The big seller of the night was a 1963 Fender Stratocaster, shown below, given to Moore by Claude Nobs, founder of the Montreux Jazz Festival. The guitar sold for $24,889. Moore can be seen playing it in live footage of the Fleadh festival in Finsbury Park, London, in 2001, and the Blues for Jimi DVD from 2007. The guitar is also shown in the collection video below at 4:22.
Another interesting guitar from the collection was Moore’s Fritz Brothers Roy Buchanan Bluesmaster guitar, below, which sold for $6,637. Moore purchased the instrument after he borrowed a similar guitar from his neighbor George Harrison when both lived in Henley-on-Thames. Moore used Harrison’s guitar to record a track on his 1989 album, After the War, and purchased the model sold at auction for live performance.
Other guitars in the auction included a Gibson Les Paul Standard VOS Collector’s Choice No. 1 Artist’s Proof No. 3, from 2011. The guitar was made for Moore and modeled after the famed 1959 Les Paul he purchased from Fleetwood Mac’s Peter Green in the Seventies (now owned by Metallica’s Kirk Hammett). It sold for $10,785 and can be seen in the video below. Moore’s 1964 Firebird 1, also shown below, sold for $14,104.
In the video below, Moore’s longtime tech Graham Lilley shows a few of the guitars from Moore’s collection, some of which were scheduled for the auction block, including the Artist’s Proof Les Paul, Claude Nobs 1963 Stratocaster, and 1964 Firebird 1. The video also includes a demo of Moore’s second 1959 Gibson Les Paul, used on his 1990 album, Still Got the Blues, which was not included in the auction.
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Christopher Scapelliti is editor-in-chief of Guitar Player magazine, the world’s longest-running guitar magazine, founded in 1967. In his extensive career, he has authored in-depth interviews with such guitarists as Pete Townshend, Slash, Billy Corgan, Jack White, Elvis Costello and Todd Rundgren, and audio professionals including Beatles engineers Geoff Emerick and Ken Scott. He is the co-author of Guitar Aficionado: The Collections: The Most Famous, Rare, and Valuable Guitars in the World, a founding editor of Guitar Aficionado magazine, and a former editor with Guitar World, Guitar for the Practicing Musician and Maximum Guitar. Apart from guitars, he maintains a collection of more than 30 vintage analog synthesizers.
