So, when do Performers, Jag-Stangs, Supersonics and Toronados qualify as vintage Offsets?

[Shadoweclipse13]

Totally agree on the list stuff. 1986, and I'm firmly a millennial in more than a few eyes. I fought the name for so long, because I didn't identify with many of the things people described millennials as. Personally, I think the naming of the generations is just one more thing that Boomers have done to try to make the world in their image. Most generation descriptions I've seen give a 15-20 year gap for each generation. Even 15 years is a hell of a long time to cultivate differences in style, taste, and everything else. I just wish the generation naming would fuck off and die.

[Jaguar018]

I just wish the generation naming would fuck off and die.

Sort of like what constitutes a vintage guitar, it's just a label, my internet stranger friend. I don't see these types of things as something that any of us need to get too upset about if we don't want to. For example, astrology. I am a Scorpio. Now to some people that means I will do this and that, but for 99.999% of the rest of the time nobody cares, and I don't care either.

I am part of Generation X and you are a Millennial, but for the most part around here we talk about our lives and guitar stuff completely removed from anything having to do with the year we were born.

Naming generations does has some value when one needs to describe history and the actions of generations of people. I would love it if ALL generations had great opportunities for good-paying jobs, free education, healthcare, and affordable housing-- but that is not the case. Things have happened in such a way that those darn boomers really got a better deal-- in a very 'broad perspective' kind of way at least.

People born in later generations are having very different experiences. It's undeniable. Whether we are talking about guitars, music, technology, or politics, we need some way to differentiate. On an individual, personal lever it's largely bullshit, but it's still useful.

[Larsongs]

The name stuff is hype created by marketeers who want to sell whatever… It’s all about selling something to someone…..

I don’t wish for anyone to fuck off & die… There’s room for people of all ages… We are all Human Beings…

[Larry Mal]

As far as I can tell, the whole naming of a generation started with the Baby Boomers, as well as all the marketing that went towards the Boomers in the first place.

All of this represented a whole new world, firstly, World War 2 had just ended which would have been notable in and of itself, and after an event like that the world wasn't going back to whatever it had been prior anyway.

But then another thing happened where people just started having a lot of children:

In the 1930s to early 1940s, new births in the United States averaged around 2.3 to 2.8 million each year. In 1946, the first year of the Baby Boom, new births in the U.S. skyrocketed to 3.47 million births!

New births continued to grow throughout the 1940s and 1950s, leading to a peak in the late 1950s with 4.3 million births in 1957 and 1961. (There was a dip to 4.2 million births in 1958) By the mid-sixties, the birth rate began to slowly fall. In 1964 (the final year of the Baby Boom), 4 million babies were born in the U.S. and in 1965, there was a significant drop to 3.76 million births. From 1965 on, there was a plunge in the number of births to a low of 3.14 million births in 1973, lower than any year’s births since 1945.

And then by the time that I was born, the boom was over and it stayed over:

From 1973 on, Generation X was nowhere near as populous as their parents. The total births rose to 3.6 million in 1980 and then 4.16 million in 1990. For 1990 on, the number of births has remained somewhat constant – from 2000 to now, the birth rate has hovered at 4 million annually. It’s amazing that 1957 and 1961 are the peak birth years in raw number of births for the nation even though the total national population was 60% of the current population. Obviously, the birth rate among Americans has dropped precipitously.

And the baby boom being over had a tremendous effect on the nation, for instance the first public school I went to is demolished, communities built a lot of schools to accommodate the Boomers and when they weren't needed they became a liability. I have no doubt that this happened in your community as well if you are American or Canadian, and to a lesser extent other nations.

Also, the Baby Boom kids were also at the dawn of something else that the world had never seen, those kids were marketed to directly. A lot of things that we take for granted now like television shows for kids and products affiliated with that was all new for the Baby Boom.

Prior to that generation, first of all, marketing itself was in its infancy, and secondly people just weren't as affluent anyway. Also there wasn't some of the media that we take for granted today, like television.

But the Baby Boom kids were in front of television sets, and shows were created explicitly for those kids, and there was products advertised directly at them there. Not to mention that the Baby Boomers had parents who were overall more affluent than what their own parents were.

