Hi,
I'm writing from Mitchells Island, NSW, Australia. I've never owned a Taylor guitar (though that may change soon) but have a guitar that might interest those who are interested in Taylor history. I've never really been a musician but have always had a guitar around me. There've been years when I hardly picked it up but I still felt the need to have it around. In the last 9 or so years I've gotten interested in song writing and so have been playing a whole lot more. Still not performing except on the occasionally open mic night.
My guitar. In 1972 I left a guitar on a bus and never saw it again. At least I think that's what happened to my previous guitar - I don't remember all that well. However, what I do recall is that a friend in La Jolla (I'd gone to university at UCSD) knew of a place where I could get a hand made guitar for $150. Sounded great to me so I told him to go ahead and order one for me which he did. I was about to leave on a trip to South America and went to pick up the guitar a day or two before I left. While I was fiddling with my new guitar in the office of the company that built it someone came into the room waving a sheet of paper saying "Look at this". (Or something like that). The guitar I was picking up had (and still has) a fibreglass back. The piece of paper was from Ovation. At the time someone said Ovation was suing them but I later heard it was a cease and desist order. I guess Ovation figured that they owned exclusive rights to the use of fibreglass in guitar construction (the guitar does not look like an ovation). The company that made my guitar had made, I was told, twelve of them. Mine was number twelve and was obviously the last. It was a good guitar and has served me very well for 50 years.
Many years later I was telling this story to someone at a computer conference and he asked for more details. I told him what I could and he told me that he was almost certain that the company I'd bought it from was American Dream and that a friend of his probably worked there at the time. That friend was Bob Taylor. The guitar is not signed in any way. There is no evidence indicating that it came from anywhere. I pressed the guy who gave me that information to ask Bob Taylor about the guitar. It took a long time but he finally did. He reported that Bob laughed and said "I remember working on a couple of those". That's it. That's all the evidence that I have that mine is a guitar with a significant history.
What i do have is a guitar that has a great story. I think it's true. A pre-Taylor can be a valuable guitar. A pre-pre-Taylor without any evidence probably not so much. However, I'm curious to hear if anyone on this forum has ever heard of the American Dream fibreglass backed guitars. It's possible that there are 11 more out there but it's possible that mine is that only one that has survived. Who knows.
I've always love the guitar but having a good back story encouraged me to spend almost $1000 (on a $150 guitar) to fix it's action about 15 years ago. The luthier liked the sound and the story but had to tell me when his work was done that it didn't actually have a truss rod, a lack that he fixed up. I did say that it was a pre-pre after all.
