( sorry if anyone read it already)
Guitar-picking great
By MEGAN TWOHEY
mtwohey@journalsentinel.comTravel Highway 20 in Walworth County and it's hard to imagine why Sting, Axl Rose and John Mayer have been drawn to this stretch of rural land.
Nothing but farms dot the flat, brown fields.
But stop at the old, white farmhouse nestled at the intersection of Highway 12, ring the doorbell twice and wait three minutes as a sign on the door instructs.
Inside are more than 400 vintage guitars. They overflow from the hallways, bedrooms and bathrooms.
Mayner Greene has been hunting rare guitars in this area for more than 30 years. His finds, he says, include a guitar that was owned by one of the grandfathers of rock 'n' roll, and another that belonged to the late Kurt Cobain. Both are on sale for six-figure prices.
Sting, Rose and Mayer are among the numerous guitar enthusiasts Greene says have flocked to his guitar gallery or accidentally stumbled upon it over the years.
"The place is unbelievable," said Jim Herrington, a Milwaukee-based photographer who has earned acclaim for his photographs of Dolly Parton, Willie Nelson and other country and western greats.
Herrington, who has lived in Nashville, New York, Los Angeles and East Berlin, sniffs out guitar collections wherever he goes. Nothing has compared to Greene's, he said.
"It would be one thing if it was in the East Village of New York. That it's in the middle-of-nowhere Wisconsin is amazing."
Greene, a hefty man with a gray mustache and large glasses, grew up in Highland Park, Ill. His mother was a piano teacher. It was only after years of piano lessons, at age 12, that Greene got his first guitar.
"I wanted a guitar so bad that I'd open up the piano and play the strings," said Greene, who talks rapidly and swallows the end of his words.
He loved everything about guitars, their look, their sound and style. By the time he started college at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, Greene owned 10.
The hobby spiraled into an obsession.
"My goal was to buy a guitar a week," said Greene, who lived in a Chicago suburb after college before settling into the farmhouse in La Grange in the mid-1980s.
At first Greene's wife tried to fight his obsession. But her protests didn't last long.
"It got so overwhelming after a while that I eventually gave in," Lynn Greene said.
Treasure in newspapers
Before the Internet, Greene relied on community newspapers for guitar listings. He'd pick them up in every small town from Chicago to Dubuque, from Milwaukee to Highland Park.
That so many rare guitars surfaced amazed him. It was like the owners didn't know what they were advertising, he said. If they didn't know, Greene wasn't going to tell them.
He still remembers the woman in Whitewater who placed an ad in the local paper asking $300 for a Ventures Mosrite guitar. It was the brand of 1960s instrumental rock group The Ventures. Those that were left were worth thousands of dollars, he said.
"The guitar was behind a washing machine in a case that was falling apart," Greene said. "But when I opened the case up, the guitar looked great."
The guitars Greene loves most though are Gretsches, the kind George Harrison played.
Greene bought his first, a Chet Atkins 6120, when he was 17.
"It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen," he said.
Since then, he's accumulated more than 50. Among them is a two-tone, smoke green anniversary model from the late 1950s.
"It was pure luck," he said as he sat holding the guitar. "This old guy from Lake Geneva walks into my house with it, and says he wants to trade it for a Martin D-28 from the early 1980s. My eyes popped out of my head."
It was Greene's Gretsches that brought Randy Bachman of Bachman Turner Overdrive knocking at his door in the late 1980s.
As Greene tells it, Bachman stayed for dinner, and left with a Gretsch banjo, three Gretsch guitars and a Gretsch ukulele.
Sting showed up in 1994. Rumor had it the singer owned property in Lake Geneva at the time. He told Greene he was in search of a certain kind of jazz guitar from the early 1950s. Greene didn't have what he was looking for, but Sting was impressed, nonetheless.
"He said, 'You don't expect to find this in the middle of Wisconsin,' " Greene recalled.
When Axl Rose came in search of Gibsons, Greene was in the middle of one of the guitar lessons he gives. For several hours, Greene said, Rose sat upstairs strumming the guitars
John Mayer passed through several years later, and the rising singer actually bought a guitar. Greene said Mayer left with an old Harmony Rocket.
The guitars of famous musicians also have entered Greene's life.
The guitar that belonged to Kurt Cobain is a yellow and red Fender Mustang from the 1960s. Greene said Cobain, the late leader of the group Nirvana, abandoned it after using it at a recording session in Wisconsin, and that it eventually ended up in the hands of Greene's friend.
Greene refuses to share the details of the guitar that was owned by one rock 'n' roll legend. He didn't even want the singer's name printed. He said he fears burglars, in spite of the two Rottweilers he keeps for protection.
Hunting down these and other guitars has taken its toll on Greene. He's developed arthritis in recent years. And his tolerance for dealing with other collectors has waned.
He's scaled back his searches, and may soon stop altogether.
"I used to be more aggressive," Greene said. "But it's like sharks eating other sharks. I'm getting too old for it."
But he's not too old to tell stories about his guitars and his famous visitors.
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