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In recent years there has been lots of news about long-lost guitars that were once in the hands of a Beatle either being rediscovered or put up for sale, often going for hundreds of thousands of dollars if not in seven figures. Each one of these instruments has a story: when it was acquired, what songs was it used on, what became of it after a Beatle had moved on from it. At one point, in a Beatle’s hands, each one of these guitars was a tool of discovery: they labored to uncover what sounds they could coax out of it and where they could apply those sounds to freshly-composed compositions that became recordings that we love.
My guest Sam Popkin (Gear, There and Everywhere podcast) and I run down a sampling of these guitars, recently auctioned at Julien’s and elsewhere, to discover what it was that attracted their owners to them in the first place and how their sounds went on to become part of the soundtrack of our lives.