1958 Gretsch Duo Jet Black

Cool as cool can be. The real deal, a gen-you-wine 1958 Gretsch Duo Jet, an original from the 1950s. Plays like a dream, looks like two, sounds like three. The frets are fabulous and it took me one heck of a lot of very close examination to determine that it’s been refretted with original-style/size frets and so much the better. It’s a top-notch job. Two insignificant pieces of plastic have been replaced, the heelcap (another fab job) and the pickguard. Older Gretsch guitars often had problems with their plastic parts; all others on this guitar are original and perfect. Better yet, the so-so original tuning machines have been replaced by the best-ever-in-the-world currently-made Waverlys. Allow me to interject something about my qualifications for Gretsch knowledge: I worked there, in the original Brooklyn factory, in the early 1960s, when I was 17-18 years old. They started me on simple stuff (assembling banjos!), but when they saw that I had real guitar making skills as well as factory skills they very quickly moved me up to the most prestigious job, final assembly, followed by the very top job there, the repair department. Gretsch was unusually vertically integrated for a guitar factory in those years; they made just about everything in-house. Pressed the laminations for tops and backs for the arched tops; wound the pickup bobbins by hand, had a full machine shop where they made bridge components and other metal parts, even had a full plating shop where they chrome and/or gold-plated the parts they made. Like so many factories that made everything imaginable in NYC in the 19th and 20th centuries the owners were second-third generation Eastern European, the foremen mostly first generation Italian-American; the laborers for the most part first generation Irish or Spanish (mostly Puerto Rican), some of whom were not too long off the boat. Dang, did I ever learn a lot about life while working there! Not to mention how to (and how not to) run a guitar factory, something I did briefly later in life elsewhere. Back to this 1958 Duo Jet. It came to me recently from a customer who told me he had gotten it from someone who had bought in my store 10-20 years ago and dang, if there ain’t the faint outline, on the black of the peghead, of one of our decals we useta put on every guitar we sold! Its gray Gretsch hard shell case is original too. What goes around comes around. $5295 w/ohsc