FAIRPORT, N.Y. — It was a record-smashing sale - a guitar tied to The Beatles, which sold for millions at a recent auction. It was a sale that a Rochester musician and music store owner had a part in making sure happened.
Few people know vintage guitars like Andy Babiuk, owner of Fab Gear in Fairport, like the guitar shipped to his shop recently, a custom-built Rickenbacker made for E-Street band guitarist Little Steven.
“Oh, he’s gonna love this, man,” said Babiuk, as he pulled the instrument from its case.
For Babiuk, it’s all in a day’s work. He sells a variety of vintage guitars and basses. He has written extensive books on the gear used by The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. Both publications catalogue every single instrument used by both bands, both onstage and in the studio.
“Vintage instruments are my forte,” said Babiuk. “So I know it really, really well.”
But within the pages, there are just a few instruments that are unaccounted for. Most notably, a Framus Hootenanny 12 string that John Lennon played on the set of “Help,” a guitar that had been missing for decades.
“So at the time, we didn’t know where the real guitar was,” he said of the writeup in his Beatles Gear book. “So what we had to do is show an example of one from that time period.”
Earlier this year, Babiuk took a call from a New York City-based auction house. They had come across an instrument believed to be Lennon’s missing guitar. Julien’s Auctions flew Babiuk to Los Angeles, where he went to work. Having photos of Lennon and other Beatles playing the guitar helped.
“Wood grain is the real telltale, because it’s like a fingerprint,” he said of the authentication process. “No two are the same. And if you could get the right angle of picture where you can really see the wood grain, and then you get the actual instrument, it starts to match.“
The guitar had been in an attic for fifty years, which is not an uncommon story.
“We get this all the time,” said Babiuk. “I mean a lot. Not a little bit. A lot, and I kind of don’t take them all seriously. But I always look at all of them because you never know, and this was one of them.”
When Julien’s listed the guitar in its Music Icons auction at the end of May, there was talk it could bring $1 million or more.
“I kind of knew it would,” said Babiuk. “When you get a Beatles guitar that’s 100% the real thing, it’s valuable.”
That’s an understatement. The guitar sold for $2.85 million, making it the most expensive Beatles guitar ever sold at auction.
“For me, it’s more interesting that this instrument was found,” he said. “The Beatles pretty much own all of it, most of it, but there’s a handful of pieces that are out there that are unaccounted for. This was one of them, so for me it was a cool find.”
As a bonus, during the authentication process, Babiuk, whose band The Chesterfield Kings recently released a new single, got to play the long-lost Lennon guitar himself.
“Sometimes, when you play a guitar and it just sounds exactly like the record, that’s pretty chilling,” he said. “This was one of those guitars.”
The kind of stories few people get to tell — about things even fewer get to experience.
“It’s just the knowledge of learning all this stuff for years,” he said. “There’s not a lot of knuckleheads out there that do that stuff, so I’m one of them.”