Old guitars swapped for cash at Raleigh event

RALEIGH -- Before he sold the Martin, a 1934 flat-top acoustic, a vintage guitar with a tone like butter, Gary Sanders needed to step outside and smoke a cigarette.

Sell it, and he walks out $1,600 richer.

Keep it, and he still owns a treasured piece of mahogany. Puff. Puff. Deal.

"It's like selling a little brother," sighed Sanders, a retiree from Youngsville, collecting his money.

This week, hundreds of pickers will fish a dusty Gibson out of the attic, fetch an old Gretsch from the closet or slide an antique Fender out from under the bed - discarding rock-star dreams for quick cash.

From now to Saturday, the International Vintage Guitar Collectors Association will size up any old music-maker: cellos, violins, oboes, cornets, tubas, tambourines, triangles and especially pre-1970guitars, paying 85 percent of its estimated value.

Musical instruments are the first things to be jettisoned in a sinking economy, leaving a wake of stringed and brass flotsam. And on Wednesday, old songsters streamed into the Holiday Inn Crabtree Valley carrying family fiddles wrapped in blankets, heirloom accordions packed in cardboard boxes.

Bryan McCoy, 32, arrived with his red Fender Jag-Stang, a hybrid electric guitar made famous by Kurt Cobain. These days, he's out of work and supporting a daughter. So $725 sounds like a song.

"It's been sitting in a closet for nine or 10 years," McCoy said. "Kids today never even heard of Kurt Cobain."

The idea behind these shows, said guitar expert Greg Taylor, is to get neglected instruments playing again. At the Raleigh show, he'll get 40 a day. Together, 200 teams of collectors like him will snare 4,000 in a year. High-end instruments go to auction houses such as Christie's; the lower-end, to eBay.com.

"The cool thing about our jobs is, if you're not going to play much, we can get it back in the hands of someone who's going to play it," said Noah Wenger, Taylor's partner in Raleigh.

In three years, Taylor has seen guitars come in steadily, but maybe at a bit of a decline. The recession may still be influencing the will to part with a treasured instrument, but this is a deep recession, and many of those tearful partings happened years ago.

Not long ago, someone brought in a 1960 Gibson Les Paul, which still had the original $277 receipt and had sat unplayed under a bed. It brought $125,000, Taylor said, and is now owned by James Hetfield of Metallica.

On Wednesday, many of the transactions had to do with reducing clutter. Sanders sold his Martin to whittle down a stable of six, though he's thinking of putting his proceeds toward another.

Happy with his deal, Sanders told Taylor, "I expected you to insult me."

Taylor replied with a smile, "Sorry."

But he couldn't please everyone. Henry Miller, a retiree from Cary, brought in his father's accordion, battered by time, wrapped in a towel and packed in a cardboard box. Calling it at least 100 years old, he recalled his father playing it in a tree while a youth in Germany.

But it bore no identification, no manufacturer's mark. And it hadn't played a note in 50 years. Because it was more a curio than amusic-maker, Taylor couldn't make an offer. So Miller pulled its bellows and let the old accordion give one mournful croak before going back in the box.

Thurston Perry, 71, came with spring cleaning in mind. He pulled his old high school trumpet from the bedroom closet of his Garner home, and took his dad's violin from under the bed.

"My father was born in 1913, and he got it when he was 8 years old," Perry said. "My grandma got the notion it would be nice to have a violin player in the family band. The story was, he was sitting on the porch practicing and my grandma made some comment about a screeching noise. So he laid it down and never touched it again."

Nobody wants this stuff anymore, Perry said, and it's sad. But Wenger offered him $300 for the trumpet, $200 for the violin, and he walked out happy, knowing that someone would love them again.