A woman looking to sell an electric guitar to raise money for the construction of a children’s hospital has helped reunite a former Guns’ N’ Roses member with a rare prototype guitar that he thought was lost forever.
Featured in a recent episode of the TV show Pawn Stars, the seller, Gabby, was looking to raise $5,000 for the black, striped Gibson Les Paul, only to find out its one-of-a-kind backstory made it worth four times that amount.
Back in 2014, then-current Guns N' Roses (and former Sixx:A.M) guitarist DJ Ashba was working with Gibson on a signature model Les Paul, and its first prototype saw a lot of action onstage with the hard-rock giants. It then went missing, only to show up at America's most famous second-hand store a decade later.
The guitar had been donated to Gabby and her boyfriend without any paperwork or backstory to help with their fundraiser for building a brand-new children’s hospital. As such, she had no idea of its heightened value.
“I'm so excited to see which guitar it's gonna be,” Ashba told the show’s cameras before going into the store. “I'm praying to God it's the one I'm hoping, because I lost one years ago that meant the world to me.”
It didn’t take long to confirm that the guitar was indeed his long-lost love.
“I can recognize this guitar a mile away,” he said after greeting Gabby and show host Rick Harrison. “This right here is the Holy Grail. There's only one of these made in the world.
“This was the prototype of my signature Gibson,” he explains to starstruck GN'R fan. “Once we locked in on this design, Gibson only made 100 of them. I actually played it on some of records with Sixx:A.M., and a lot with Guns N' Roses. I abused it. There's even still probably beer stains and stuff on it.”
On its surface, Ashba’s signature model sticks tightly to the traditional Les Paul template. However, a deep dive into its electronics shows how it’s deviated from the norm.
“The weird thing when I joined Guns N' Roses is that playing a Les Paul, obviously it's the right guitar for the sound of the band, but I could never get used to the two volume knobs,” Ashba explains. He'd primarily played an Ernie Ball Music Man Axis guitar in his pre-GNR days. “So I had them take one off. So there’s only one volume, two tones.”
A kill switch was cleverly disguised as the original three-way pickup switch to maintain the guitar’s original look. The pickup switch itself was relocated to be beside the guitar’s two control knobs.
There’s also another clear sign that this guitar is a prototype and not a production model: DJ Ashba's name is inscribed on the truss-rod cover.
“It's a really special guitar, I would love to have it back,” Ashba says.
Harrison offered Gabby the princely sum of $20,000 for the guitar, and subsequently struck a deal with Ashba offscreen for its return.
It certainly makes for one of the more interesting guitar reappearance stories. However, it doesn’t quite match up to the remergence of John Lennon’s Framus 12-string acoustic, which sold at auction in April for $2,857,000 having been discovered in the attic of a house in the rural British countryside.
The acoustic guitar hadn't been played for 50 years, having played a key role in The Beatles' Help! album and its partner film.
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