I don't want to get off on a rant here but the public should at least be made aware of this scam, I know I am spitting directly into the wind, because to the best of my knowledge there is nothing that can be done.

It was put together, masterminded and perpetrated by a couple of guys with 70's haircuts and egos the size of California. This is a story so foul and so despicable that Ed Roman says it should be ILLEGAL.

I am going to use analogies here, because I don't have time for a lawsuit and It simply makes good sense !!                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          

Lets say you owned a small medium or large chain of music stores.... Anyone could easily pull off this scam  if they owned 4 or 5 stores.   The bigger the chain the easier and more dastardly  the scam.

Ok now let's say one of your stores maybe the flagship store for example is located in Downtown LA or Boston or New York.

Lets say you have accumulated several hundred thousand dollars worth  of supposed vintage guitars.   At today's ridiculous prices that would be really easy to do. Especially if you had a bunch of stores located in small town USA.

Here's what the these low life maggots are doing

First... They put vintage guitars in many of their their stores at 20% higher prices than the going rate (Uh Oh you probably know who I'm talking about because that was a definite give away!

Second, They pretend that they are having no trouble selling them. When in reality they are simply moving them around from store to store.

John Q. Customer sees the guitar and laughs at the price. Several weeks later it's gone!  the salespeople tell him it sold.  John Q. Customer ask the salesman who was crazy enough to buy the guitar. No one seems to remember,  because it sold when they weren't there or management made the sale. 

Another couple of different ones hit the store at even higher prices one disappears almost immediately and a couple of weeks later "boom" The other one sells.

Now if you stop and think for a minute this is what happens ... The Suckers, I mean customers in the immediate vicinity of these stores get a false sense of value on these guitars.  They start to assume that the guitars are more valuable than they actually are.  These customers  are being professionally manipulated, duped and played like a piano.  Occasionally one will really sell.  Then, they really play that one up big. On the website and the salespeople in the store will talk about this repeatedly to every customer who walks into the store.  The salespeople in this store are commissioned and they get big fat commissions when they sell one so they will say anything to further the perpetration of the scam.  (I refuse to pay commissions for that reason and many others)

Many of the guitars of course won't sell.  They make their rounds from store to store for over a year.  They end up in a small private area that the general public does not see. This room is reserved for the real wealthy celebrity marks who have the money and have heard all the stories of how these guitars increase in value tremendously.  I personally, am a pretty big fan of several of these people as actors, some of their movies are some of my personal favorites.

When these rich or famous people purchase these guitars it actually does increase the perceived value of the instrument.  Remember I said "perceived value" with the accent on "perceived"

If you were selling these guitars yourself think about this scenario.  I mean if you hear about some moron selling something for $10,000.00 you are going to try to sell yours for $11,000.00. It's human nature to be greedy so don't fault yourself for it. It is embedded in our very DNA. we simply cannot help it.  That fact disturbs & bothers me.  I know it's true, I'm just as guilty as everyone else.  Although I don't agree with this type of marketing, I have been known to benefit from it passively.

Say for example, you sell a 1958 Les Paul for $3,000.00 in 1978,  If you bought another one somewhere you might try to sell it for $4,500.00 in 1979, $6,900.00 in 1980  $9,500.00 in 1981 and so on and so on by the time you reach 2010 the price would be well over $300,000.00  (When I did the math,  I accounted for no increase during the mid 80's because during that time the value actually dropped on those types of guitars.  And they say that the 80's hairbands were not too bright !!!!...  Well maybe they were right,  I personally know a lot of older 80's ex hairheads who are falling hook line and sinker for the vintage guitar scam that has been perpetrated on the public for well over 30 years now.

Ok back to the story

These maggots repeated the same process over and over until they got the prices up over $200, 000.00 for a $175.00 list price old Les Paul.

I myself have been brought hundreds of guitars to be restored and aged to look like old vintage instruments. 

With old Fender's it's almost child's play to recreate a 1957 Strat or a 1954 Tele.  There are luthiers & craftsmen who are building fake guitars from the ground up.  Currently I figure it costs less than $1,000.00 to counterfeit an old Fender and less than $2,500.00 to counterfeit a 1959 Les Paul burst.

I am not accusing this chain of stores of counterfeiting although it certainly isn't impossible for them to do.  They have the resources to easily do it.  (I personally don't think they are actually doing it)

There are enough people out there already doing it so that they don't need to do it themselves.  The people who do it are always very small shops with one cash paid off the books employee at the most. If you have a lot of employees you will definitely get caught so bigger companies would never dare to do it.

Celebrity customers are the ones that really fall for these scams. There are some high profile  movie stars and "A" list musicians who are really falling for it. These people have the money to be able to afford these insane prices and if they see these guitars going up steadily they feel it's a safe investment.  In reality, it has a false bottom and when it drops out many people will lose their collective shirts.

