My Rare Guitars Blog

What did we do before the internet? I guess watch bad TV shows. These days there is endless entertainment at our fingertips. If you have not seen this one yet, get ready for a good laugh. Quite the talent at such an early age… I’ll need to get her signed early to and EASTWOOD Guitars endorsement deal. Enjoy!

I get a lot of EMAIL from customers that alert me to various EASTWOOD Guitar sighting around the globe. Last night I got one from a someone that was watching the Letterman Show. The band is Gossip. Was it an EASTWOOD Stormbird?

Nope, that is a GIBSON non-reverse Firebird. About FIVE times more expensive than our Stormbird - had me fooled for a moment too. So why am I writing about this? Because the band was awesome! What a great performance by Gossip! As soon as I saw this I went to ITunes and bought their 2005 release, Standing in the Way of Control. A great merger of Punk and Soul. Check out the video and you decide…

One of the most forgettable events from 2007 was LIVE EARTH. I was clearing up my inbox today and found an article that I had clipped from the local Toronto newspaper, written by one of Canada’s National treasures, Rex Murphy. I got a real chuckle from this so I thought I should share it with you. For those who can’t remember, Live Earth was a series of worldwide concerts held on July 7, 2007 to combat climate change, spearheaded by Al Gore. The concerts brought together more than 150 musical acts in eleven locations around the world and were broadcast to a mass global audience through televisions, radio, and streamed via the Internet.

As Rex observed, “NBC gave 3 hours of prime time and managed to stir up only 2.7 million viewers - a number that would be embarrassing for a re-run of Three’s Company. It featured such acts as Madonna, Shakira and other “cleavage climatologists”. It was a flop. Why? The spectacle of the world’s most wasteful people, rock star plutocrats with their cribs and bling, caravans and trailer trucks and 100,000 watt amps, taking a day out of their wealth-stuffed lives to preach about the moral importance of consuming LESS, set the hypocrisy bar so high that it put too great a strain on the digestion of ordinary people”. Private Jets for climate change sums it up.

For the whole story, click on this link: Live Earth? How about live irony?

A couple of days ago I was ranting about taking my son on a trip to Europe. Good ‘ol Proud Father stuff. Twice in the same week? Yesterday morning on NBC’s TODAY Show R.E.M. did a LIVE broadcast from the streets of New York City. They played their new hit single, Supernatural Superserious - and ripping into the opening guitar riff was long time R.E.M. sideman Scott McCaughey on his EASTWOOD Sidejack! Did I feel like a proud father? You bet! “> I would have never guessed five years ago when we developed the SIDEJACK that this day would arrive. I’m quite proud indeed. In fact, rumour has it that you’ll get a chance to see it again tonight on the COLBERT REPORT. R.E.M. with an EASTWOOD Guitar on the Colbert Report? Can’t get much better than that… Very Cool. Here is a picture of Pete Buck with Robyn Hitchcock, earlier this year on the west coast - Peter with his AIRLINE 2P DLX and Robyn with his AIRLINE TWIN TONE. Proud father indeed!

The nice thing about a BLOG is that I can write about ANYTHING that is on my mind. This week has NOTHING to do with guitars. I’ve just returned from being in Europe for 3 weeks - 1st week at Messe, then the next two with my wife Kay and 9 year old son Troy in Southern Spain and a couple of days in Paris. Yes, a well deserved Holiday.

Since returning (and before we left for that matter), I kept hearing, “How can you take your son out of school for that long, won’t he fall behind!?”. And the question always comes with some sense of panic - as if the parent asking the question truly believes the child will fall behind in life, never to recover. REDICULOUS. Today our school systems are (IMHO) a pile of CRAP, with outdated curriculums being run by a system that motivates the teachers to give the kids more and more homework - to hopefully improve the grades - to make the system look better. But in the end, it is stripping away the most important thing - giving the kid an opportunity to develop some common sense and the ability to learn make decisions on their own. I believe the time we spend away with Troy in Europe is far better developmentally than if he would have stayed in class.

