Have you ever left your Loar on the front porch

[onlyagibsonisgoodenuff]

Yeah, it's kinda like the time I left my F-5 on the pile of firewood after the jam session at the last festival. Not!
I can't imagine how you could forget to bring in the cello from the front porch. Did he have his hands full of junk mail from the postal box?

[John Flynn]

The other good story is when YoYo Ma left the one-of-a-kind "Red Diamond" Stratavari cello in the trunk of a NY City cab. Fortunately, the cab driver tracked him down and returned it.

[Bill James]

I'd love to hear the phone conversation when he had to call his boss. "Hey ya know that old cello I was using...funniest thing happened"

[sunburst]

As a matter of fact, and I haven't told too many people about this, I got up one morning after a late night gig and found my b@^jo on the front porch where I had put the case down to open the door the night before.
Fortunately, I live in the country, so nobody had come by and left any more b@^jos.

[krishna]

I had an instrument repair shop in Winnipeg years ago.I was give a $400 or $500 dollar classical guitar and case for a partial refret, and some other work.I was living on a main street, and #bicycled home that night at about 2 in the morning.I leaned the guitar up against a small #protective cage that surrounded a tree.I had been using that cage to lock my bike to for years.After locking up my bike,I went up to my place leaving it behind.The next morn,(2:00 in the afternoon)I got up and noticed that the guitar was'nt were I thought I had left it!I checked my appartment to make sure I had'nt been broken into, and then screamed down the stairs!Of course it was gone. In the next hour I went to all the pawn shops in the neiborhood ,describing the guitar to all,and even went to the local cop shop with my tale of woe.All to no avail.(This probably would not have been so bad if I had'nt known how in love with the guitar the owner had been.)At about 6:30 that night I resigned myself to go to the customers house and tell him the bad news.On my bike,about 5 blocks from his place,I saw a guy walking ahead of me,holding a guitar by its neck.(Heart racing...)I pulled up beside him to see it was a classical guitar(Eyes wide!)I asked if that guitar he was holding happened to be a Rodregez. His eyes went wide and he said"I did'nt steal anything! A guy approached me this morning at 6 AM and offered this to me for 60 bucks,I bought it,and ran #home to deal with it tonight.I just got home now and was just going over to my freinds house for my 1st lesson" I told him what had happened to the guitar,asked him were the case was,and promptly gave him his 60 bucks back and took it to my shop,praising God for his goodness to me,and faithfulness to this sinner!Think about all the coincedences that had to happen to put that instrument back in my hot little hands!God is so good to me! # Kerry

[neal]

Kerry, you can be forgiven as the sleep deprivation was fogging your mind, but, I dunno, those classical guys.....

But, then again, you don't here about Yo Yo Ma's wife smashing his strad in a fit of rage, or someone knocking Yitzak's violin off the stage at one of those wild drunken classical music parties......

[wsm]

I was on Dead summer tour 85'. #We had 3 guitar players in the car and were somewhat loaded down with backpacks and Martin Dreads. #

We were jamming in the parking lot after a show at Merriweather Post waiting for one of our fellow travelers to return to the car. #Lots of really talented musicians dropped into jam and it turned into a great evening of music. # I specifically remember a mandolin player that really blew our socks off.

Later we find our missing friend who got 'lost' watching lightning bugs in a field (go figure). #

Anyway, we return to the hotel, lug our stuff up to the room and retire for the evening. #Get up the next morning and find the trunk of the car is wide open and our three guitars in all their glory, greeting the morning sun....

[sunburst]

You know, this thread got me to thinking about conditioning. There is hardly a more valuable instrument than a Strad. Think of the awe one would feel being entrusted with one. Imagine taking the thing for granted so much that you could leave it on the porch!

I remember the first time I did major repairs to an actual pre-war D-28. I was almost afraid to get near it with a tool in my hand. Same thing first time I had a Loar in my care for any length of time.
Now I have a 1928 000-45 in the shop for serious repairs. Doesn't bother me a bit. Just another old guitar.

