Mosrite serial number dating
It was in good condition and had some chips and scratches. It wasn't the model I wanted, in fact I didn't even know of the Mk V at the time as I thought that version was a later Mk II (which it is) but this was a Mosrite. The look of that blue Mk V just stunned me. He went out and bought back this old hardcase (original Mosrite) and opened the lid. "I've got a little blue MK V out the back". I mentioned I was from Australia (like he couldn't tell) and was after a "cheap" Mosrite. They had a Ventures on the wall and it was beautiful but WAY OUT of my price range. On the last afternoon I was visiting a little shop called Jimmy's Guitars on Sunset Blvd and I got talking to the guy behind the counter. I quickly learned that I wasn't going to get a MK II and I probably couldn't afford a Mosrite. At least the guitar shops knew what I was talking about and some of them were a wealth of knowledge to a fledgling from Brisbane. There were Ventures models on Sunset but they were $4K + and I couldn't afford that. On the way back we had a couple of days in LA and I dragged her around guitar shops for both of them. This of course meant stopping in LA where I was sure I was going to finally find a Mosrite. Some sort of relief came in the mid/late 90's when my then girlfriend (now wife) and I decided we were going to elope, get married by Elvis in Vegas and go to Mexico for two weeks for our honeymoon. Before internet, and living in Brisbane it was pretty hard to find out much info at all about Mosrites, especially what turned out to be one of the rarest production Mosrites ever made. Especially since the Mosrite I wanted was the Ventures Mk II like the one Johnny Ramone played. This was going to be harder than I thought. I had seen a couple advertised in promo magazines that Sydney guitar shops produced and known of people in Sydney and Melbourne who had bought them but when I did the rounds when I was on holiday one year nearly every shop just looked at me blankly when I asked "do you have any Mosrites?" You went shopping. As I frequented the local shops my next plan was to hit the bigger shops in Melbourne and ask around. When I first wanted a Mosrite I did the usual thing you did before the internet.
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Years later these guitars were allegedly still sitting in a house unsold but leads (inc a TV reporter who had a done a story on them) had proven fruitless and to this day I have not seen them turn up on the local market ? Maybe they eventually went back to the US or Japan ? Maybe they're sitting in a garage ? There were three I think (I'm getting pretty senile) and they were just imported by a guy in Toowoomba who bought in a shipment of (numbers vary depending on sources) about 20 guitars directly from the US. The first time I saw an actual one was in the window of a new guitar shop in the Valley. You never saw Mosrites for sale in Brisbane. Our guitar shops got whatever was at hand with rare sightings of something very cool for too much money, and would be filled with locally made gear (especially amps) that was generally great quality but we didn't want local stuff, we wanted that other stuff. We had a good record shop in Rockinghorse Records and there were some small alternative venues but generally speaking we didn't have any great guitar shops. It did however also have it's disadvantages in that we didn't really have any great culture or alternative outlets until the early eighties. Generally speaking it's friendly, comfortable and relaxed, and we have a great music scene. I still think it's one of the best, if not THE best city in the world to live. Growing up in Brisbane had it's advantages.