The Bass of Doom

Hello All. This post has been in the making for a few years and is a story that is more than 20 years old.

 

The story of the Bass Guitar of Doom starts in a country far from Australia more than 20 years ago, by a young man starting a band, my brother. Not satisfied with having just a stock standard bass guitar, he pulled it apart, stipped it and repainted it and then created a very personal handpainted design on the body and neck of the guitar. He also have plans for the knobs however the world we lived in had other plans for us. The family was to leave South Africa in 1994 which put a big pause on any work to be done on the project.

The Bass guitar was put into a container and shipped with all of our other house hold items to Australia. It arrived here in Perth, Western Australia mid 1996 [I think], and it was put into a corner and left.

The bass was passed to an ex boyfriend of mine in 2001, as he wanted to start playing, which I had no idea about. While visiting another friend one evening in Perth around 2004, he made a point of wanting to show me this really cool bass guitar my ex had given him. Intrigued I sat quietly while the friend ran off to another room and brought out a guitar cover that look VERY familiar. It was a homemade denim bag, and I realised I knew who made the bag! Now I was very curious, and my friends excitement had built to fever pitch with him bouncing around and jigging while he opened the bag. When he revealed the bass guitar I just stood there looking at the guitar smiling, all I said was, “yeah, my brother painted that back in South Africa." The friend was a little deflated by this news as you would expect. I got hold of my brother and told him the funny story which is found rather amusing. he was also surprised that the bass was still around.

I lost track of that friend for a few years and in 2008 when we caught up again, I asked if he still had the guitar. He told me he had given it to a mate of his,  who I knew through others in Perth.  The surprise was finding out that the new owner was in a band with a good friend of my brothers. I was able to track down the current to hopefully get a few shots of the guitar for historical purposes.

The day we arrived to take some photos of the guitar, and the owner at the time ended up returning the guitar to Danial. Saying that he felt it should go back to its rightful owner, as he wasn’t going to do much with it for a while. 

For some reason my brother is REALLY meant to have that bass guitar. He still have it too...somewhere.