Here is news of a Hollywood remake that we can all get behind. Gibson CEO Cesar Gueikian has teased the release of a Custom Shop replica of the ES-345 that Michael J Fox’s Marty McFly played in Back To The Future – and Gueikian has also hinted at an Epiphone version.
McFly/Fox’s ES-345 is the electric guitar that everyone in the world is looking for. It has been missing ever since the Robert Zemeckis sci-fi wrapped in 1985, and, in June, Gibson launched its Lost To The Future campaign to find it then return it into Fox’s hands.
The search is global. There have been thousands of tips. And yet the whereabouts of this guitar remain a mystery.
A cynic might say that Gibson has been sitting on the ES-345 all this time, or has somehow found it and not announced it to the world. Not so. When Gueikian posted this teaser to his Instagram account – reliably the best source for yet-to-break Gibson news – commenters floated the idea that it had been found.
Mark Agnesi, Gibson’s director of brand experience, quashed that rumour. “No, we have not found it yet,” he wrote.
The hunt is ongoing. In Agnei's last update, he urged people to keep looking – in the attic, open up boxes, check the shed – and revealed that Gibson had recruited the investigative journalists who found Sir Paul McCartney’s long-lost Höfner 500/1 bass guitar, Scott and Naomi Jones of the Lost Bass Project.
There was also a reminder that this particular ES-345 has got an interesting anomaly in the spec; at the 12th fret, it has a solid parallelogram MOP inlay, whereas all the others are split. Typically, that inlay is split at the 12th, too.
Gueikian teased the release of the Custom Shop ES-345 replica with, “Great Scott! ‘Heavy” – but even without the reference we would have known exactly what this guitar was going to be.
All lined up together at the Nashville factory, they all had that Cherry finish and the solid parallelogram inlay on the 12th fret. And they looked good. “I guess I’m buying a new Gibson,” replied session ace and YouTube star R.J. Ronquillo.
A closer look at the ticket on the second photo reveals a few more details and, in keeping with the Back To The Future theme, a temporal anomaly. Gibson is calling this the 1955 ES-345, but how could this be when the ES-345 was introduced in 1959?
Well Gibson is clearly operating on diegetic time; 1955 was the date that Marty McFly travelled back to, when he performed Earth Angel and stunned the crowd with a ripping take of Chuck Berry’s Johnny B. Goode during the Enchantment Under the Sea Dance scene – a moment that Agnesi likens to his generation's Beatles on Ed Sullivan.
These pics reveal that the expertise of the Gibson Custom Shop’s Murphy Lab have been deployed. These replicas will have aged gold hardware. And they won’t be cheap.
But when one commenter exclaimed that he would “die a happy man” if Gibson turned this into an Epiphone guitar, Gueikian replied, “Let’s keep you happy and alive.”
Take that as you will but that suggests to us that we can expect a full roll-out; the Murphy Lab collector’s grade instruments, and more affordable production runs.
In the meantime, Gibson is still looking for information. The mystery remains unsolved. And it is a mystery. In his last update, Agnesi admitted that they didn’t know the serial number of the guitar. They didn’t even know which year it was, 1960 or 1961.
“If you have guitars in your house – your parents played, your grandparents played, your grandmother played guitar back in the [day]. You’ve got guitars around the neighbourhood, whatever. Open those cases up and take a look, even if you don’t know what you’re looking at,” said Agnesi. “Open the cases, take a picture, send us the pictures and info.”
If you have any information as to the whereabouts of Marty McFly’s original ES-345, send them to Lost To The Future.
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