The Fender company makes electric guitars that have become American icons. The firm is “being buffeted by powerful forces on Wall Street,” writes Janet Morrissey:
“A private investment firm, Weston Presidio, controls nearly half of the company and has been looking for an exit. It pushed to take Fender public in March, to howls in the guitar-o-sphere that Fender was selling out. But, to Fender’s embarrassment, investors balked. They were worried about the lofty price and, even more, about how Fender can keep growing.
Gibson Guitars agreed to pay penalties totaling over $$600,000 for smuggling exotic endangered wood into the United States in violation of the century-old Lacey Act. The Act was amended in 2008 to ban importation of illegally harvested hardwoods like Madagascar ebony. Gibson builds many well-known guitar models including the ES-355 (B.B. King and Chuck Berry play it) and the Les Paul, and many of these guitars have ebony fretboards. Madagascar has forbidden logging of its slow-growing ebony since 2006, meaning US importation from that date forward was illegal.
In order to avoid criminal prosecution, Gibson acknowledged that it imported exotic wood in violation of environmental laws, paid the Justice Department $300,000 in penalties, forfeited claims to over $250,000 worth of wood seized by the Feds, and contributed $50,000 to a foundation to promote the conservation of protected tree species.
At least Gibson didn’t get caught smuggling illegal weapons into the country. Blackwater did that.
26-year-old Aline Westphal from Hildesheim in Lower Saxony has won the 2011 Air Guitar World Championship in the annual competition in Oulu, Finland. The young German, also known as die Nichte des Teufels (“The Devil’s Niece”), is not just another pretty face. A university drama student, she’s writing a dissertation on “Air Guitar.”
Ms. Westphal is the first woman to win the world air guitar title in the global competition’s 16 year history. Rock on, Aline.
Guitar Hero, the music-themed video game with the plastic guitar-shaped controller first introduced in 2005, was recently discontinued. Sales had been in the billions but fell to under $300 million last year. Now the Activision corporation says there might be a reprise:
“‘Guitar Hero’ Not Dead, Says Game Maker Activision,” Scott Steinberg, Rolling Stone
Image (“Portrait with Video Game, after Paul Bril”) by Mike Licht. Download a copy here. Creative Commons license; credit Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com
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Fender’s classic Telecaster guitar just turned 60 years old. The solid-body guitar that changed County, Rock, and Blues music sounds just as good as ever. Take it from James Burton, Jeff Beck, Merle Haggard, Elliot Easton, Keith Urban, and a few of their pals.
The mighty Guitar Hero electronic game franchise started in 2005, back in the Middle Ages of video games. It earned hundreds of millions of dollars, but as of today it is no more. Sic transit gloria mundi.
