, the varnish worn off the high notes on the neck, you might imagine that this particular guitar has seen more than a few years of use. That it might be some musician's trusty axe, lugged from club to club, down one dusty country highway after another, over a long career of achingly bent blues notes (that missing varnish on the high notes again).
As further confirmation, this close-up shows an accumulation of the sorts of scrapes and dings a guitar collects over years of that kind of use.
Except for one thing.
This is a brand new guitar. Exactly as it comes from the factory.
This is, in fact, one of Fender's new Road Worn series of guitars. Replicas of vintage Teles and Strats and P-Basses and J-Basses, all pre-distressed to look like they've been played for years. So even if the only thing you can pick out is that lick from Smoke On The Water, and you've never been farther from home than your local Guitar Center, you can at least have an instrument with a genuine aura of artificial authenticity.
I imagine there's material for an entire anthropological dissertation here somewhere, but I'll leave that to some anthropologist.
Me, I'm just sad.
2 comments:
The Cuppycake song sounds AWESOME on that thing.
First blue jeans. Then guitars. Click and Clack the Tappett Brothers suggest we'd all be happier if they'd smash a ball-peen hammer into every new car as it comes off the assembly line. Yeah! No more worrying about the first scratch, dent or ding.
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