The introduction of relic stickers has reignited the debate on faux-damaged instruments. But why do some players find the concept of relics so, ahem, distressing? Answering that very question – through the medium of a snarky sort-of-interview – it’s this week’s Fret Buzz.

I'm new to relicing. Give me the elevator pitch?

Box-fresh, squeaky-clean, unblemished, and virginal are fine for a Jonas Brother. But what if your guitar could imply you’ve spent the past decade gigging a Deep South dive bar, swatting Hell’s Angels during set breaks, with a wildcat stripper named Candy stubbing Lucky Strikes on your scratchplate after your nightly lovemaking?

Yes. I want people to have that impression of me.

Trouble is, that kind of lifestyle wears you down. Alcoholism. Gonorrhoea. Country ’n’ western. Hence the rise of guitar relicing: an entire art and science dedicated to making your Tele look like Keith Richards’ kneecaps.

How did relicing start, anyway?

Back in the ’80s, repair men realized that putting fresh parts on vintage guitars was like jamming Simon Cowell’s veneers into the mouth of a mummified corpse from a Mesolithic peat bog. The industry sprang up from that first soiled hardware.

I'm sorry, but how is relicing different to vandalism?

Think of it more as willing sadomasochism. These days, guitarists will pay a premium for a good thrashing from a middle-aged carpenter named Kenny.

Hey, whatever your kink. Is there a relicing godfather I should know about?

Most people would cite Tom Murphy, boss and namesake of Gibson’s Murphy Lab. This man is the opposite of a plastic surgeon. An hour on his workbench would turn Harry Styles into Willie Nelson.

Is the Murphy Lab an actual laboratory?

More like a state-of-the-art torture chamber. They’ve got revolutionary lacquer formulations. Cutting-edge cooling chambers. Thermally aged soundboards. But Tom and the team get medieval too, using car keys and railroad spikes. The results are stunning – but controversial.

What's the problem?

There's a school of thought that players should earn their scrapes and dings. Take Rory Gallagher’s ’61 Strat...

Oh yeah. That thing looks like it spent the weekend on Miami Beach with no sunscreen.

That’s a good, honest flaying, right there. No cooling chambers in 1970s Ireland.

So this is about authenticity?

Yeah. It’s like if you found out Harry Potter’s scar wasn’t from battling Voldemort but done under anesthetic on Harley Street. Or that Henry Rollins’ Search & Destroy tattoo was actually one of those stick ’n’ peel jobs your mom applies with a wet sponge.

How about the defense for relicing?

As Murphy reminded Guitar World last year, relicing is more than skin-deep, with the Lab’s fretboard-rolling process giving the feel of a played-in classic. It’s also a feasible way to take a ‘vintage’ instrument out on the road. As for the looks, the only thing that's aged better is Michelle Pfeiffer.

Maybe it's time for an older model. How much is a Murphy Lab guitar?

Prices start around $5,600 for a 1957 Goldtop Reissue (Ultra Light Aged).

Christ! What’s next? Pay someone to scratch my car, smash my windows, and defecate on my lawn?!

Well, maybe you’d prefer those relic stickers we mentioned (yours for $6.20).

No. That's the most pathetic thing I've ever heard of.

Fine. Then go at it with a cheese grater. Start holding band practice in a sauna. Or simply pop your Strat in the Stones’ dressing room – three hours should take your finish from Olympic White to Cancerous Lung.

Giving stupid answers to smart questions, it’s our weekly snarky pseudo-interview… Fret Buzz. This week: Bob Dylan’s guitarists keep going on garden leave. But what makes The Bard a tough gig, and who are rock’s most notorious paymasters?

Dylan’s guitarists are walking out? You just can’t get the staff…

They’re dropping like flies. Last month, long-term sideman Doug Lancio quit the road band, followed a fortnight later by Bob Britt. We wouldn’t like to speculate, but Britt’s farewell post – “Sayanora Bobby” – seemed flippant (at best) or a man bursting with bottled-up venom (at worst).

