I overheard a friend of mine recently say, “Buy your old guitars new and your new guitars old.” From an investment standpoint, truer words may never have been spoken.

As for vintage guitars? No words need to be said. But when it comes to a reissue—why not? You’re just hanging with the boys, maybe cracking a few cold ones, when a mic-stand mishap leads to a fresh ding. And guess what? No one’s the wiser.

In the White House, they call it plausible deniability. Loosely defined, it’s the ability of people—typically senior officials in some sort of chain of command—to deny knowledge of or responsibility for anything… damnable. You’re chillin’ in Libya and some shit blows up in Benghazi? Suddenly everyone’s invoking plausible deniability like it’s gospel.

Same principle applies to a ding on your guitar’s headstock. See the connection now? A few donks and dings aren’t flaws—they’re safeguards. They give you cover. They tell the story you want them to tell. It wasn’t you. It wasn’t the beer. It wasn’t the mic-stand placement. It was Mike Eldred’s fault. Yeah. That’s the ticket.

After all, nothing says American tradition quite like passing the buck.

As for the guitar—why not?

Ash body, nitro relic finish, early-’60s oval “C” maple neck with a slab rosewood board, 9.5" radius, vintage nickel hardware, and a Custom Shop flat-pole 10K Esquire bridge pickup that sounds like God’s wrath on men for killing each other and limited to just 100 pieces.

Case? Original.
Paperwork? Of course.
Weight? As a feather.

In a nutshell: old-school vibe for not a lot of cake.

In closing, what did we learn? Buy your old guitars new and your new guitars old, and plausible deniability and its many uses. Senator Clinton, what are you doing on my channel?

“Nobody wants to sit where I am and think now about what ‘coulda, shoulda, woulda’ happened in order to avoid this.”

As George Washington once said, “It is better to offer no excuse than a bad one.”

That’s the beauty of this guitar.
It doesn’t lend itself to just that.

Excuses.