Singer-songwriter and Chucho frontman Kenny Uptain recently had a bunch of equipment taken right from his house. “My acoustic guitar, all of my cables … a microphone, a pedal board, guitar strings, tuner,” all the miscellaneous shit pertinent to regular solo gigging. Uptain, who lives in the Fairmount neighborhood, notified the local officers and was given a detective to contact, but no one has responded to his call. His gear remains missing.
What makes tracking down stolen equipment so hard is that the waiting period for selling recently acquired used gear varies from city to city.
“It’s a city ordinance,” said Paul Parnell, who sells guitars at the Hulen Guitar Center. “In Fort Worth, the hold on used gear is 14 days. In Arlington, 21. But you cross [west of] Bryant Irvin Road, you’re in Benbrook, and Benbrook doesn’t have any holds.”
Despite the police’s slim chance of recovering stolen property and the handicap from Benbrook’s no-wait resale policy, the music store network is still fairly effective. Zoo Music’s Dave-O Sheppard related a story about a guy who came into the store with a guitar in a case, under the pretense that he was thinking about trading it, telling Sheppard he was going to “just look around” while the guitar technician was checking out the instrument.
“He said something about taking his case out to the car, and then a little bit later, he came back in with the case and decided he didn’t want to trade after all.
“After he left, we realized we were short a guitar.”
The thief came back in the next day with an entirely different look –– no hat, no sunglasses, long hair cut short –– and stole another guitar, this time by walking out with one on display near the exit.
“He looked different enough,” Sheppard said, “except he still had on these funky sandals.”
The word went out to other Guitar Centers and local music stores, and when he tried to sell his purloined six strings at the Hulen GC, the employees managed to stall him long enough for the cops to arrive and arrest him.
“That happens often enough,” Parnell said. “We really try to work with other stores to catch these guys.”
In Choat’s mind, it’s a community effort.
“We’re all brothers when it comes to guitars,” he said. “If I walk into a pawn shop and see a guitar on the wall, I can usually tell who had it last.”
That might sound a little far-fetched, but if you’ve ever hung out with band dudes before, you are likely familiar with their mutual familiarities with one another’s gear. Band dudes geek out over gear. It’s as simple a fact as the sun rising in the east. On top of that, the music community is kind of a small world.
“I don’t want to reveal all my secrets,” said Liberio with a laugh. “But if I see a used amp somewhere that looks like one we lost, I can open it up and know in a second if it’s one of ours.”
In other words, hiding your name and phone number in a secret spot on a guitar or amp is a little bit like inserting a tracking chip into Spot or Socks.
“That’s how we found Scott White’s guitar,” Choat said. “This buddy of mine, David Gardner, he just likes browsing music stores, and he’s found a few that we’ve all seen posts about on Facebook or whatever. He was there when that store sold Scott’s EGC and saw the Iceman on the wall, too, because he knew little details from the pictures.”
Another memorable save executed by Choat and the Zoo team was a black early-’80s Gibson ES 335.
“This guy –– we called him Flash –– he played a gig and met these girls who wanted to get breakfast with him,” Choat recalled. “This other dude was with them, and I guess they needed gas or something, so he followed them to a gas station. Flash got gas himself and went inside to pay for it. When he came out, they’d looted all his gear and driven off.”
Flash called the cops and put the word out via social and traditional media. Choat said a dude came in with the guitar the very next day. “I mean, you don’t see a guitar like that every day, and of course it was just like Flash’s.”
Choat stalled him while another employee called the police. “I did everything I could to check out that guitar to keep him in the store –– ‘Oh, lemme check the pickups, gotta check the tuners’ –– that type of thing.”
The cops eventually showed up to make an arrest. The man had bought it from a friend for next to nothing and was merely trying to flip it.
“He seemed honest enough, but c’mon,” Choat said. “If you have a shady buddy who just happens to get ahold of some guitar and wants to sell it really fast, I mean, use some common sense.”
In White’s case, the thieves had no idea what they had and had even been rebuffed from Guitar Center earlier that day, because one of them was too young to sell a guitar (a minimum age of 18, according to the store’s policy). “If you work at a music store,” Choat said, “you should be suspicious when a kid comes in with a guitar he doesn’t know anything about, doesn’t even know the brand and says, ‘Oh, whatever you can give me is fine.’ Those are red flags, and then when you look up what it is and see it’s worth two grand but he’s fine taking $125, well, that doesn’t look right at all.”
The best thing you can do as a musician is mark and document your gear, and no matter what happens, always secure the stuff that’s most easily carried away. While Joe Carpenter retained his drums, items like his purloined stick bag are just as valuable.
“I spent years accumulating all that stuff,” he said. “I’m glad I got most of my gear returned, but some of those things, you just don’t get them back. The takeaway is that at least you can count on the music community to go out of its way to help you.”
Hopefully, the police can do the rest.