Not to mention that there were a lot of those kids.

Now, how this pertains to the electric guitar is pretty simple.

The Baby Boom generation grew up having the electric guitar marketed towards them in a way that no one else had ever seen. And they liked the guitar. And they bought them or had their parents buy them.

No matter what you say about the naming of generations, there's no getting around the fact that the birth rate dipped. I am basically as old as you can be and not be a Baby Boomer, I am the child of Boomers. Like I pointed out with them demolishing schools in my community after the Boomers didn't need them, there were just far less of us kids than there had been Boomers.

And so when the Baby Boom generation re-entered the guitar market as George Gruhn points out, they still had the numbers and at this point they had something else that they didn't have before, their own money, and lots of it. My generation didn't have the numbers and we didn't have the money (we were kids), and so of course we were never going to have the same capabilities of driving the guitar market.

George Lucas was born in 1944 (kind of a proto-Boomer), and I use him to illustrate that by 1986 (when the Norlin Gibson era ended) he was one of the most important people in Hollywood. And this was the case in industries across the board, by this point the Boomer generation wasn't simply working in industries, they were in charge of them. No real conspiracy here- this is what you would expect.

I can't find the birth date of Henry E. Juszkiewicz, but I will bet anything that he is a Boomer, also.

My point with all this is to show that when the Boomers re-entered the electric guitar market with a lot of money and nostalgia for the instruments that they remembered from their guitar heroes as kids, there were other Boomers there who understood this and were willing to sell the guitars that the Boomers wanted. So if you can sell your fellow Boomers the guitars that they want, of course you will do that instead of marketing primarily towards a younger generation who have less money, less interest in guitar, and less numbers.

None of this is a conspiracy or anything, any company would organize itself around selling the product that its largest demographic with the most readily accessible income wants.

And of course the people that ran guitar centered media like magazines were also Boomers and so the whole world of electric guitar culture has some to be viewed through that lens.

So to get this back to the point of this thread, what is considered "vintage" is, like I say, solely based around what the Baby Boom generation values.

Is a 1950 Gibson ES-125 vintage? You can buy then for $2000. How about a 1979 Fender Lead? That's as old at this point as the 1956 Stratocaster was when Boomers started paying a lot of money for those. But you can buy a Fender Lead for $700. What about a Gibson Marauder from 1975? You can buy that for $1200.

So what this shows is that age is not at all a determiner of what makes a guitar "vintage". The market is not applying "vintage" value to those guitars.

What makes a guitar have the distinction of "vintage" is whether or not it can be sold as such and with a higher cost due to "vintage" status. And since the Boomers are still paying for these guitars and they still have a lot of money, that's who you are competing with. That's why the guitars they prefer sell for the prices that they do.

This may or may not change when the Boomers exit the market. I suspect that it will persist, since if you want to market a product (like an old guitar) you need some kind of marketing tool to use. And the historic value of the "golden era" of guitars that ushered in the electric guitar's dominance in popular music is just too easy and established at this point.

So, no, I don't think the Jag-Stang will ever have the status of "vintage" like we understand it today.

[Larsongs]

If all of a sudden some youth Band or Artist got really famous & started hyping his ‘90’s Guitar as a Platinum Era Classic. And repeated it enough that Fender, Gibson, Gretsch or whoever Endorsed him & created his Tribute Platinum Era Classic Guitar line there would be a whole new generation Terminology created.. Hype it enough & it becomes a real thing.. Even though, like Boomers, Gen X etc., it’s all Hype used to sell something….

[Larry Mal]

This is certainly possible, however, guitar based music is genuinely nowhere near as widespread as it had been. That is to say, I don't see any rock and roll artist having the cultural power to really drive a guitar to "vintage" status.

I could always be wrong.

But I think that in the world of the electric guitar, some will be Stradivarius violins, some will be potato bug mandolins. I think the lines are pretty much set.

