2024-04-29 01:04:49
A guitar is up for auction that makes the hearts of all Beatles fans and Bavarians who love the history of music in their Land beat faster: the one that was played by John Lennon and George Harrison in what was the most extraordinary period in history of the band. And which was produced in Bavaria, by a company with an extraordinary sensitivity for music.
In 1963 and 1964, the Beatles were on the rise: they were becoming legends. Their debut album Please Please Me was released in March 1963 and reached the top of the British charts in May of that year, where it remained until dethroned by its successor: With the Beatles. In February 1964, the Fab Four arrived in the United States for the first time and made their historic television debut on the Ed Sullivan Show. That summer the band embarked on its first world tour. At the beginning of the following year recording sessions began for Help!, the album containing the songs “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away”, “It’s Only Love”, “I’ve Just Seen a Face” and, of course, “Help!”. These songs have more in common than just their presence on the same record: the sound of a 12-string acoustic guitar, played by both John and George, the Hootenanny model produced by the Bavarian company Framus in the early 1960s, which Harrison also used Norwegian Wood and Girl. And which also appears in the film Help! in the scene where the group performs You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away.
Now that guitar, found after 50 years in the attic of a couple in England, after a tour that passed through the Scottish guitarist Gordon Waller of the pop duo Peter & Gordon who gave it to the road managers of his band, is the undisputed protagonist of the auction two days of icons from the world of music organized by the Californian auction house Julien’s Auctions which will be held on May 29th and 30th at the Hard Rock Café in New York City and online at juliensaucstions.com.
Together with the musical instrument, relics such as a concert set list handwritten by Kurt Cobain, the telephone that John Lennon used during the Bed-Ins for Peace, the protests against the war in Vietnam carried out by him and his wife Yoko Ono, and the Gianni Versace dress worn by Tina Turner during her Wildest Dreams Tour.
The guitar’s selling estimate is 600,000-800,000 dollars (560,000-746,000 euros) but the owner of the auction house claims that it could be sold for a higher price than Lennon’s Gibson J-160E sold at Julien’s Auction in 2015 for 2.41 million dollars (2.24 million euros at the current exchange rate) because “from a historical point of view it is more significant”.
Framus (from Fränkische Musikinstrumentenproduktion) was born in 1946 in Erlangen after its founder Fred Wilfer fled from the city of luthiers in the Sudetenland Schoenbach (today in the Czech Republic, called Luby u Chebu), bringing with him the best luthiers from Schoenbach and surrounding areas .
The success of the company in Bavaria was enormous, Wilfer had to move production several times, the Bubenreuth factory, inaugurated in 1954, became one of the most modern of the time: on a surface area of over 2200 m²: here 170 luthiers produced around 200 instruments per month. From the beginning, Wilfer wanted a musical kindergarten in the factory: children aged between three years were introduced to playing an instrument thanks to a system that transformed music into a game. In an interview the entrepreneur summarized his idea by saying that it was not just about producing musical instruments, in the long term it was also necessary to ensure that “customers were also produced”. However, the production of violins was gradually replaced by the production of guitars , also thanks to the construction of a new factory in Pretzfeld. Framus guitars, which became the largest guitar factory in Europe with three hundred employees, ended up in the hands of stars such as John Lennon, Keith Richards, Bill Wyman, the acoustic Model 17 of the Zenith series was Paul McCartney’s first guitar.
The company went bankrupt at the end of the seventies, for about twenty years the name practically disappeared, but in 1995 the brand was revived by Fred Wilfer’s son, Hans-Peter Wilfer for his company Warwick which produces musical instruments in Saxony.
2024-04-29 01:04:49