Short Takes

In 1990 Yuriy Shishkov was in a damp basement room in the Soviet Union, illegally making guitars with makeshift tools and scavenged parts, selling the finished product for about a $100. He eventually made his way to the United States, where he found himself making guitars for Jimmy Page, as well as Paul Stanley of Kiss. Now he's an ace luthier in Fender's custom shop, where he puts together guitars like a mirror-topped Telecaster for Keith Urban. Sure beats working the night shift at the Tonika plant in Vladivostok. The Los Angeles Times tells his story here and furnished the picture on the the left.

I'm probably the last to learn this but Page put aside his Les Paul and played a 1958 Telecaster on the notable solo on "Stairway to Heaven" ...

This struggling economy is hurting the guitar business. Nashville-based Gibson, which has been around since 1902, is laying off 50 people amid what it says is a 20 percent drop-off in instrument sales in this fiscal quarter. The layoffs will be on the corporate side, rather than the guitar-making side ...

Jimi Hendrix's boyhood home -- the tiny house he lived in when he developed his interest in music --- was demolished this week but it's legacy may live on. "Can you imagine a guitar made out of wood from Jimi's house? Who wouldn't want that?" Pete Sikov, who bought the 900-square-foot house a few years ago for more than $30,000, told the Seattle Times. Sikov is saving and cataloging the pieces from the place, where Hendrix lived from age 10 to 13. Sikov moved the house from Seattle to nearby Renton, Wash., a few years ago with the intention of making it a museum of sorts. But after several development deals fell through, Renton city officials ordered the house, which was something of an eyesore, demolished.