Joined:
July 2004
Posts: 812
Location: Hicksville, NY | Here's the info. about Dave Guard's guitar (taken from Mandolin Brother's website). It's interesting to know that the neck was custom made, and costs more than the guitar itself! :eek:
Dave Guard was, of course, a co-founder of the Kingston Trio. Born in October of 1934, Mr. Guard was a 1956 graduate in Economics of Stanford University. One year later he met two students at Menlo College in Palo Alto, CA – Bob Shane and Nick Reynolds -- and together the three young men changed the face of music in America, converting the tastes of the nation from homogenized pabulum as created in Tin Pan Alley to acoustic performances on banjo, guitar and tenor guitar, created for fun by amateur players that quickly became professionals who achieved widespread popularity, won a Grammy™ for their first effort and made 9 gold albums. This new variant was called folk music but it was nothing like the earthy field recordings made in the ‘30s and ‘40s. These songs were slick, highly commercialized and delightfully easy-to-sing-along-with and it flowed directly to the singing-songwriting folk poet of the 1960s who, in turn, led to, well, nothing less than popular culture as we know it today, the group, rapper or songwriter who says “I came up from the streets, I wrote and arranged this myself, and I can be successful on my own terms.” It is safe to say that their biggest hits, including "Charlie on the MTA," "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?" “Tom Dooley” and "Scotch and Soda" are known to musicians in every country on earth. Guard was the composer of at least 39 Kingston Trio songs including “Three Jolly Coachmen,” “Haul Away,” and “Scotch and Soda.” The owner of this guitar says: “I was given the guitar by Dave prior to his death in 1991. Dave died of [Lymphoma] at my sister’s house in Rollinsford, NH. Dave was friends with my sister and her estranged husband, Rick Shaw who is a part of the former Brandywine Singers and a current musical group, The Shaw Brothers. Dave used this guitar on the acoustic parts of his last album titled Up and In.” Phil Petillo remembers making the neck for Dave to his specifications around 1986 or 1987. Dave told me at the time that he spent around $3,000 on the custom neck, which was more than he paid for the guitar itself.”
In his later years, Dave Guard developed a new teaching method based on colored tabs that he affixed to the fretboard of his instruments. The Vega Pete Seeger long-neck open back banjo that we sold for Mr. Guard just before he died had the same color-code on its lengthy fingerboard. The original neck on this Ovation Custom Legend has his proprietary colored glossy tabs on every fret (although they are worn of color and torn on the first three frets). That original Ovation neck is 1 11/16th” at the nut and it is our opinion that Mr. Guard probably wanted a neck that was wider and easier for him to work with so he had Phil Petillo, a guitar repairperson and builder from Ocean, NJ, make a new neck for the Ovation Super Shallow body. This new dotmarker inlaid neck is 2 1/8th” at the nut, has a scale length of 26 1/8” and a bridge spacing of 2 3/16th”. The apparently East Indian rosewood head plate is inlaid with the stylized letters “D G” in black against a background of mother of pearl. The newer hand-filling neck, vertically laminated (for strength) of seven pieces of alternating wood, has no color tabs on its ebony fingerboard, but it does have six chrome-plated Grover Rotomatic tuners with stair step buttons, an etched diamond on back plate behind the headstock, a small yet delicate flower inlaid in the perhaps rosewood heel cap and a sort of near-eastern motif scalloped ebony truss rod cover held in place by three countersunk screws. The face of the ornate Custom Legend model is bordered with abalone; the large soundhole rosette with its double abalone border and flower designs is covered with a clear plastic sheath (as Ovations of this model have) and, apparently in the process of installing the new neck, that plastic sheath shattered a bit at the cutaway – a flaw of little consequence. The ebony bridge is ornately carved and has two pearl inlaid dots. The acoustic sound is formidable; but for playing out there is also the Ovation OP-24 pickup system with preamp. To own a guitar that Dave Guard, himself, used and taught with, is to have a special and remarkable relationship to the legacy left a member of one of the most influential and popular folk groups of our lifetimes is, for many, the fulfillment of a dream. I myself started out as a guitarist/singer who played the songs of the Kingston Trio while in college and I can safely say that if it weren’t for the Trio I might, a decade after the discovery that playing guitar would be a life-changing experience, never have founded Mandolin Brothers. All of us acoustic players owe a great deal to this group and this man, whose memory we revere and whose music we treasure. You can own one fine customized guitar, the original (removed) neck, the hard shell Ovation case, and a color copy of a photo that was provided by Mr. Petillo showing Mr. Guard, in a dolphin-pattern long-sleeved shirt, in front of a microphone, playing the instrument when it had the neck of many colors, autographed “Salutations to Grand Master Phillip (signed, Dave Guard).”
$5,670 or at our cash discount price, $5,500 |
something special = something interesting