I might be wrong, but here are a couple of articles that Kay has clipped from the past few years that shed a deeper light on the subject. The first deals with the issue of homework. Right now Troy is in Grade 4 and he is spending HOURS and HOURS trying to memorize the different names and situations from Medieval times. That should come in handy some day… Or not? The second deals with how we are over protective of our kids and consequently stripping them of their ability to learn about risks and rewards.

This was my experience in school - I was board out of my mind for most of my time, being force fed statistical information on subjects that ultimately served no purpose in my life thus far (I’m turning 50 in 2009, perhaps the Medieval stuff might come in handy yet!?). A third article that I will include in a future ramble talks about how many C+ students (much more than you think) turn out to be our community leaders. Winston Churchill, Richard Branson, Bill Gates and many others were reportedly bored to tears in the school system too. But they all had curiosity and an appetite for risk - the very things that homework and our child protective society is squelching.
This quote rings true for me, “The A Students end up teaching the B students how to work for the C students”. MARKS DON’T MATTER.

Here is a very cool guitar that was hand-painted in Africa:

.. and here is a picture of one of MANY Vintage Framus guitars that were on display with Vintage CARS:

.. and here we are with from KARPATENHUND, - a pitcure for SCOTT HAGER - maybe next year he will come and join us!!

.. and here is Santino from POWER TRIO GROUP, one of the best guitar players I met all week. Check him out.

.. and here is my new friend SPIROS Zafeiriadis from Greece. Proud owner of the EASTWOOD Tuxedo.

Here are a couple of photo’s that surfaced this past week of EASTWOOD Guitars in action. The first is Britta Phillips (Dean & Britta) taking her EASTWOOD Hi-Flyer BASS for a spin recently in NYC at Dean’s book release party:

In the meantime, SXSW was in full swing last week while I was in Europe at MUSIKMESSE. There were many EASTWOOD sightings at the festival, including this EASTWOOD SIDEJACK DLX in Greenburst taking stage with REM - Here is a link to the REM slideshow from NPR at SXSW.

I’ll post more MUSIKMESSE shots tomorrow night.

Now back to my Sangria. Cheers,
Mike

It’s Tuesday and I am in Marbella Spain for a weeks R+R… Saturday night we wrapped up our inaugural participation at the annual Frankfurt MUSIKMESSE. The fair runs four days and is the International version of North America’s NAMM Show – but much larger in scope. What a great success. We met with many customers – new and old – and had a great time! Here are a few pictures of the people and products we saw:

(above)Here is Arne, owner of Taranaki Guitars in Germany and dealer for EASTWOOD Guitars.

(above) Here is Bryan and Brian from St. Blues Guitars, which were also on display at the Taranaki booth. Nice to meet you guys!

(above) Here is Wendell Ferguson and John Newman manning the EASTWOOD booth. Wendell was dazzling the crowds with his finger picking.

Our new AIRLINE TWIN TONE guitar got quite a workout at the show, and it was especially cool to see a couple of original SUPRO Dual Tones on display (above) - our TWIN TONE is a tribute to this guitar - one of which was used by Keith Richards (below).

Our EASTWOOD Twin Tone got plenty of interest at the show, and was purchased by this 14 year old lad (below):

..Whom I’m making the early prediction will be one of the next great British Blues Guitarist - except he is from Germany - and as I am away until the 28th, I don’t have his name and website address! One of the other EASTWOOD boys took it back to Canada! I’ll post an update with the info soon.

Check back in a couple of days, I have a bunch more pictures I am sifting through…

Feb 15, 2008 - Toronto. What has become a rare and collectable American made guitar, the 1967 Messenger is being brought back to life with a tribute model from Canadian company, Eastwood Guitars, INC.

The original Messenger guitar was developed 40 years ago in California by a small company named Musicraft and is now best known as the guitar of choice by Mark Farner (Grand Funk Railroad) in the early 1970’s.

The new EASTWOOD model captures the seductive look of the original but simplifies the design with a Set Maple Neck mounted to a hollow body with Maple center block, Mahogany back, sides and a spruce top. The guitar features the distinctive cat’s eye f-holes giving it an unmistakable look.

The original Messenger guitars are now selling on the Vintage market in the $5-$10,000 range. The new EASTWOOD model starts at only $849. Limited Edition production run will be available in Greenburst or Cherry only, they start shipping in early April 2008.