Starting Bid: $18,000.
Brock has been wailing on his custom-made Wicks guitar for years now, doing his own version of whammy bar theatrics and sludgy, hypnotic riffs since before Cowboy Dan was old enough to tighten his own bootstraps. But long before Modest Mouse entered the playlists of frat boys across America, Isaac was a wee lad in a trailer park in Issaquah, Washington, figuring out what the hell a power chord was, just like the rest of us. And word on the street has it that this leather guitar strap—into which he supposedly carved “the heart’s a bitter buffalo”—was once used to save a kitten from drowning in Issaquah Creek! I always knew Isaac was a big softie. If I get outbid, there’s always…
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Starting Bid: $7,500
The consistently forward-thinking Brian Eno has been likened to a god in the music world for good reason: popularizing ambient music, producing records by bands like Talking Heads and Bowie, delving into the world of generative music, and much more. But one of the most notable things about Eno is his obsession with the famed 80s Yamaha DX7 digital synthesizer, a beast of a keyboard that’s only programmable with the fiddly buttons on its surface. BUT, have no fear, the path to FM synthesizer heaven is paved with riches, as you can now bid on Eno’s very own copy of the DX7 manual, made available with a starting bid well under $10k! I hear he scribbled the beginnings of his Oblique Strategy cards in the borders! RTFM, right? Now if that doesn’t work, I’ve got my eye on another little prize: This guy: Jerry G. Jerry Garcia’s Napkin Sketch of Wolf Starting Bid: $1,765
Sure, that doodle you made of Steve Carell while you were stuffing your face with wings at Applebee’s is great. Bring it home and show it to the kids and put it on the fridge till it gets thrown away in a month when you can’t remember if it was supposed to be a person or some kind of weird marmot. But not all napkin art is worthless! Oh, no. Grateful Dead guitarist and marijuana Hall-of-Fame inductee, Jerry Garcia, sketched out the first iteration of his now-iconic, custom-made “Wolf” guitar while sitting in a small cafe in The Haight, shortly before he ordered two more doughnuts and another mocha Frappuccino. The real prize though, and mark this down because my birthday is coming up after the winter, is…
Fellow gear-hound and tone-obsessive, Neil Young, is notorious for being picky. He once sent back a chicken parmesan dish three times simply because the plate “didn’t have the right proportions,” and then went and wrote a song about in the back of his Cadillac. That song? Just a little number called “They Messed Up My Parmesan, Again.” Sadly, it was relegated to a dusty vault and will probably never see the light of day. More importantly, Neil’s signature grungy guitar-playing theatrics are often accredited to his, um, Whizzer, a device he made to sit on top of his revered 1959 tweed Fender Deluxe that manually makes incremental knob changes. What most people don’t know is the first version of the Whizzer was actually a bamboo back-scratcher duct-taped to a broken-off broom handle. Neil apparently came up with the idea when Crosby, Stills, and Nash split town without him and the dudes from Crazy Horse wouldn’t return any of his calls. See the Lonely Boy indeed.Apart from Kevin Fennell and his drumkit, all these eBay auctions came straight from Leo's brain which is, FYI, "fairly large," but fits in his skull. Just. He's on Twitter - @LeoMaymind.