Yes, I’ve always gone with ‘thanks for the opportunity’. What’s Britt going to do now?

Gardening, apparently. He wrapped up his next post by announcing he was off to weed his flowerbeds.

He’d rather do that than play with Dylan? Next you’ll be telling me Stevie Van Zandt has quit the E Street Band to creosote his fence.

Well, tell that to the 35-plus guitarists who’ve blown through Dylan’s lineup [indeed, Dylan debuted his third new guitarist in three weeks, Jad Tariq just this past weekend – Ed]. The guy gets through sidemen like kamikaze pilots.

But Dylan is the era-defining poet of the rock ’n’ roll epoque. A seminal visionary who…

Yeah, yeah, we know all that. But being his guitarist isn’t necessarily easy.

Isn’t it just G, A minor, C, and A?

In theory (although what you just said is slightly reductive). But Dylan’s freewheeling onstage tendencies can apparently feel like one long hazing ritual.

“I was great friends with the Heartbreakers,” Dave Stewart of Eurythmics once recalled. “They were on tour with him and said he’d suddenly play the song in a different key, or he decides to miss out a verse.”

Heh. What a jokerman. I bet he’s a riot in the studio?

Not according to Robben Ford, who recalled one ’90s session where Dylan arrived in the studio only to slump wordlessly on a stool – “[he] doesn’t say anything, head down, nothing”. Then there’s the relentless death march of his touring schedule.

Don’t people nickname it the Never Ending Tour?

Yep. By the time you finally get home, the babies whose births you missed are arthritic old gargoyles hobbling around looking for their dentures.

Is Dylan the toughest rock icon to work for?

Not by any means. Rock ’n’ roll is full of borderline despots. Take James Brown, who reportedly fined his players for missing a note, or even just wearing the wrong shoes.

Wow. So by the end of Sex Machine, you could owe him $50? Maybe I would be better off as a dog-walker.

That’s nothing. Prince demanded a ‘purple’ lifestyle of his band members.

What does that even mean?

Search me. Lots of beets on the backstage rider?

Maybe he should have just hired Barney the dinosaur.

Then there’s Frank Zappa, whose standards were so absurdly high that you literally had to be Steve Vai.

And what about that poor sessioner that Axl Rose humiliated by making him wear a KFC bucket every night…

No, that was his choice. I mean, the guy’s called Buckethead. He’s kind of painted himself into a corner on that one.

So how do I apply for the Dylan gig?

Just hang around the stage door for the next sessioner to storm out. We’ll have your gardening gloves waiting for you…

Eric Clapton’s long-lost Les Paul is back after six decades in the wilderness. But which iconic guitars are still missing in action, and why haven’t our heroes heard of padlocks? Drilling into that very subject, via the medium of a conversation with, er, ourselves… It’s Fret Buzz.

I keep hearing about Eric Clapton’s Summersburst. Has the veteran British bluesman brought out a new Snapple flavor?

That would be amazing. But no. The Summersburst is the 1960 Les Paul bought by Clapton from The Police’s Andy Summers and played on Cream’s 1966 debut album. It’s been missing for [checks watch] 60 years. But it just resurfaced in a Paris guitar shop.

Where’s it been all this time?

Hanging out with the absinthe fairy and cancan dancers at Moulin Rouge? For a long time, its last-known location was Dan Armstrong’s repair shop in New York, where Clapton was apparently unhappy with the neck fix, refused the bill, and ditched the guitar. Now it’s been revealed that it had been kept under the watchful eye of collector, Perry Margouleff.

How does Clapton feel about its resurfacing?

Publicly, he doesn’t seem that bothered. After all, the guy’s already auctioned his guitar collection. Maybe it’s like when you’ve tidied the shed and your neighbor suddenly returns that rusty lawnmower you’d forgotten about. Or your idiot kid comes home from college and starts yelling on Fortnite. And besides, his Beano is still missing.

Well, it’s only a comic book. Just buy another one. It costs, what, $4?

No, we mean the 1960 Les Paul that Clapton played on the Bluesbreakers’ fabled ‘Beano’ album of 1966. That one was swiped from a church hall in the same period.

