The Bouncing Strat

 

Same Strat, different location: at Guitar Gear Giveaway, left, and, right, as listed in the inventory of a UK dealer back 2022

Or... the one they couldn't sell

In 2022, having a respectable sum of money to invest, I decided to go all out for a vintage Stratocaster. This, I reasoned, was a guitar that would likely appreciate in value without having to sit on it for decades. Demand for vintage Stratocasters is fierce, and prices had been going steadily upwards in recent years. The going rate for a clean, pre-CBS example in sunburst finish is currently somewhere around £25-30k. To put this in perspective, around 25 years ago, the same instrument would have sold for around £1200. Custom colour examples, meanwhile, change hands for quite a lot more, especially if the colour in question happens to be Fiesta Red. For a clean example, you’d need deep pockets, as prices are now knocking on the door of 45k.

With vintage Strats such hot ticket items, it pays to know what you’re dealing with before you part with your money, and before I went anywhere near a guitar shop, I spent months delving into the intricacies of construction, learning all the period features that should be present on any bona fide item, and how to tell an original from a refinish – or worse still, a fake. Fender have done a bit too good a number on turning out guitars that accurately reproduce the look, wear pattern, sound and feel of genuine vintage instruments, and with a little ingenuity, a modern Custom Shop relic can be turned into something resembling the original closely enough to fool a lot of collectors and even, dare I say it, the occasional dealer.

Once I’d decided to go for a vintage Strat, I began to examine as many as I could find for sale online, looking at photos and comparing them with what I was learning about the crucial details – seemingly insignificant items like ‘nail holes’ and ridged bridge saddles. Did the neck pocket have the correct ‘paint stick shadow’? Changes in the methods of manufacturing have become critical indices in determining the age and provenance of vintage instruments, none more so than the Stratocaster. Moreover, during the early 60s, when British players were in thrall to the genius of Hank Marvin, and everyone wanted a red Strat like his, Selmer – who imported the guitars from the USA – began to refinish the ‘commonplace’ sunburst examples in their own version of Hank’s classic colour, Fiesta Red. Selmer’s version of Fiesta Red looked a lot more like ‘salmon pink’, although curiously, Hank himself described that first Strat as ‘flamingo pink’ in a BBC interview. I’ve seen several Selmer refins and they are quite definitely pink: the paint fades to a different hue from factory original Fiesta Red, and was also a good deal thicker than the nitro-cellulose used in the Fullerton factory. I wasn’t looking for a Fiesta Red strat (I didn’t have £40k+ to stump up), but even so, I made sure of all my facts before I went near anything.

As I looked at pictures from dealer inventories both here in the UK and in America, I began to notice something. I kept finding the same instruments in different dealers’ inventories. In the months after I began searching for a Strat, I saw the exact same examples pop up in the inventories of the five or six high-end dealers whose websites I was watching. A guitar that had been listed at £29k last week might rock up at £35k less than a month later, on a different dealer’s website. Bear in mind that at one point, I was checking the inventories every day, sometimes several times a day, so I knew exactly what I was looking at.

When I did eventually settle on a Strat to purchase – a near mint, 1966 suburst example – it was inevitable that it had already been through the hands of another UK dealer a few years earlier (though at what price, I was unable to determine). The dealer himself admitted this, and sent me the photos from the previous sale. Fair enough. The price was correct, and I knew I was buying one of the best examples of the year on the UK market at that time (its value has since increased by around £3-5k).

Before I came to this decision, I briefly considered a Strat from another dealer I’d dealt with many times over the years. This was not one of the high-end specialists, but a music retailer with a healthy sideline in vintage instruments, and who knew what they were talking about. The trouble was, so did I. Their Strat, a custom colour example, dated to 1964 and was listed at a much higher price than I wanted to pay. I passed on it, but did get the chance to examine it for real when visiting the shop to make another purchase. The list price started a little shy of £40k, about the going rate for a pre-CBS custom colour Strat. I confidently expected to see it in the inventory of another dealer before very long. But the Strat stayed put. Six months later, it was still up on the same dealer’s website, the price having trickled downwards by four or five grand. I knew from my months of research that, despite their hefty price tags, bona fide vintage Strats do not tend to gather dust on the walls of dealers for very long, and if they did, there was a reason for it.

