Went to a preview tonight at Heritage Auctions in Beverly Hills for an upcoming auction featuring the guitar collection of Skip Maggiora, former owner of Skip’s Music in Sacramento. I knew Skip before he passed earlier this year, and wanted to see the collection in person.
Skip bought his first store in 1972 from Tiny Moore, who was the electric mandolin player with Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys in the golden years of the 1940s and early 1950s. I had met with Skip years ago to photograph Tiny’s Bigsby mandolin for the Bigsby book. Here I was, all these years later, looking at Tiny’s mandolin once again. It will be sold soon in the Heritage Auction coming up in December. If I had the scratch, I’d be bidding.
Skip had tons of amazing instruments: 1950s Strats and Les Pauls and Telecasters and so, so much more. There was a (probably one-of-a-kind) Rickenbacker six-string bass, one of the cleanest 1953 blackguard Telecasters I’ve ever seen, and enough 1950s Gibson semi-hollowbody guitars, 335’s, 345’s and 355’s, to supply all the world’s Freddie King tribute acts. It was an orgy of amazing vintage guitars!
My Facebook friend Alan Cross (who told me about this preview happening) brought me a stack of 16-inch transcription discs he found at an estate sale. Cool! Heritage Auctions’ Dave Hinson was there (a guy I’ve known since my teens—he worked at a store called Silver Strings in St. Louis that I frequented as a teenager, and later a place called J. Gravity Music, and after that he started a store called Killer Vintage that he still owns today). Dave gifted me one of his newest inventions, the “Tunerette”—a clip-on guitar tuner that looks like a cigarette! This is a necessary invention, I told him, because there’s literally nothing that looks worse than guys who leave their clip-on tuners on their headstocks while they’re playing their gigs. Now, with the Tunerette, it looks like you have a lit cigarette clipped to your headstock! Genius! Sally Jo and I also hung with a few other luminaries and guitar collectors, and we had some pretty interesting conversations as we munched on the snacks provided by the fine folks at Heritage Auctions.
I got a really nice color catalogue of Skip’s collection, which you can order from Heritage Auctions. If you’re a guitar geek extraordinaire, it’s well worth it. I miss Skip, he was a good dude. Nice to see his collection honored in this way.
Find numerous additional photos at Deke’s original post.
