| 2008 Epiphone Les Paul Special II The story of the "Dumpster Diver Paul" |
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So it was the Spring of 2011 and my girlfriend, now wife, were moving out of her apartment and temporarily into my studio so we could find a better apartment to live at (HA!, As if There's such as thing). While taking a load of stuff over to my place, I was taking out some trash and saw a guitar case sitting in the dumpster. I opened it up expecting nothing, and inside was the all-too-familiar garden-variety Epiphone Special II Les Paul. This was basically a $250.00 guitar in the trash. And it sat there, in the garbage, with nothing visibly wrong with it except what looked like a ritz cracker superglued to the top.
So I take the load back to my apartment and come back, and what do I see sitting in front of the dumpster, but the case open and the guitar there. So....I grabbed and took the guitar. It turns out it was pretty nasty, the strap was moldy, the case was rotten, the body had some kind of liquid down the front - probalby beer or something - screws and strings were crusty and rusty, but the elctronics worked and there was nothing else wrong with it it seemed. For the longest time this remained my "sticker guitar". That I put stickers on and played looking all punked out with Stickers. It did not get a lot of live use, mostly seeing play with Open Jam Night and Zombie Jihad, or as stress relief in my Microsoft office. |
