ROB WARMOWSKI: All right. Welcome back everybody to Gearwire.Com. I’m Rob Warmowski and I’m here at the Chicago Guitar Show, which strangely enough is held in the DuPage County Convention Center, which is kind of weird. I’m here with John Brinkman, who is one of the original promoters of the guitar show. John, thank you for joining us.

JOHN BRINKMAN: You’re welcome. Thank you for having us.

ROB WARMOWSKI: So John, tell us a little bit about the history of the Guitar Show. What made you create this show?

JOHN BRINKMAN: Well, this is the extension of the one we do in Texas. We created the shows down there in 1978 and started having Guitar Shows before anyone else ever thought of the idea with one exception. You had the very first one here in Chicago.

ROB WARMOWSKI: And what year was that?

JOHN BRINKMAN: In 1976, ’77. It as downtown in [PH] Beach’s Music Store.

ROB WARMOWSKI: Hmm. Wow.

JOHN BRINKMAN: And I came up, looked at that. It was what we call a close show. They only had four or five dealers and they were the same dealers. No one else could come in and set up but everybody could come in and buy. So, we just took the deal, the idea, extended it a little further, put in into a larger venue and invited all kinds of dealers to come in.

ROB WARMOWSKI: So let me ask you this. Before ’76 or so before the show began, how did vintage guitar prices develop? How did people know what they have?

JOHN BRINKMAN: Mostly car trunking.

ROB WARMOWSKI: Oh, car trunking meaning just go, you know, -- Well, tell me a little bit about it.

JOHN BRINKMAN: They put up a flea market and would buy and sell and trade instruments out of the trunk of their car, and so you developed somewhat of a market, nothing national, just kind of hit and miss.

ROB WARMOWSKI: And you -- If you -- I mean you would go buying guitars like that too as well as selling them?

JOHN BRINKMAN: Oh yes. You would go out and buy them, and back in those days, it didn’t take anything to buy them.

ROB WARMOWSKI: And did they have any published prices or --

JOHN BRINKMAN: No, there we know published prices. The first published list that I was aware of was probably George Gruhn and traders out of New Jersey.

ROB WARMOWSKI: About what year?

JOHN BRINKMAN: I’m going to say early ’80. ’78, ’80, ’82, somewhere it’s right in there.

ROB WARMOWSKI: That’s a lot of decades for an object ago without official appraising being available.

JOHN BRINKMAN: It didn’t exist as a market. It was not a viable market.

ROB WARMOWSKI: Do you -- Are you aware of the appraisal market for classical instruments, and is that any different from guitars?

JOHN BRINKMAN: In the main, no. Classical instruments are considered also in our Guitar Show business but they are more elite, for lack of a better term. That makes it easier because there’s fewer, there are probably the same number of quasi experts that they think they know what’s going on with it but it’s just kind of a little bit different market both in price and in size.

ROB WARMOWSKI: A market expert such as yourself has got to know.

JOHN BRINKMAN: [OVERLAPPING] careful.

ROB WARMOWSKI: A market expert like you, you’ve got to know something -- where the deals are. If someone who’s just getting into guitar collecting as an investment today, where would you suggest they take a look?

JOHN BRINKMAN: Number one, I would suggest they educate themselves first. Go out and buy all the trade magazines you can buy featuring pricing. Attend at least a couple of three shows. It won’t be very long that you’ll see what sells and what doesn’t sell, and you’ll be able to determine kind of what you like. And then when you decide that, you can get into collecting and buying and selling from that standpoint. Now, in the last three years, there’s a whole another entity involved, and that is one of collecting or investing in guitars rather than buying them for your own collection, and that’s kind of a cold heart, “Can I make money? How much do I make?” and there’s no feeling for the instruments.

ROB WARMOWSKI: I’ve read several stories recently about how guitars outperform some stocks and that some New York investors have looked at guitars buying in bulk guitars as part of their portfolio. What are your thoughts about that?

JOHN BRINKMAN: Well, I get on the average at least two calls a month from investors some place across the country that want to buy guitars, and of course they’re buying principally the Fender, Gibson, Martin, Gretsch, and National, and they will -- One guy in the last week called me and said, “I just broke a million dollars out of my savings, and I want to put it in instruments. What have you got?”

ROB WARMOWSKI: That’s -- and you get two calls like that in a month?

JOHN BRINKMAN: Mmm hmm.

ROB WARMOWSKI: Wow.

JOHN BRINKMAN: The kind of instruments you have it’s really not that difficult to sell. The difficulty is in finding them.

ROB WARMOWSKI: What’s the most unusual spot or recently the most unusual spot you found an absolute treasure in?

JOHN BRINKMAN: I find them mostly in attics, garages, garage sales. I bought a Martin OM-18, 19333, out of a garage sale here about a month ago, and that’s a $2,500 guitar.

ROB WARMOWSKI: So what do you do when you see that the person is just putting out a garage sale, they’ve got the price tag that they’re asking 50 bucks for a $2,500 guitar? Do you? What do you do? Give them a couple of hundred?

JOHN BRINKMAN: What I generally do is try and establish some kind of a price that I think they would not fall over

ROB WARMOWSKI: Right.

JOHN BRINKMAN: And you run a problem occasionally if you have that guitar and you don’t know what it’s worth and I say, “Look I’ll give you $5,000 for it,” all at once you go blind. I mean you can say, “Whoa, wait a minute. If he’s going to pay that, what is it worth?”

ROB WARMOWSKI: Right, right, right. You don’t want to muddy the water.

JOHN BRINKMAN: So, I guess the most unusual case of that, I had a lady call one October and said, “I’ve got a guitar to sell. I want to buy bird seed for my birds.” So I said, “Fine. Do you know anything about it?” She said, “Well, it’s got Martin written on the top of the guitar.” She didn’t call it a headstock. So I said, “Okay. I’ll come out.” And I took some money and went out, and it was an older Martin, one with the vertical name in the headstock, and I said, “Well now, what do you want?” And she said, “Well, I figured it’s going to take me $200 to feed my birds all winter,” so she said, “I’ll sell it for $250.” Now, the guitar, I don’t remember exactly what it was worth but it was worth several thousands, so I laid $2,000 on the table and I said, “Take whatever you want. It doesn’t make any difference to me.” She took $500.

ROB WARMOWSKI: Those are some fat birds.

JOHN BRINKMAN: They stayed fat [LAUGHING].

ROB WARMOWSKI: [LAUGHING] John Brinkman from the Chicago Guitar Show, I just wanted to thank you so much for speaking with us at Gearwire.Com.

JOHN BRINKMAN: Thank you. I enjoyed it. You’re welcome anytime.

ROB WARMOWSKI: I think we’re coming back.

JOHN BRINKMAN: [LAUGHING]