HISTORY ERASED?

I read with great interest and excitement the small Sept 2019 profile on Jimi’s Woodstock Strat, The Story of the White Strat. I had my own brush with that axe in April of 1990 as a 20 year old from Brooklyn living in London for the first time. I was lucky enough to have an opportunity to play it briefly and unplugged when a German film crew were doing a TV piece on it at Sotheby’s. This was a few days before the public auction where it was justly being featured as the star attraction (along with a lock of Madonna’s hair and one of the Ramones’ finger nails, if memory serves).

I didn’t see the guitar again until a few months ago at the wonderful Play It Loud exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. As such I have a small bone to pick with Mr Neville Marten. It would be a thrill under any circumstance to see and/ or hold that piece of history, but to do so as it was the last time Jimi put it down – cigarette burns in the headstock, blue dye from the beads in fringe, dirty frets and all – was magic. Imagine my shock upon seeing it 30 years later blasphemously cleaned and shined, with all those beautiful historic hallmarks removed.

The Japanese concept of wabi-sabi, meaning ‘perfect because of an object’s imperfections’, should be part of the Hippocratic oath of all guitar techs that come across historic axes. I humbly ask that should you, say, find enough pieces of the guitar Jimi smashed at Monterey, please be so kind as to not alter or otherwise reassemble them. It would be a shame to forcefully quiet what history is trying so hard to tell us. Gabriel Brodbar, via email Neville Marten replies: “I think you misunderstood what I said about my own interaction with the Hendrix guitar. My work on it was done prior to the Sotheby’s sale. So when you saw it originally, it was after my hour or so of setting up, restringing and lightly cleaning it (with ordinary Fender polish), and de-tarnishing the frets, which Mitch Mitchell asked me to do. No work was done by me to remove any of Jimi’s tell-tale wear, such as the staining and cigarette burns. What happened to it after that in terms of restoration or maintenance is beyond my ken, I’m afraid. But do rest assured that I did not erase any evidence of it being Jimi’s guitar.”