And frankly I would say "fuck the electric guitar" in general, I can't think of a more backwards and dumb industry than the electric guitar market, which has made a fetishization of it's own Boomer past the main focus and selling point for so long that it's hard to see it having much of a future of any kind. And it really doesn't deserve one, either.

However, there is one big wild card that I can't talk about when making predictions, and that is guitar companies discovering in the 21st century that women exist. It sure took them a long time:

Just because hip-hop and pop are ascendant in the streaming age doesn’t mean there aren’t thousands of guitar bands recording and gracing concert stages every year, from newcomers like Empath to modern mainstays like the National. It does mean, however, that guitar makers have to find new customers. As the charts and stages change guard, companies are also stepping outside of a demographic upon which they relied for decades – white, male buyers – to ask themselves: Who were they missing all this time?

When Fabi Reyna first started She Shreds, a magazine for female guitarists, five years ago, few in the industry paid attention. But now – with those old guitar heroes exiting the zeitgeist and Taylor Swift and her ilk drawing massive crowds of female fans and imitators – instrument-makers are taking notice of a huge audience they’d ignored. Guitar-wielding women, from Lucy Dacus to Soccer Mommy to 19-year-old Lindsey Jordan of Snail Mail, have made some of this year’s most remarkable albums. Perhaps the enormous potential had been there all along.

“A year ago, brands started to realize what was happening,” Reyna tells Rolling Stone. “Fender and Reverb started having conversations with me. You can really tell who has that mentality and who doesn’t – like, if it takes you 20 minutes of scrolling on a brand’s social media page to find a woman.” Historically, the guitar buyers’ market has skewed very male: Juszkiewicz recalls it was around 95 percent male when he started as Gibson’s CEO in 1986. (It’s budged to around 85 percent now, he says, adding that “we have to do a lot of work.”)

He didn't do any of that work.

And I tell you what, I've read a few articles talking about how the big guitar companies have discovered women and are now marketing themselves to women (who are responding as anyone could have guessed and are now buying a lot of guitars), and I have never seen a more self-congratulatory stroke fest than what I see with these men who talk about how wonderful they are for doing this.

When really, it's fucking appalling that the men who ran the guitar industry for decades put themselves in a corner of selling Boomer nostalgia to other old, white men and ignoring literally every other demographic. I mean, women are the fucking majority of people, you have to be singularly stupid to ignore a demographic like that to the point where you are only selling on 5-15% of your product to the majority of people.

You can imagine the focus groups when, after they've tried literally nothing else, desperation finally forced guitar makers to consider women:

"Thanks for coming in... uh, women. That's what you prefer to be called, right? Women? We thought we would ask you a few simple questions to get started so we can evaluate the marketplace. I don't want to get too technical here, but we sell guitars, like you would play with your hands. First of all, do you all, like, have money?"

"Do we have money?"

"Yes, exactly. That's a great question. Keep 'em coming. Keep 'em coming. Money. Like, if you wanted to buy something? Do you have any of it?"

Fucking geniuses. Perhaps this could be followed by a slide show of old, hairy men who played music with no current relevance.

So my opinion of the electric guitar market has never been high, you all get that by now.

But the wild card is, all these women that have been buying guitars recently, well, what is "vintage" going to mean to them? Everyone buys things based on nostalgia- what will these people who have never been marketed to before find to be nostalgic about?

I really doubt that it's going to be the guitar that Peter Green played, you know? No one gives a fuck about him outside of guitar magazines.

[Nevets]

If all of a sudden some youth Band or Artist got really famous & started hyping his ‘90’s Guitar as a Platinum Era Classic. And repeated it enough that Fender, Gibson, Gretsch or whoever Endorsed him & created his Tribute Platinum Era Classic Guitar line there would be a whole new generation Terminology created.. Hype it enough & it becomes a real thing.. Even though, like Boomers, Gen X etc., it’s all Hype used to sell something….

I agree with this. And even if they're not called or considered "Vintage" there will be a demand. Look at the insane prices out of production Squiers are listing for these days!

When Gen Z gets old and starts making money they'll probably want to spend it on the gear they wanted as kids, just like we do.