I guess you can get used to anything with enough familiarity. Even a multi-million dollar Strad.

Think, boys and girls, don't forget where you left your instruments.

[jim simpson]

A friend of mine borrowed my P-bass for a gig at his work where they assembled a little combo for entertainment at a party. It turns out that when he loaded up to go home, he left my bass guitar in it's gig bag on the trunk. He had about an hours drive back to his house including stretches of highway. The trunk did have a luggage rack affair on it so I believe that's what kept it from flying off. The guitar made it safely home by some small miracle.
I couldn't believe he told me. He said he was prepared to buy me a new one but was relieved to see it where he left it.

[Jon Hall]

I walked out of a motel room early one morning and saw a hard shell guitar case sitting outside a room. The guest must have been really tired or something. I asked the desk clerk to take care of it.

[Chip Booth]

I used to play with an electric band and had an old strat copy that I called my Frankenstein guitar. #I routed it for new pickups with a screwdriver and a hammer, I reshaped the neck with a wood rasp, stripped the finished and just oiled the body. #Man I loved that crazy old thing, it was hardly worth $50.00 but it was my main axe. #One night after a gig I left the guitar on stage as we loaded out, and it was stolen. #I was absolutely heart broken. #The club was a place we played monthly and we had a very loyal follwing. #Our fans were as outraged as I was. #During the next month several of them got together and started looking into the theft. #They searched pawn shops and asked friends about it, describing my rather unique instrument. #The next time we played at the club they let me suffer for the first set, then during the break presented me with my guitar! #Complete with a poem. #They actually found and bought the guitar for about $200.00 from a guy who bought it from the likely thief, and refused to allow me to pay them back for it. #Man, I still get weepy thinking about those guys, and I still have the guitar

[Rroyd]

A good friend of mine was playing mandolin and guitar in a group in a large metropolitan area, and after giving the bass player a ride home at 3 a.m., unloaded his old D-28 and Randy Wood F5 so they could get the bass out of the car. They visited a bit, and he climbed back in his rig and drove home, leaving the guitar and mandolin sitting by the curb in front of the bass player's house. When he woke up about noon he discovered his instruments missing, and realized that he hadn't put them back in his car. His story had a bit happier porch ending than the one about the cello, as the bass player had a neighbor who was a habitual early morning jogger, and when he discovered the instruments sitting by the curb, he put them on the bass player's porch, figuring there must be a connection there. Anyway, it had a happy ending, after nearly
causing a coronary.

[London Al]

One band I've been in had a lucrative sideline as a busking act. ( we had to or we would have starved)
The first time we did Amsterdam,we were very 'light headed', and didnt even notice some junky make off with our box of cassettes from right under our feet with a 100 people watching.
The worst thing was people coming up to us at our proper gigs saying " I bought your new tape really cheap the other day"

[Trip]

In a really dark driveway after a long jam night, I made a couple of trips to carry all my stuff out to the car put 2 mando cases plus all my other stuff down right behind my car...loaded everything but 1 mando case hidden in the darkness close to my bumper and jumped in the car threw it in reverse and felt some resistance as I backed up.....luckily I didnt completely run over it and just have a skinned up case now.....

[mandocrustacean]

London Al may have "hit on" what may be the cause for so many lost instruments.

[Paul Kotapish]

Does leaving your custom Nugget deluxe A in the middle of the floor at Heathrow airport count?

My band at the time, Open House, had just ended a month-long tour of Europe and we had a few days layover in London before heading home to California. We caught a dawn flight from Helsinki, transferred in Frankfurt or somewhere, and arrived in London completely breary eyed and...stupid would probably best word to describe our mental state after a month on the road ending with a couple of festivals in Scandinavia during the height of summer when the sun barely sets and the drinking and music never stops. It had been a great trip, but we were hammered.