Historically it has to happen,  They call it a market correction...

Look at the the Diamond Business, Gold & Silver, Ferraris, Real Estate... Junk Bonds it's all the same thing.  Guitars at least are cool you can make music with them.

I wrote this rant because !!!!!

A couple of weeks ago a guy walks in the store selling an old Gibson beginner model guitar.  Sold new for $60.00 in 1958, His mother had bought it for him. The guitar resided under his bed for 45 years and was almost new. The guy tells me he wants $5,000.00 for it.   I gagged a little because I could taste the bile when I almost vomited !!!!

I take the guitar on consignment, because there is absolutely No Fu#%ing Way I would pay that kind of money for a crappy old guitar that cost less than $12.00 to manufacture. Today 45 years later could be made from scratch better for $20 dollars in Korea. I have strat copy guitars in stock that cost me less than $38.00 each landed in my store that would play circles around this guitar.

Wait the story is not over !!!!

I have the guitar about a month and I actually get a very well known, very talented guitarist inquiring about purchasing it. I don't want to piss this guy off so I play the silly game myself and call the owner and try to get him to drop his price to something more realistic.  During the course of this process, I become aware of the full tilt boogie scam that a particular chain of stores is perpetrating.  So this had to be written.

The other thing that people ask me about almost daily is the huge influx of Chinese & Korean excellent quality perfect fakes that are coming into the USA by the containerload.

There are currently hundreds of fake Les Pauls being shipped into the USA.  You can buy them on Ebay for prices as low as $100.00 (plus $300.00 for shipping from China)  Most of them say Gibson on them and even say made in USA. The serial numbers are perfect and I myself could very easily be fooled.  I remember a company in the Phillipines bringing in fake old Fenders as far back as 1978.

This is very comical, One Company  "Jinda Trading" ran an ad on the internet showing exact copies of Les Pauls but was calling them "Fender Stratocasters"  I had to laugh at that one. These people obviously don't even know what they are selling, they also had  Rolex watches, Omega Watches, Nike Sneakers,  Izod La Coste shirts, Prada Shoes, Gucci Bags,  in short all the trappings of the BMW driving Yuppie who has more money than brains.   (Their ad is reprinted below   see it to believe it)

Gibson of course is suing everyone and anyone they can find with these copies. They even sued me over a small amount of copies that I bought last year through completely legitimate channels. In my case the guitars did not say Gibson on them and of course we didn't try to represent them as Gibsons. They were exact duplicates and I would guarantee that if they had said Gibson on them I would not have been able to tell the difference myself.  Currently I am researching this very heavily. I have found well over 125 companies so far that have made copies of Gibson's guitars,  I expect to have a minimum of 250 companies by December. I am working on a website that will expose many of these companies.  Due to my lawsuit with Gibson my attorneys advised me not to publish the site until after we win the case!

In the old days it was easy to tell a real Gibson from a fake because the copies didn't say Gibson & the fakes were not made as well.  Some of the fakes that people are showing me in my store are completely undetectable. back in December of 2005 an oriental person came into my store and asked me if I was interested in buying some Gibson  Les Paul, Zakk Wylde copies he showed me a sample and it was damned exact.

(Check This Out) I had the option of purchasing these with any name on them I desired, The one the salesman had with him said "Wylde" on the headstock. He informed me that the reason it didn't say Gibson on it was because then I would not have been able to tell it apart from a real Gibson and I would have suspected him of actually showing me a real Gibson just to take the order.

He told me he had sold well over 300 of them in the past week that he had been in the USA,  he said one store ordered them with "ZW" on the headstock but most of the stores ordered them with the word Gibson on the headstock.  My cost was to have been somewhere around $350.00 per guitar.

These guitars had real ebony fingerboards, Real EMG pickups, real MOP inlays, in short they were pretty nice guitars. He showed me photographs, good clear bright professional looking photos of sunburst models, SG's Explorers, 335's and even L5 Jazz guitars. They all looked dead on in the pictures,  he showed me close-ups of the headstocks most of them had 1999 serial numbers I asked him for his card and told him I would think about it.  He of course had no card and said he would get back to me.  This guy was pretty funny, he kept pointing to the EMG's and saying that they were real, he must have said it three times.

Dealers who bought these guitars from this maggot probably really hate me for printing this,  Ask me if I care !!!!

I know they are out in the stores, because when I was at the Dallas guitar show several months later.  Some greasy looking pimple faced peckerhead offered me one of them for $600.00. He actually had them with him, and he showed them to me. He told me "he could give me a better price if I bought 3 or more."  I told him  "I knew what they were and to please leave my booth!!!"  about 20 minutes later I went to get a hamburger and I saw him selling one to a kid and his father in the hallway.