[BTL]

I don't know why young women are buying guitars now, but I love that it's happening, and I love that companies like Fender are riding the wave. My understanding is that 50% of all new Fenders are sold to women. That's pretty awesome.

[Larry Mal]

I don't know why young women are buying guitars now, but I love that it's happening, and I love that companies like Fender are riding the wave. My understanding is that 50% of all new Fenders are sold to women. That's pretty awesome.

Me too. There's a few reasons I can think of:

1) The pandemic has a lot of people at home still, and work from home is bigger than ever.

2) Women can buy guitars online which makes a lot of them feel more comfortable since they don't have to deal with men that way.

3) Fender's online music lessons was a master stroke, again, the absence of men makes women feel more comfortable in a lot of cases.

So in general just reducing the toxic masculinity that has dominated electric guitar for so long.

But the main fucking reason is that guitar makers started marketing to women... it's no secret that marketing works. What's hard to understand is how it took these idiots so long to realize this.

They could have been doing this in the 50's.

[BTL]

[...] They could have been doing this in the 50's.

What a wonderful world this would be.

[Larry Mal]

I mean, I don't think we can just blame the lack of diversity on Fender and Gibson and shit. I think we all need to look at ourselves a certain amount, also. I know I certainly am a different person than I used to be.

For instance, I used to be in a blues based hard rock band in the 70's and early 80's called Thörr, we used to cover some Blow Job Willie songs, actually. But mainly hard rock.

We didn't take ourselves too seriously or anything, we would wear costumes and makeup and shit. It's kind of hard to describe, but my character can kind of be thought of as if you ran into a Doberman Pinscher, but in space.

And then one day we released a song I wrote called "Love Pistol", it was one of our better ones, I always thought- of course, I wrote it! But it did become a minor regional hit here in the midwest and we got a little radio play for that one.

Anyway, a lot of people really objected to the lyrics, it's been a while but some of them referenced me "pistol whippin' some sweet young thing all night long with my love pistol" until she "couldn't even see straight" at which time I would "shoot my love pistol inside you real deep baby" and so on.

So, people were freaking out, and I remember having to do some interviews on the radio and trying to explain that the "love pistol" in question was actually a metaphor for my penis, and that I would never actually advocate for any violence against chicks in any way.

For whatever reason this explanation never satisfied anyone, although I remember some broad saying that it was "simply stunning". You know how it is when the press gets hold of something, real hard to change the narrative at that point.

Anyway, Thörr ended up breaking up pretty soon after that, not really because of "Love Pistol" or anything but mainly because Ray Ray wanted to do his bullshit concept album with synthesizers and shit, but that's another story.

So, let's all try to treat each other a little better, OK?

[s_mcsleazy]

I don't know why young women are buying guitars now, but I love that it's happening, and I love that companies like Fender are riding the wave. My understanding is that 50% of all new Fenders are sold to women. That's pretty awesome.

Me too. There's a few reasons I can think of:

1) The pandemic has a lot of people at home still, and work from home is bigger than ever.

2) Women can buy guitars online which makes a lot of them feel more comfortable since they don't have to deal with men that way.

3) Fender's online music lessons was a master stroke, again, the absence of men makes women feel more comfortable in a lot of cases.

So in general just reducing the toxic masculinity that has dominated electric guitar for so long.

But the main fucking reason is that guitar makers started marketing to women... it's no secret that marketing works. What's hard to understand is how it took these idiots so long to realize this.

They could have been doing this in the 50's.

my AFAB NB bandmate only goes into guitar shops with me because they constantly get blooze lawyers talking down to them if they go in alone. they use cheap guitars (usually modded bullet mustangs) and most of these blooze lawyer types see this as "the little lady clearly doesn't know what she wants" and then you'll get the endless "oh a lady like you should be playing a proper guitar" then they'll hand over a les paul (a guitar my bandmate has never got along with because they've snapped a few headstocks in the past and hate how they feel) or something super patronizing like a pink strat (which is really not my bandmate's style) it doesn't matter to these people that they've been playing guitar for 18 years, doesn't matter that they can build their own fuzz pedals, doesn't matter to them when they say "i like cheap gear because i feel less bad when i break it live" it just matters they're right

i also had a AMAB trans friend who's said when they presented more masculine, they never got a single look in a guitar shop, but the moment they started presenting more feminine, they got the same problem as my bandmate. blooze lawyers coming out of the woodwork to tell them how what they like is wrong.

i think she shreds magazine did some studies a few years ago into what female (i'm using the term female in a general sense) guitar players look for in an instrument.