Nine months went by. The Strat was now listed at a considerably lower price, indeed, a bargain price if it were a genuine pre-CBS example. And that was the whole point. If it was as good as it looked, why hadn’t one of the high-end dealers picked it up? They must watch the websites the same way I do. I had examined the photos from the original listing in great detail, and there had been one aspect of the guitar that bothered me: the finish. In the photos, it looked extremely clean. Up close in real life, it had the fine crazing that is typical of aged nitro-cellulose lacquer (but can be faked by the Fender Custom shop and others). It was a very hard call to make. If I bought the guitar for the new, lower price, I could make perhaps five or ten grand when I sold it on. But what if it wasn’t okay? Surely another dealer would spot that? And might this be the reason why no dealer had stepped up to the plate so far?

At the lower price, I suspected the Strat wouldn’t be around for much longer, and I was right. Within a week, it was listed as sold on the shop’s website. A couple of weeks later, it did what I’d been expecting all along, and surfaced in the inventory of another dealer. Price on application, but I mentally added five or six grand to what he must have paid.

Then – almost unbelievably – the same guitar appeared on the website of a third dealer. It was easily identifiable by its wear pattern and other features. And the price was, as I’d anticipated, a good six grand more than the first dealer had been asking at the bottom of their range. So, there you have it: I’d missed out on an excellent opportunity to earn six grand by doing nothing more than buying a guitar.

But this is not the end of the story. Within a week of the guitar appearing on the website of the third dealer, it was back in the inventory of the second. A veritable bouncing Strat. So what was going on? Had my instinct been correct all along? I believed the guitar to have had a refinish – in the same custom colour it had been on leaving the factory in 1964, and probably done sufficiently long ago to have worn in the way any nitro finish should. Either that, or it had been expertly aged. For me, there was one tell-tale sign that I’d learned during my months of research, an attribute that any Strat of that era should have exhibited and this one did not. When spraying their instruments, Fender placed them on a turntable, propped up by a series of nails hammered into the body in areas that would be covered up by the pickguard. When the nails were removed, there would be no paint in the holes. Paint in these so-called ‘nail holes’ is the guarantee of a vintage Strat’s having been refinished and there are absolutely no exceptions. Fender stopped using the nails in the paint process around the end of 1964, but the guitar in our story dated to December 1963. It should have had nail holes. The first dealer who listed the guitar had obligingly taken it to pieces and shot some detailed images. Two things were immediately apparent. There weren’t enough nail holes in the body and those that were present had white paint in them. The guitar was a refinish, end of story.

Only of course, it wasn’t the end. The second dealer who took it on got very shirty on Facebook when people started questioning the guitar’s pedigree. This was a guy who knows his onions, not the type to be tangled with. I kept well out of all this – powder dry, as the saying goes. But before long, this same dealer had the Strat marked down to £21k as an ‘absolute bargain’. This never happens with vintage Strats.

Now it’s back again. The Strat they couldn’t sell is now being listed in a prize draw on the competition website Guitar Gear Giveaway. I recognised it at once, but the clincher is its serial number, L20627.

2022 dealer website image left and, on the right, the same guitar on Guitar Gear Giveaway's website

It costs £3.99 to enter, and you can enter as many times as you like, thereby increasing your chances of winning. This is not a giveaway, it is a commercial operation. To cover themselves on their outlay, the organisers will have to sell 5,263 tickets for this specific draw. Anything above that, and they’ll make a profit on the £21k they almost certainly laid out for the guitar earlier this year. The organisers make enough money from draws like this to be able to donate significant sums to charity, but I repeat, this is a commercial operation, and essentially a way of potentially maximising the value of an investment by raffling off a chance to own it instead of offering it for sale in the normal manner.

I'm not saying you shouldn't enter: you might get lucky and nab a decent guitar for less than a fiver. Personally, I doubt it. There will be a lot of interest in this draw. But whoever wins it should be aware that this is the Strat that three UK dealers couldn't sell. It now remains to be seen whether it can even be given away...