I’ve seen some loco stuff in my time spinning around on this planet. Somehow, I’ve found myself in the fascinating world of hardcore collectors. Collectors, whether it comes to cars, cameras, or guitars, are a finicky breed with strange fixations and obsessive tendencies. Now, I’m not casting any aspersions, because I myself have weird motivations that push me to discover and learn, but I’m also not the guy who has replaced the kitchen plates with vacuum tubes in the cabinets, nor the fella who has drum sets in his bathroom (yes, I have witnessed each of these scenarios). No, I’ve been able to strike a sort of balance over time: I’m still married, and I haven’t moved my kids out to make more space for collecting.
Back in the day, it was hard to find super-weird guitars. Classified ads and word of mouth were the way of the day, and at times, I really felt like I existed in a vacuum where I was just about the only dude who liked odd things. Many times, buyers were “locked” into their areas. For example, here in the northeast, there were a lot of Danelectros. But with the internet came connections, and I came to realize that there were quite a few other people in the world with my same passion for rare gear.
And so it was on one fine day searching eBay that I saw this Sandtron guitar. Even by my standards, it’s a weird one—a totally unique shape that’s slightly offset with design cues from Italian Eko guitars and local Japanese flair. The body is made of sen or some other type of mahogany. The paint job is brown (a rare finish for Japanese guitars of the era) and was laid on thick, Italian-style, kind of like a candy-coated apple. The headstock also has that truly bizarre “protrusion” that puts the guitar in the 1967 range.
Additionally, the volume and tone knobs are like something you might see on the front of a stereo. I eventually learned that the guitar was made around the northern Nagoya area because it shared components (such as electronics, fret markers, and tuners) with Zen-On and Suzuki Nagoya guitars of the same period. But the Sandtron was different, because it seemed to be made in incredibly small numbers and the build quality was much better than the other electrics produced in the same region. When I finally tracked down an old Sandtron Electronics catalog, I learned the company was located in Burlington, Ontario, and was probably the same company that slapped its name on the headstock of these guitars. This also speaks to local rarities; if you happened to live in or around Burlington back in the late ’60s or early ’70s, then you might have had a chance at one of these. If you were on the west coast, you would’ve seen guitars from the same factory being sold under the AstroTone brand.
Here’s the kicker to the story. Shortly after I bid on and won this guitar, I started getting messages from two guys that seemed nice enough at first. I soon found out that these particular fellas were some of the most extreme collectors I had ever come across. These dudes were after me HARD to sell the Sandtron to them. One of them was simply a nut with disposable income: single, no kids, and no aim in life other than acquiring things. He just bought things he’d never seen before. (There are a lot of people like this in the collecting world.) The second worried me a bit more. Even though he had this way of putting people off, I kinda felt bad for him because he was obviously struggling—he asked me to wait a month until his next check came, so this guy was living paycheck to paycheck. These two characters are still doing their thing to this day, constantly buying and showing off collections, but never seeming to come to peace with the guitars crowding around them.
Over the years, I’ve come to know a lot of people like this, and it makes me ponder addiction and obsession and such. For me, the guitars just sort of passed through here so I could document and write about them. Thankfully, my addictions haven’t caused me to lose any people I love. Just saying: Be careful out there, everyone!
Then, in the dream, I “awoke” and realized I was back in my bedroom, and it was all just a dream. The kicker is that I was still dreaming, because that “paddle” guitar was suddenly in my hands—then I woke up for real! How about that misadventure?
