“It looks good to me,” Brinkmann says, with
very little hesitation. “I’m up.”
Crocker hedges his answer a little bit: “I think
it’s still healthy, but we’re making some major,
major adjustments. A lot of it is due to the
economy, but I think part of it is due to the
fact that we saw meteoric, explosive growth
that wasn’t healthy for the industry.”
Dave Rogers of Dave’s Guitar Shop represents
another of those dealers cautiously watching for things to turn. While he came to the
Chicago Guitar Show with enough guitars to
fill a dozen tables (more reissue stuff than true
vintage, it should be noted) and his area commands a steady flow of foot traffic, he’s maintaining a sense of caution and patience for the
free hand of the market to do what it will.
FEATURE
“The vintage market really peaked about
two years ago,” he told me. “It got so crazy
and inflated—bursts selling for $400,000;
blackguard Teles selling for $60-$70,000—it
just had to correct itself. And it is correcting a
little bit, but I don’t know if we’ve found the
bottom yet. The prices still have yet to really
find themselves, and once they do, I think
they’ll be a little lower than they are now.”
“I think it’s leveling out. People are fighters, and once everybody has kind of moved
through the stuff that they were pretty deep
in, both on the public end and the dealer
end, then this thing will level itself out and
become healthy again,” says Jimmy Wallace,
of Jimmy Wallace Guitars and the Dallas
International Guitar Festival, echoing much of
the same sentiment. “In the end, if anything,
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