The Current's Guitar Collection: David Rawlings, 1935 Epiphone Olympic

David Rawlings describes the 1935 guitar he found in a basement
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Singer-songwriter David Rawlings talks about his 1935 Epiphone Olympic guitar, which he found covered in dust in a friend’s basement — and then located an incredible item to trade for it.

Here's what Rawlings had to say:

"I'm David Rawlings, and this is a 1935 Epiphone Olympic. I found this guitar in my friend Earle Pughe's basement. He had gotten it from a friend who had found it at a yard sale, and then he had bought it for a few dollars from him, and then it had gotten set in his basement because it needed some work. It did not have a bridge on it, and it wasn't playable, so it was kind of sitting on a work bench. And it had been there for, I think, about 20 years, and had a lot of sawdust and just grime all over it. And so I picked it up and looked at it, and I knocked on it, and I thought, 'Well, that's a really nice-sounding little box.'

"And so I asked him if I could buy it from him. And he said, 'I don't want to sell that guitar.'

"I said, 'Well, is there something you want? Can I, like, trade you out of it?'

"He's like, 'Yeah, but you'll never be able to find it.'

"I said, 'OK. Well, what do you need?'

"And he said, 'If you can find me a Fender Bandmaster Reverb head amplifier, I'll trade you for that guitar.'

"And so I went hunting. The next day, I drove — he was in Concord, Massachusetts — and I drove into Boston, into Allston, and I went to this music store, Allston Music, and I looked at the amplifiers, and sitting there for about $200 was a Fender Bandmaster Reverb. And I only had $150, but as it turned out, the reverb was broken, and I brought that to their attention. They said, 'OK, we'll take 100 and a half for it.'

"And so I brought it back to [Earle Pughe], and he was shocked. I didn't realize at the time how rare that amp was; I've only ever seen one in my life besides that one. So it was really crazy luck to just stumble on one the next day before I left to go back to Nashville. And so he said, 'How much did you pay for that amp?'

"And I said, '150.'

"He's like, 'That's too much!' and he said, 'I'm gonna give you $90 back.'

"So I ended up with about $60 in this [guitar]. Played it ever since."
[Editors note: The trade worked well for Pughe, too. "I still have the Bandmaster Reverb," he reports. "It is a great amp."]

"[This guitar has] got a great tone to it," Rawlings continues, "and it's a guitar that Epiphone made as a student model, which is why it's so plain and why the body is so small. But they hadn't really figured out the nuances of making student guitars yet, and the scale length is actually professional scale, like a Martin D-18 or something like that. So it's actually really hard to play if you were a student, it'd be terrible for you to be starting with, but it gives it a kind of clarity of tone and sustain that you wouldn't get with most other guitars with this body size are much smaller. I mean, they're much shorter scale and have kind of a different kind of tone, whereas this has a very, very like pianistic tone to it."

Credits
Guest – ‪@davidrawlings‬
Producer – Mike Pengra
Video Director – Evan Clark
Camera Operators – Evan Clark, Josh Sauvageau
Audio Mix – Cameron Wiley
Graphics – Natalia Toledo
Digital Producer – Luke Taylor

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