The plan was to leave my suitcase and guitar at the left-luggage storage facility and just take a little day pack and my mandolin into town on the tube to a funky hotel we used to stay in near Russell Square. The first part of the plan went just fine. I collected my gear from baggage, made the transfer of heavy bags to the left-luggage facility, got a receipt, and bounded down the steps to the tube station. A few seconds later the train arrived, I hopped on, and just as the doors closed and I was feeling grateful to be shed of all that gear and traveling light, I realized that I was traveling much too light and that I'd left my beloved hatchet sitting in the middle of the floor near the left-luggage check in.

The train I was riding makes a long loop around Heathrow and then heads back to London. I had gotten on at the last airport stop and it was a looooonnnnnggggg ride to the next station. I was in a complete panic and drenched in sweat by the time we finally made it to the next stop. I was sure that my prized possession was already on its way to a pawn shop, but I bounded off and darted to the first police phone I could find. I babbled incoherently for a few moments before the officer on the other end of the line calmly suggested that he couldn't help me and that perhaps I'd have better luck if I contacted the local station manager. I tore up the stairs, managed to get a semicoherent version of my story out to the station agent, and he kindly called the manager. The manager took me back to the office and said he'd try a few calls.

Within seconds he had the clerk at the luggage place at Heathrow, and they informed us that an oblong green case matching my description had been discovered and confiscated by security. Great. Now I was sure that they had passed it on to the bomb squad who had detonated it just to be sure that it wasn't an explosive. A few moments later, though, I was reassured by a very nice woman in security that they had X-rayed the case, determined that it was no threat, and had been awaiting my call.

Relief does not begin to express how I felt at that point. It took another long tube ride with stops at all the other terminals before I got back to the terminal where I'd left my gear, but within another hour I was reunited with the Nugget. Suffice it to say that I did some additional celebrating that night.

Yikes.

I've never repeated that particular stunt, but I have done some other dumb things with instruments over the years, and I thank the maker on a regular basis for watching out for me. At this point, I try to maintain a routine about dealing with instruments so that even if I'm exhausted, I'll still function by rote. When I come home late from a gig, I put the instruments down between me and the front door before I unlock it so that I'll trip on them unless I pick them up and carry them inside. I never set an instrument down in front or behind the wheels of a car. I keep my mandlin touching my leg when I set it down in a public place, and I always keep it slung over a shoulder if I'm standing or walking.

So far, so lucky.

[Jonathan]

A friend of mine was loading up his car in downtown Philadelphia before a gig some years ago - string bass, tux, stand, music, stool. Guess which item got left on the sidewalk? (And it was snowing). It wasn't until he drove two hours to Reading, PA and opened the back hatch that he realized his oversight. Naturally, there was no sign of the bass when he got back to Philly. It wasn't a Strad, but a pretty nice Italian bass worth about 30 grand. He put up a notice at the place where he had left it, offering a reward, no questions asked, for the return of the instrument. Several anxious days went by before he got a call from someone with a strung-out-on-weed voice who thought he just might have it. My friend went to the address in a dubious part of town with 200 bucks secreted in his pockets, hoping to come out alive. The guys hanging out there were more pot-mellowed than threatening, and he managed to part with only $160 before getting his axe back.
I'd say he got off cheap!

[MOP]

http://www.afvbm.com/strad.htm

[Tom C]

From all this reading, it sounds like a good idea to leave some sort of ID -business card or something in the mando case. Maybe even cell phone# so they can contact you quickly.

CNN article about missing cello

The person who found it was planning to have her cabinet-maker boyfriend turn it into a CD rack according to the article at the link.

[London Al]

One night after a gig which went so well, the audience had caused structural damage to the pub, one of our fiddle players was so determined not to get ripped off by the local taxi, he was so focused on setting the fare with the driver, he forgot to actually put his violin in the cab, and left it by the side of the road. He lost a hundred year old instrument, and his phone that night. A few days later we were doing a recording session for the BBC back in London. The same guy decided to conduct the rest of the band with great enthusiasmfrom a small booth he was sharing with our other fiddle player. With an action which looked like something out of a Kung Fu movie he managed to chop the head off another hundred year old instrument.
I'm sorry if this is all sounding a bit too cathartic folks.