Macari's Music in London, England

Brighton, England

We continued on to Birmingham then Manchester, which led us back to Liverpool. The next day I flew to Germany to visit our distributor – iMUSIC NETWORKS in the beautiful city of WURZBURG. Then it was off to Spain for a 2 day visit with EDEN ROC our distributor for Spain, Italy and Portugal. The trip started in the wonderful city of BILBAO in the north where I was treated to some fabulous traditional Basque food and a tour of the city.

Wurzburg, Germany

Bilbao, Spain

The next day we drove to Madrid for the grand opening of the EASTWOOD Guitars Showroom, featuring a great night out with live bands and an interview with local TV station.

I will be writing more details about the showroom later, but in the meantime here are a couple of photos from the showroom. Eden Roc is a great group of hard working people and we are proud to have them as our distributor in that region!

Eastwood Guitars Showroom in Madrid, Spain

Eastwood Guitars Showroom in Madrid, Spain

With little sleep it was back to UK for the 2nd half of our UK tour. Before heading north I met with Will Seargent from Echo and the Bunnymen who was rehearsing for their upcoming tour. Pictured is his original VOX 12 string that was used on the 80’s hit song The Killing Moon. Will is using an EASTWOOD Classic 12 in the upcoming tour.

Will Seargent from Echo & The Bunnymen

Next we headed up to Glasgow where we had a great pub visit with long time Eastwood players Tippi and Greg Kane (Hugh and Cry). We dropped in to CC Music the next morning for a tour of their recently expanded shop, the best in Glasgow!

Eastwood Guitar Player: Tippi

CC Music in Glasgow, Scotland

We visited a few more cities and shops along the way including Edinburgh, then off to YORK for the annual NELSONICA event with Bill Nelson. This year Bill put together a live band for a Friday night show featuring some Be Bop Deluxe classics. Carl and I had dinner and a few pints with famous British music producer John Leckie. John shared some great stories ranging from the early days with Be Bop Deluxe to Stone Roses and Radiohead.

John Leckie (British Music Producer)

A few months earlier we sent a couple of BREADWINNER guitars over to Bill so that he could turn them into pieces of art. One came home with me to Canada; the other was auctioned off at Saturday nights Nelsonica.

Bill Nelson art guitars

All-in-all a great trip and was good to see the EASTWOOD and AIRLINE brands continuing to grow in popularity in UK and Europe. I look forward to my next trip!

17 Days In Europe With Eastwood Guitars from MyRareGuitars.com

Vintage 1965 Juliett Delux Electric Guitar

You don’t need years of study to figure out this came from south of the Alps. A German guitar would have an innovative laminated neck and perhaps two more switches than you can figure out what to do with or a finger-operated, spring-loaded vibrato. No one but Italians—or someone pretty close—would make a guitar in avocado green with a green-black-silver mesh pickguard and matching pickup covers! I didn’t need two seconds to grab it off the dealer who showed it to me, no matter where it came from! I mean, avocado green?! You gotta own a guitar in that color, especially if it comes with color-coordinated appointments!

But there’s a long way from figuring out at a glance that this is Italian to figuring out what the heck it is! Like many of the guitars I’ve picked up over the years, this Juliet became an unsolved mystery buried in the back of my guitar room for ages. Actually, quite a few apparently Italian mysteries collected there gathering dust.

Vintage 1965 Juliett Delux Electric Guitar

But I have this thing about learning what’s up about any guitar I own. It’s why I got into the guitar history game in the first place. So these guitars nagged at me. Then one day I discovered www.fetishguitars.com, a web site devoted to Italian guitars. This site is about the best—and almost only—source on the subject at this point in time.

Besides a general lack of information, part of the problem involves the fact that so many Italian—read European—guitarmakers, like the Japanese, made guitars for a lot of different people carrying many different brand names and logos. Just as guitars made by Tombo in Japan ended up in the U.S. as Norma guitars, guitars made by various Italian manufacturers ended up in both Europe and America carrying a wide variety of names, usually not that of the factory.

Vintage 1965 Juliett Delux Electric Guitar

Back to this Juliett Delux. Mucking around the fetishguitars.com site led me to a company named Zerosette from Castelfidardo, Italy. Castelfidardo was—and is—one of the world’s centers of accordion-making. It began there in the late 1800s and even today it’s the home of an international accordion festival and competition. Its heyday was the 1950s when the accordion craze briefly swept the U.S. That soon ended, and, as we all know, guitars eventually took over. It turns out that Castelfidardo is located in a region of Italy with a long tradition of guitarmaking. So it was not that hard to add guitars to the mix. This explains why EKO guitars were so successful in the U.S. the early years of the ‘60s.

One of the more obscure shops located in Castelfidardo was called Zerosette. Virtually nothing is known about the actual operation, though you may have encountered their work in various guitars bearing the Goya, Contessa, and Sano.

Tucked among the gems produced by Zerosette are guitars bearing the Juliett Delux and JG brands. A comparison of the shape of one of the Juliett solids is the spittin’ image of this guitar…and even in light green! A look at the pickups shows a certain similarity of shape to others made by Zerosette. None of the examples shown there are quite as fancy as this guitar, but it’s pretty clear that this came from the Zerosette shop. Jack Marchal of fetishguitars.com believes this to be from 1965, based on the components and style. JGs may or may not have been related to the Juliett brand’s owners (other than being made by Zerosette); I suspect them to be for the same company but slightly later.

So, I now feel like I know where this guitar came from and who made it, as much as you can know with our lack of knowledge. When it was made or for whom? That remains a mystery.

All I know for sure is that an avocado guitar with matching parts, that’s way cool. Thank god for Italian guitars! Like I said. Style!

A Taste of Italy (1965 Juliett Delux Electric Guitar) from MyRareGuitars.com

Troy in Paris (Eiffel Tower in background)

Since returning (and before we left for that matter), I kept hearing, “How can you take your son out of school for that long, won’t he fall behind!?”. And the question always comes with some sense of panic – as if the parent asking the question truly believes the child will fall behind in life, never to recover. Ridiculous. Today our school systems are (IMHO) a pile of crap, with outdated curriculum being run by a system that motivates the teachers to give the kids more and more homework – to hopefully improve the grades – to make the system look better. But in the end, it is stripping away the most important thing – giving the kid an opportunity to develop some common sense and the ability to learn make decisions on their own. I believe the time we spend away with Troy in Europe is far better developmentally than if he would have stayed in class.

I might be wrong, but here are a couple of articles that Kay has clipped from the past few years that shed a deeper light on the subject. The first deals with the issue of homework. Right now Troy is in Grade 4 and he is spending HOURS and HOURS trying to memorize the different names and situations from Medieval times. That should come in handy some day… Or not? The second deals with how we are over protective of our kids and consequently stripping them of their ability to learn about risks and rewards.

This was my experience in school – I was board out of my mind for most of my time, being force fed statistical information on subjects that ultimately served no purpose in my life thus far (I’m turning 50 in 2009, perhaps the Medieval stuff might come in handy yet!?). A third article that I will include in a future ramble talks about how many C+ students (much more than you think) turn out to be our community leaders. Winston Churchill, Richard Branson, Bill Gates and many others were reportedly bored to tears in the school system too. But they all had curiosity and an appetite for risk – the very things that homework and our child protective society is squelching.
This quote rings true for me, “The A Students end up teaching the B students how to work for the C students.” MARKS DON’T MATTER.

Marks Don’t Matter from MyRareGuitars.com