COSTLY STRINGS: In this age of falling tech stocks, the best blue chip investment in the world may be a guitar once owned by Eric Clapton. Clapton sold his famous “Brownie” instrument for $550,000 recently, and a potentially even higher amount is expected when rocker Todd Rundgren auctions off a guitar he owns, one which Clapton used to record every song he did with Cream. Rundgren paid $500 in 1971 for the psychedelic Gibson Les Paul SG, nicknamed “the Fool” because it was painted by artists financed by the Beatles under that company name. The guitar was also used on the George Harrison song “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” and it’s being auctioned by Rundgren via Sotheby’s Online May 22-June 5. The expectation is that it might fetch even more than the other Clapton instrument. Rundgren’s manager, Eric Gardner, is liquidating his collection of music memorabilia through Sotheby’s London on May 26. That collectible haul includes original sheet music handwritten by Mozart, Brahms and Strauss, as well as an invoice for 75 shillings written and submitted by Beethoven for hand copying his opus 132 and opus 134. Shortly after, Gardner will auction other lit originals June 26 at Sotheby’s NY, where the items include a page from Isaac Newton’s notebook on which he calculated the laws of motion and letters from the likes of Mark Twain, Napoleon, Dickens and Voltaire. The collection’s valued at $1.5 million, a number that would be higher if any of those cats had been any good on the electric guitar.
Copyright 1999 Variety, Inc.