Any leads?

Joe Bonamassa insists that Beano “is in a collection on the East Coast. It still exists. I haven’t seen it, but I have it on good authority from people who have.”

How do you smuggle a guitar out of a dressing room anyway?

We can only assume, in harem pants. But it happens more than you’d think. Keith Richards had nine guitars stolen from the Stones’ Côte d'Azur mansion during the recording of 1972’s Exile On Main St.

Nine! But surely Keith in that early-’70s period was alert and vigilant, and would have fitted out Villa Nellcôte with burglar alarms or at least completed the relevant contents insurance forms?

Erm, you might want to read his memoirs. Anyway, one of Keith’s Les Pauls turned up last year at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Looking pretty rough after all these years, I’d imagine.

There was deep weathering after decades of abuse. As for the guitar – that looked pretty good!

At least Michael Angelo Batio’s four-neck Quad couldn’t feasibly be stolen.

Actually, it was, in El Paso, by a particularly ballsy thief who presumably told security he was holding an enormous pair of garden shears. Only the top two necks were ever recovered, which is still more than any reasonable person needs.

So stolen guitars do come back?

If you wait long enough, it seems, the universe will provide. In 2024, Paul McCartney was reunited with the legendary 1961 Höfner bass stolen 52 years earlier. And no doubt did a cheery thumbs-up for the cameras.

So what you’re saying is: ‘guitars are like homing pigeons’?

Even better. Because they don’t crap on your shoulder when you’re busking.

Johnny Marr’s cleaning out his closet and the world’s wealthiest music fans are warming up their credit cards for yet another hot-ticket celebrity guitar auction. Why does this keep happening? Answering that very question through the medium of – as one fan describes it – “a snarky faux interview”… it’s Fret Buzz!

Lend us a dollar – Johnny Marr is auctioning his guitar collection in September.

My pleasure. So you’re good for the other $199,000?

Excuse me?

As befits an indie-guitar god, Johnny’s instruments are quite expensive. For instance, there’s a $200,000 estimate for his fabled 1960 ES-355.

Hmmm. Anything in my budget?

How about $106,000 for the ’82 Rickenbacker 330 Jetglo played on This Charming Man?

Heaven knows I’m miserable now.

Well, we told you they’re expensive. Basically, if you put your hand in the air anywhere near Christie’s auction house in London, you’ll accidentally default on your mortgage for a road-soiled wah pedal.

Has Johnny fallen on hard times?

Don’t worry about Johnny. He’s doing very nicely. He’s just offloading a few dozen guitars because he “didn’t like the idea of my studio space becoming a museum”.

First-world problems…

Anyway, Johnny is famously a charming man, and the proceeds will go to various charities, including the Guide Dogs For The Blind Association.

Wow. Those guide dogs are going to be loaded. Will they all get gold collars?

That’s not how animal charities work.

How did this auction craze start, anyway?

Back in 1999, Eric Clapton sold his first batch, including the ’57 Brownie Strat. Since then, it’s gone gangbusters. In March, David Gilmour’s Black Strat regained the title of World’s Most Expensive Guitar, fetching $14.6m.

But aren’t these just ordinary production guitars that happened to be played by talented people?

Johnny reckons there’s more to it: “I once asked this acupuncturist if guitars had chi – a life force. He said, ‘Yeah, your guitars have got chi in.’ I was like, ‘I knew it!’”

Why don’t manufacturers just put in the chi at the factory?

Chi doesn’t work like that. It’s more of a spiritual thing. It’s under your fingernails.

Who has $14.6m, anyway?

Oh, all sorts of people. Tech bros. Russian princes. Centuries-old dynasties of European vampires. Regular folks, y’know?

Are you being sarcastic?

Yeah. People get annoyed by celebrity guitar auctions. But also excited. And jealous too. It’s hard to read the room sometimes.

Why the resentment?

It’s the notion of rock’s most cherished guitars being held captive in the iceberg basements of Silicon Valley, their voices forever silenced – except that one time Jeff Bezos took out Kurt’s Jag-Stang for a halting attempt at Come As You Are.

