Recent content by bobwise

Here's another little tidbit -- Harry briefly talking about his early days in music retail. No real MIJ content but kind of cool. From NAMM's oral history series: http://www.namm.org/library/oral-history/harry-rosenbloom

Nice little article. I got my first guitar from Harry Rosenbloom (they misspelled his name as "Rosenblum") in '72-- a Penco bolt-neck SG. While looking at the Penco Strats and Teles he told me "Strats are rhythm guitars, Teles are lead guitars". At the tender age of 13 I wasn't brash enough to...

That used to be mine. The seller is a third party -- he got it from the person I sold it to. It's an LS-120 with a veneer top. The residue from the model sticker on the back of the head used to be very legible but it's faded since I bought it 5 years ago. The "2" is still visible and it's...

That was a sweet guitar, but: A) Right now I'm so broke I can barely pay attention B) I go for "breadth" in my collection rather than "depth". One Strat, one Love Rock, one electric archtop hollowbody, one double-cut Junior, one OM-style cheap acoustic. I have 5 Explorers but they're all very...

BTW, you paid significantly less for yours than I did, and yours is in mintier condition. Mine's got a lot of play wear (which I love, but it lowers the value), and the truss rod cover and knobs are non-original. (The PCB was removed but came with it in the case.) Mine has the stock DiMarzio...

Beautiful guitar, and you're a lucky man to own it. The early LS120s are awesome guitars. Please don't take the following as trying to "rain on your parade" or "bring you down" or anything like that. There probably are some non-veneer LS120s and even if it really is veneered it doesn't affect...

"bobwise..... do I know you?" Last year at the Arlington Guitar Show (or maybe it was the year before) I spoke to someone at your booth about the Goldtop Tokai you had there and asked him if he was marcusnieman from the Tokai Registry. He said no, that he was just filling in and running the...

"... that they are mop but they sure look like the original celluloid acetat (aka "Peraloid") on the old Lesters." Yes indeed, they're plastic just like the '50s LPs. The swirl/figure is a little different -- that exact pattern of pearloid hasn't been made since the '50s. Some hardcore Historic...

"Doesn't the Gibson transitional tenon date from 69-70 sort of period?" Oops, I always forget about those. They didn't make a lot and the specs changed every few months. The very earliest '68s had long tenons (NOS leftovers from when they stopped LP archtop production in '60/'61), then some...

In the interest of full disclosure, I just noticed something about that pic I lifted off Google of the 3 types of Gibson neck joints: the pic of the transitional tenon is actually a Photoshop edit of the long tenon pic (the wood grain is identical and wood grain is like fingerprints). So I...

Here's a pic of a Tokai medium tenon: You can see from the shadows that what looks like a tongue on the end of the tenon is actually a depression in the floor of the pickup cavity. If you look carefully in the shadows you can see the end of the bottom of the tenon -- a line between it and the...

The early Tokai neck tenons are visually deceiving. That '80 LS120 does indeed have a medium tenon (just like my '80 LS120). The tenon runs all the way back to the pickup cavity, but it stops right there and the end of the tenon forms part of the wall of the cavity. The thing that runs back...

Another classy thing about Tokai: most of the other Japanese companies gave the impression that they were ashamed of being Japanese. They made up random Westernized brand names that had no meaning, no significance to the history of the company, not a founder's name or factory location or...

All three of those are genuine Gibson neck joints. Pics 1&3 are about 6 years old and originally came from Gibson's website -- they took a couple of seconds/rejects and sawed them in half, took them out behind the factory and snapped a couple of pics. Pic 2 obviously has the same background so...

Why Tokai? In the '70s, both Fender and Gibson made drastic changes to most of their flagship guitars. When people asked for reissues of Les Pauls and Flying V's and Explorers, Gibson basically told people "those models were sales failures (that's why we stopped making them) and you don't...