Musican's Friend... SCORE!

So we got back from our trip to KC and laughed the whole time. Just an awesome time. We got there to our Daughter and Son in law's place and our SIL Val had dinner going. We did the fam thing and hung out and laughed some more, got up bright and early the next morning and headed down to Musician's Friend.

If you're not a musician you may never have heard of this place. Musican's Friend is a ginormous... and I mean GINORMOUS warehouse that does catalog and internet sales of music instruments and supplies. They've got a 100 percent "you will be happy" guarantee with everything they sell so they DO get a goodly amount of returns. This is the warehouse/distribution center for North America.

I'd heard and read about the clearance center and had wanted to go there for a long time. The one thing that I'd heard over and over was "be there at opening time" for the deals, 'cause they pull out more pallets of stuff every single day.

These guys...






...were there early and come every single day. They make their living buying MF's returns and re-sell them, sometimes doing repairs, but often times there's not much if anything wrong with the stuff. Someone just took a wild hair to send it back.

These guys glared at us the whole time we sat in the parking lot. We were hornin' in on their turf. We were bastards. Ha! I laugh. After they glared at us a while they got out and stood at the door waiting for 'em to open. We did too. They loosened right up after talking to 'em a bit 'bout music and stuff. Everyone there is a musician of some sort and this is one of my favorite parts of these places. Musicians tend to look like musicians. Most are outgoing and a whole lot of fun... even the ones that look like they're gonna kill you.

Usually.

A mad dash of all of us standing in line, I didn't really know where the hell I was going but fell right into the lemming atmosphere and just ran. These guys started grabbing guitars and banjos and drums and amps and lights and anything you can imagine and puttin' 'em in piles. DO NOT TOUCH OTHER PEOPLE'S PILES! It's best not to look at other people's piles... some of these guys were probably packin. I was not.

I ended up kinda watching what others were doing and made my own pile. Okay, now everything is marked with what is wrong with it, it's retail price, what they've discounted it to, and THEN take another 40% off of that. But I got to watching these guys that were there every day... and figured out that you can negotiate an even better deal if you've got a good pile of crap.

I did.

Sal made buddies with just 'bout the coolest sales girl I've ever met. I seriously wanted to just hang out with her. She looked 'bout 30, had a mini Amy Winehouse beehive and the MOST AWESOME back tat I ever saw. She bent over to pick up something outta my pile... my daughter and Sal both bugged out their eyes and I just blurted out "YOUR BACK TAT IS INCREDIBLE!" She started laughing and lifting up her shirt tail so we could see it better. She had a gun belt with cartridge loops with cartridges in 'em tattooed around her waist with a colt 45 in a holster sticking up out of the top of her pants and evidently the rest down in her pants (heh). Had to be a singer in a rockabilly band, had a fantastic "look" going on.

Anyway, my haul.

An Epiphone Les Paul Special II Left Hand, cherry sunburst. It has a pinky fingernail sized blem on the bottom of it. I got it for $57. I giggle every time I say that.

A hard case that was missing the keys. Thats it. It fit the LP perfect. $18

An Epiphone A style mandolin. No marks on it anywhere, missing the bridge. $57

A Rogue A style Mandolin that had a pretty tragic neck split... it's pretty much junk cept for the parts. I needed a bridge, remember? This is a killer $3.00 . That is "3" as in "three" dollars.

A Silver Creek Baritone ukulele without any marks on it, other than the bridge popped off. Bridge was there and all the bridge parts. Simple repair. $64 bucks

A tenor steel drum. This thing just kept getting cheaper and it was for Val's birthday. $122.

I bought some strings and other crap and misc stuff. $400 bucks all total. I'm selling the LP and the Uke after some repair, they oughta cover the $400. I had the Epiphone Mandolin playing in about 10 minutes. Still got a little set up to do on it, I think I'm keeping it, has a real nice throaty low end to it.






Amanda beatin' the piss out of a itty bitty child sized Ludwig trap set. Makes me laugh...







...and whanging on the steel drum with totally inappropriate drum beaters. The poor child is blessed with my warped sense of humor and loaded to the gills with smartass. Both of the girls have that smartass thing going on, I dunno how that happened. :-)







Gorgeous ain't she?

Okay, I gotta get caught up with my blog readin!
J.





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