Isn’t that a simplistic view of auction buyers?

Yeah, maybe. Last year, Christie’s specialist Amelia Walker told GW that “at the Mark Knopfler sale, I remember seeing people in tears. It’s absolutely driven by the emotional connection.” She also points out that many guitars head to public museums – while the benefits for charity are undeniable.

Anyway, isn’t the guitar press partially responsible for stoking up this circus with its feverish coverage of celebrity guitar auctions?

Hey, don’t hate the player, hate the game.

Back to Johnny’s auction. Please, please, please, let me get what I want?

The best we can do is a ‘Comet Sparkle’ edition of Johnny’s signature Jaguar for $11,000. And that’s assuming you don’t get into a bidding war with a Big Oil CEO who was very sensitive at school.

I keep seeing Fender in the headlines. Has a new Stratocaster come out or something?

Well, kinda. According to Fender, thousands of new Stratocasters are coming out every year. Trouble is, they’re being made by other manufacturers.

Ah, this is that cease-and-desist thing. What’s going on?

Earlier this year, Fender mailed out a stack of letters to guitar-builders across the US.

Oh, that’s nice. Why shouldn’t luthiers be penfriends?

The letters were, let’s say, strongly worded. They reportedly ordered those firms to halt production of any guitar that “infringes our client’s copyright in the Stratocaster body shape”.

Which is?

There’s 20-odd design points that make a Strat, but the defining feature is probably the asymmetrical double cutaway and headstock silhouette. Y’know, it’s the quintessential ‘guitar’ shape that your five-year-old nephew doodles on his school exercise book.

Is Fender coming after him too?

Not yet. But multiple builders have confirmed receipt of Fender’s cease-and-desist letter, from giants like PRS to boutique operations including LsL Instruments.

How about B.C. Rich?

No, probably not them.

Hasn’t the Strat been around since 1954? That’s some sluggish legal action.

Well, this isn’t the first time Fender has got litigious. Most recently, they tried to trademark the Strat, Tele and Precision shapes back in 2009. It didn’t work.

So what’s changed?

Back in March, Fender won a case in Germany against a Chinese builder. The US brand says the new copyright decision gives them “enforceable rights” over the Strat shape, at least in the EU. But the MI sector is fighting back: the world’s largest retailer, Thomann, just became the first firm to take legal action against Fender.

So the sue-er has become the sue-ee?

We don’t think those are actual words, but fine.

What are guitar designers supposed to do now?

Admittedly, it’s a head-scratcher. There’s a finite number of forms a guitar can take to work alongside our fundamental human physiology. It can’t exactly be a star shape.

Tell that to Björn from ABBA.

He only played that once, though. It probably pokes you in the armpit.

I play a doublecut. Do I have to hand it in at the police station, like an XL Bully?

Calm down. Fender says “two-horned or double-cutaway” guitars aren’t necessarily targets. And while there was briefly talk of a S-type bonfire, CEO Edward ‘Bud’ Cole now insists existing inventory won’t be destroyed.

How has the guitar blogosphere reacted?

With stoic reflection and measured cool-headedness.

No, seriously.

Fine. With froth-mouthed, bug-eyed, teeth-gnashing hot takes worthy of a Witchfinder General. Some pundits reckon it’s a long-overdue slapdown to a black market crawling with copycat chancers who never had an original idea in their lives. The rest are painting Fender as a bully-boy Godzilla sweeping mom ’n’ pop operations off the map with its big scaly tail.

Does Fender have a point?

Well, that’s debatable. What is the fundamental essence of an electric guitar?

Why are you suddenly talking like Carlos Santana?

We just mean: is a guitar defined by its physical dimensions, or by something more intangible like sound or vibe? Is a Ferrari a copy of a Porsche because both have four wheels and a hedge-fund manager at the wheel?

Are you expecting an answer to that?

No, just something to ponder. We’ll leave the decision to the unfortunate judge who has to sort out this train-wreck when it goes to court...