1. personable: the guitar has to give off this impression that it's theirs and it's also customization.
2. colours: it's got to look cool, as much as we don't want to admit it, fender really got stuck on the same 6 colours for a while in the 00's and that was unappealing to those who maybe wanted an instrument to look cool.
3. different scale lengths and body types: this is mainly down to a wide array in female (using that term in the general sense again) body types and sizes can be quite a bit wider than male.
4. price points: don't just have guitars at 2-3 price points. make the range more of a spectrum. like bullet mustang (£130 standard colours, £180 custom colours) then spend a little more and you can get the CV mustang, spend more and you can get the mim mustang, spend more and you get the japanese ones, spend more and you get the american ones. that way, it doesn't feel like a massive gap between the one you got and the next one up.

[Larsongs]

This is certainly possible, however, guitar based music is genuinely nowhere near as widespread as it had been. That is to say, I don't see any rock and roll artist having the cultural power to really drive a guitar to "vintage" status.

I could always be wrong.

But I think that in the world of the electric guitar, some will be Stradivarius violins, some will be potato bug mandolins. I think the lines are pretty much set.

And frankly I would say "fuck the electric guitar" in general, I can't think of a more backwards and dumb industry than the electric guitar market, which has made a fetishization of it's own Boomer past the main focus and selling point for so long that it's hard to see it having much of a future of any kind. And it really doesn't deserve one, either.

However, there is one big wild card that I can't talk about when making predictions, and that is guitar companies discovering in the 21st century that women exist. It sure took them a long time:

Just because hip-hop and pop are ascendant in the streaming age doesn’t mean there aren’t thousands of guitar bands recording and gracing concert stages every year, from newcomers like Empath to modern mainstays like the National. It does mean, however, that guitar makers have to find new customers. As the charts and stages change guard, companies are also stepping outside of a demographic upon which they relied for decades – white, male buyers – to ask themselves: Who were they missing all this time?

When Fabi Reyna first started She Shreds, a magazine for female guitarists, five years ago, few in the industry paid attention. But now – with those old guitar heroes exiting the zeitgeist and Taylor Swift and her ilk drawing massive crowds of female fans and imitators – instrument-makers are taking notice of a huge audience they’d ignored. Guitar-wielding women, from Lucy Dacus to Soccer Mommy to 19-year-old Lindsey Jordan of Snail Mail, have made some of this year’s most remarkable albums. Perhaps the enormous potential had been there all along.

“A year ago, brands started to realize what was happening,” Reyna tells Rolling Stone. “Fender and Reverb started having conversations with me. You can really tell who has that mentality and who doesn’t – like, if it takes you 20 minutes of scrolling on a brand’s social media page to find a woman.” Historically, the guitar buyers’ market has skewed very male: Juszkiewicz recalls it was around 95 percent male when he started as Gibson’s CEO in 1986. (It’s budged to around 85 percent now, he says, adding that “we have to do a lot of work.”)

He didn't do any of that work.

And I tell you what, I've read a few articles talking about how the big guitar companies have discovered women and are now marketing themselves to women (who are responding as anyone could have guessed and are now buying a lot of guitars), and I have never seen a more self-congratulatory stroke fest than what I see with these men who talk about how wonderful they are for doing this.

When really, it's fucking appalling that the men who ran the guitar industry for decades put themselves in a corner of selling Boomer nostalgia to other old, white men and ignoring literally every other demographic. I mean, women are the fucking majority of people, you have to be singularly stupid to ignore a demographic like that to the point where you are only selling on 5-15% of your product to the majority of people.

