After a few years of delays due to prohibitive freight shipping costs, I recently reacquired the rest of my older brother's music equipment whose whereabouts are known. My brother passed away in 2006. He was seven years older than me; I surpassed his age last year.
In 2001, a few months after selling the Peavey guitar (right) to a friend of mine, let's call him Luke, my brother sold the Peavey stack along with the Epiphone bass for $600, and they spent the next decade a hundred miles away floating through abuse between smokey apartments, sporadic gigs/raves and storage. By the time another friend, let's call him Paul, picked it all up in 2011 for a great deal** they had fallen into a sad state, seemingly drenched it Coca Cola and other caustic substances.
We all jammed through our adolescence on these instruments -- the amp especially, at it was a damned workhorse for some teenagers looking to impressed whatever girls we were chasing at the time or change the sociopolitical landscape around us: RATM, Tool, Smashing Pumpkins, Lucid, Altisonus, Tanzen, Public Defecation... all of that fizzled out by late 2004.
The Ibanez (middle) fell into the back of my grieving parents' garage, where it was slightly damaged and ultimately recovered in 2013 by Paul who meticulously restored and upgraded it.
Paul masterfully cleaned and restored the amp and three guitars to the best condition I've ever seen them in since they were sold and passed them along to me with no markup. After all, all parties involved were very fond of my brother and his impact on our musical tastes and cultural views, and insisted they stay within the family.
Objectively, the instruments are fairly mediocre and I have better axes in my inventory, but I enjoy the stories they bring at maintain. You can't fake that. The amp is solid, although I'm having some clipping issues right now; needs a bit of maintenance.
Names of all those pictured:
-- Epibass, probably early '90s
-- Paevstekk, probably early '90s
-- Ibby, circa 2002
-- Paevstrat, circa 2000 starter pack
-- Bassman, which dates back to the pre-Tanzen jams of 2002; equally storied, but I've never lost it
**($50 for the guitar, $50 for the bass, $50 for the amp, because they were presumed to be broken -- they weren't)
