The Green Gretsch

When I was 19, my family was on a road trip going from Colorado to Florida. My dad really liked pawn shops so when we found ourselves in Memphis, we couldn't resist.

It was hanging so you couldn't walk through the door without seeing it. 

It was a two-tone lime green and olive hollow-body Gretsch. The finish was dry and cracked, as though it had been played day after day in the hot Alabama sun. 

It was already some 20 years old. It had been through hell. It was ugly and totally cool.

I don't know whether it had just come in, or if they had been trying for some time to find a sucker tourist who would snap it up.

The problem was that the neck was coming away from the body of the guitar.  I thought I could get it fixed, so I laid out too much money and walked out one happy kid.

It wouldn't stay in tune for beans, so when I got it back to rural Colorado I started asking around about getting it fixed. This was pre-internet so my research was pretty skimpy. Those who knew what they were doing wouldn't touch it.  It seems the way the necks were attached to the guitars were puzzling and you can't be sure about the right way to take a particular neck off without the original drawings.  All those design drawings, I was told, had been destroyed in a fire, and unless the guitar tech had actually built Gretches - "lots of luck kid."

So I ended up giving it to a friend who was learning (!?!) to work on guitars.  When I got it back, I noticed there had been some breakage when the neck was separated from the guitar. He then drilled it, inserted a dowel and glued the neck back on with epoxy. All three of these - I was later told - were wrong, wrong, wrong.

Also to my horror, he had taken some mis-matched green paint and filled in where pieces of the cracked finish had fallen out.

The guitar remained un-tunable for another 15 or so years, until I found myself living in the city where there were real professionals.  One looked at it and said, for a disaster, it was a pretty good job.  The neck was put on straight enough so that he could fix it.

He couldn't justify the work that was going to have to go into it, but he said he would set it aside and work on it every now and then between better paying tasks. It took him 9 months of carefully shaving down the fingerboard and reset the frets. 

It plays like a joy.

It has been many years since my friend put the ugly paint on it, so that paint has faded to the point you can't tell it was ever done unless you look really close.

The electronics don't work, but I'm told not much can go wrong with old pickups.  One of these days I'll take it in for that work too. For now, I just like to play it and have it hanging around the house.

People come visit and say "Oooooooooo."

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