The only black musical instrument I’ve ever owned was a black Kentucky mandolin that I bought in 1981 or 82. That’s where I first discovered the truism about what fingerprint magnets shiny black musical instruments are.
I’m not hyper-fastidious about the appearance of my instruments, but whenever I played that mandolin the smudges that would magically appear when I just THOUGHT about fingerprints. It made me feel like a total slob: as though I was an adult, mandolin-playing, grownup version of Pigpen, the filthy little character in the Peanuts comic strip who has flies and a cloud of dirt around him wherever he goes....
At that time I wasn’t playing mandolin onstage anymore, because the Irish band I had belonged to had broken up and I was playing solo gigs instead (fewer arguments onstage that way...) Mandolin is the one instrument that I play that really needs to be in an ensemble setting - unless you’re a virtuoso on it, solo mandolin is not much fun to listen to. By itself, the mandolin is the thumbtack of musical instruments....
Anyway, I still had the Larson Brothers mandolin my godmother had given me, and strictly speaking didn’t actually need the Kentucky mandolin any longer.
So I polished it very carefully and thoroughly, put a classified ad in the paper (remember those?) and sold it to a guy who didn’t play very well but sure did like that shiny black finish.
Mission accomplished.
Just a few years ago now I bought a new Subaru from a dealer in the Midwest and drove it back to Alaska. Virtually all of the vehicles that I was shown were black. There was one in charcoal grey, which is kind of like a black car that didn’t have the high school credits to graduate...
I kept telling the very nice woman who was showing me the car:
“I live in Alaska!! A black car is the most impractical color you could possibly sell me! I won’t buy one!”
The Subaru dealership in Anchorage doesn’t carry many black vehicles at all. They know better....
She finally showed me a red one, and that’s what I bought. It was a slightly less expensive model than the others she’d been showing me, and I think that was the real problem: she wanted to sell me a more expensive vehicle, naturally enough.
Hey, that’s how she makes her living, so I couldn’t begrudge her that. Still, I got a bit irked at the way she kept waltzing me around until she realized that I wasn’t going to budge, and she finally showed me the red one.
I really had to be a pill about it before she “remembered” that there was a red one on the lot. (Gripe, gripe, gripe.) But enough about that.
The moral of the story is that shiny black guitars and shiny black cars are fine so long as you have someone on staff who will clean and polish them for you daily.
If not, then you’ve just bought yourself a lot more work.
Hope that makes sense.
Wade Hampton Miller
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