Record breaking guitar sales are an exercise in nostalgia
While every part of a rock band is important when it comes to the creation of great music, there is no escaping that guitarists are a quintessential component that helps tie an entire sound together.
When we think of the people who helped make rock music the dominant genre that it is, we tend to focus on the exceptional guitarists who put together great riffs, licks and solos. People like Jimi Hendrix, Jeff Beck, Eddie Van Halen, Jimmy Page, Keith Richards, and Slash, the list goes on and on and on, as all of these brilliant minds have been able to put together music that fully helped people realise the potential that rock had.
The genre is one of the biggest in the world, and it led to a complete cultural revolution, one that saw the birth of the rock star, the changing scope of sound, and showed how music can be not just something entertaining to listen to, but something that can provide commentary on every emotion under the sun and whatever is happening in the world. Music is tied to history and to the ins and outs of people’s lives so intrinsically that they want to own tangible parts of whatever it is that moves them.
For a lot of listeners, this comes in the form of buying vinyl or merchandise; they might not be dripping in sentiment, but they are real, you can hold them, and they’re a tangible representation of what is often considered an intangible sensation. However, for others, simple items like a record or a T-shirt aren’t enough, and they instead want to own parts of the genre which genuinely led to musical evolution.
Given that the guitar hero is such an intrinsic part of rock music, for many, it makes sense to buy guitars that have previously been played by legends. For decades now, musicians’ former guitars have sold for astronomical amounts of money as people want to try to bring history into their own home.
For instance, one of the most famous guitar players in the world was Jimi Hendrix, who was able to win over the hearts of everyone within earshot with his flamboyant approach to music. He took the romanticism of a solo to a whole other level, as he wasn’t just playing in a bid to show off; he was channelling the theme of his song through his six-string. He could be singing about love, anger, war, and you would hear that topic in every single note he played.
“He came on, and I went, ‘Oh, my God’,” said Jeff Beck, recalling the first time he saw Hendrix play. “He had the military outfit on and hair that stuck out all over the place. They kicked off with [Bob Dylan’s] ‘Like a Rollin’ Stone’, and I thought, ‘Well, I used to be a guitarist’.”
One of his most famous performances came in the form of Woodstock, when he took to the stage and played at a festival that was considered the forefront of a new movement. This was more than just a Jimi Hendrix gig, but it was a representation of one of the biggest moments in musical history, and therefore, it shouldn’t come as a massive surprise that the guitar Hendrix was playing previously sold for $2,000,000.
This might seem like a substantial sum of money, but it pales in comparison to how much guitars now sell for. Just this year, records were broken as David Gilmour’s black Stratocaster sold for a record $14.5 million. The guitar was originally bought in 2019 for $5m, and while a lot of people might say that the increase in price is just a reflection of inflation, if that were the case, then the guitar would have only gone for about $6.8m. Now, it’s sold for more than half of that, and not too far behind its huge figure was Jerry Garcia’s guitar, which sold for $11.5m.
Comparing those figures to Jimi Hendrix’s Woodstock guitar, it’s clear that the amount that these instruments are selling for is increasing rapidly, but it begs the question, why? What is it that’s happened in the past couple of decades which has made people so adamant on parting ways with huge sums of money in a bid to own a legendary guitar? Well, in this writer’s view, it has everything to do with nostalgia, and what rock music used to be, compared to what it is now.
The rest of this article isn’t going to be the predictable rambling of: “Well, they don’t make music like they used to.” There are plenty of exceptional guitarists out there writing killer solos in the same way that those who came before them did. The difference is that rock music is no longer this thing which is developing; it has well and truly developed, and as a result, the modern-day guitar hero doesn’t carry the same weight as those who were making music in the ‘60s or ‘70s.
Like I say, this isn’t supposed to be read as a criticism of the modern guitarist. If anything, guitar solos are more romantic than they’ve ever been, as they aren’t used sparingly anymore. Their existence needs to be justified, which means they need to not only sound good within a track, but they also need to elevate it. A modern guitarist can’t just dance around a pentatonic scale for shits and giggles; they need to make a song sadder, angrier, filled with more longing. Essentially, they need to succeed in taking what a song is about and churning that feeling out of a guitar. Musicians have done this before (I used Jimi Hendrix as an example earlier), but it wasn’t an absolute necessity in the same way it is today.
Because of the fact that rock music has been fully established now, the guitarists who have made great riffs, solos and licks in recent decades are just examples of good guitarists; they don’t represent this intangible changing of things in the same way that those who came before did. It wasn’t just that Jimi Hendrix was good, he was playing in a way that nobody had seen before, and was considered one of the most innovative minds in the world of rock as a result. Additionally, David Gilmour and Jerry Garcia aren’t just great at playing, they represent pivotal moments in both psychedelic rock and the hippy movement that can never be recreated.
These relics of rock give people access to another level of nostalgia, not just one which allows them to look back on the good ol’ days (as some might refer to them), but that also gives them a glimpse into a moment in time that defined the art they consume in the modern age. Enough time is starting to pass from music’s past that these guitars aren’t just musical instruments, but are important artefacts that helped shape rock music.
These increased prices for famous guitars are going to continue to rise, as more distance grows between now and historical moments in music. It doesn’t mean that music now isn’t as good as it used to be, but it doesn’t feel like a historical moment that needs to be captured quite as much.