You can imagine the focus groups when, after they've tried literally nothing else, desperation finally forced guitar makers to consider women:

"Thanks for coming in... uh, women. That's what you prefer to be called, right? Women? We thought we would ask you a few simple questions to get started so we can evaluate the marketplace. I don't want to get too technical here, but we sell guitars, like you would play with your hands. First of all, do you all, like, have money?"

"Do we have money?"

"Yes, exactly. That's a great question. Keep 'em coming. Keep 'em coming. Money. Like, if you wanted to buy something? Do you have any of it?"

Fucking geniuses. Perhaps this could be followed by a slide show of old, hairy men who played music with no current relevance.

So my opinion of the electric guitar market has never been high, you all get that by now.

But the wild card is, all these women that have been buying guitars recently, well, what is "vintage" going to mean to them? Everyone buys things based on nostalgia- what will these people who have never been marketed to before find to be nostalgic about?

I really doubt that it's going to be the guitar that Peter Green played, you know? No one gives a fuck about him outside of guitar magazines.

The point of my Post was about a famous young Artist or Band that hyped his or her Guitar, created a new term for their great Era of Guitar, got endorsed by Fender or whoever, they marketed & promoted it & a new ultra desirable era for Guitars became the thing… This type of hype, marketing & promotion has been going on forever for all kinds of Products… Not just Guitars.

Mary Ford played Guitar with Les Paul.. Lots of Girls have played Guitar over the years..

Although if a Girl was good looking, had a great figure, could dance well & Sing they had a much better shot at making it in the Music Business.. Still do… I doubt many care that Taylor Swift can play a Guitar. Same with Miley Cyrus & others…

Sex Sells Music!

Sure Guys could sing. But most guys didn’t look like Elvis or Paul Mc Cartney or the latest heart throb male Music Artist… Most guys aren’t good dancers.. So they don’t got that working for them. They had to have some kind of gimmick.. A Guitar could hide their fat Gut & their non athletic physique.. LOL… And Guitars looked kind of cool! Still do…..

The Pandemic has changed everything.. I think It’s great that more Girls are playing Guitar….. I’d love to see more Girl Rock Bands!

[sal paradise]

This is a fascinating thread. I have a few things to say that probably won’t add much.

Larry, as ever, wins in life. Cynical & challenging about boomers and vintage. But right. I must disagree about men and dancing though. Plenty of men can dance. The sad truth is that dancing men doesn’t sell to men. You’re so right about women though. St Vincent could be the best guitarist I’ve seen since Prince. Yet no one talks about her playing. They do talk about her as a sex symbol. And the reality of her actual sexuality tends to be downplayed. Same with Janelle Monae. She is an amazing singer & dancer, also out and proud. Yet for the mainstream she’s a sexy pop singer.

I’m so pleased we seem to be in an era where women are finally getting top billing as musicians & not just sex symbols. Although Wolf Alice, the XX get nailed into the same old tropes “female fronted” etc. But look at the indie scene. It’s bursting with solo female talent.

Thinking about Laura Marling, Jenny Lewis (although she deliberately sold herself on owning her sexuality a la Liz Phair-), Sharon Van Etten, even Courtney Barnett- they’re all considered serious musicians from what I read/hear. And I’m so pleased that there’s an endless list names beyond that who sell albums on their music, not because they’re “attractive”.

It makes me sad that so many female artists are promoted as sex symbols, and I even feel disappointed in myself when I’m attracted to someone who’s music I enjoy (although that’s a seriously complex situation, because sometimes the attraction comes after, not before). But fuck it. It feels like, from where I am, that the tide is turning & the volume of mainstream female musicians as musicians is increasing. I know there are still terrible stories and lots of work to be done. I hope it’s changing. And I hope maybe women can bring some sanity to the boomer fuelled vintage guitar market.

As to the original question: I had a first year l/h Jagstang. I gave it to a friend for virtually nothing as she was broke & I wanted an epi Les Paul. Apart from the neck, the body was awkward & the pickups were toothless. Rare, but hardly a vintage year for guitar building.

I like guitars that look old and sound good. Oh & Fenders that have vintage tuners. I don’t care if it makes me shallow. It’s annoying that I can’t afford them though.