Bruce Springsteen Heard “$200 — Take It or Leave It” in a Guitar Shop — That Guitar Was Priceles D

The man behind the counter didn’t look up when he came in. That was the first thing. Guitar shops in Asbury Park in 1971 were not places where people looked up when the door opened because the door was always opening and the people who came through it were almost always browsers.

Young man with more enthusiasm than money who picked things up and set them down and left without buying anything, which was the natural rhythm of a music store in a working-class shore town where most of the people who wanted guitars could not quite afford the guitars they wanted. The shop smelled the way guitar shops smell, wood finish and old electronics and the particular dry smell of instrument cases that have been opened and closed 10,000 times.

The walls were covered the way the walls of real music stores are covered, not with careful retail displays, but with the accumulation of years. Instruments hung at whatever angle they’d been hung and left there. Price tags slightly faded. The whole thing organized in a system that made complete sense to the person who ran it and very little sense to anyone else.

There were photographs tacked above the amplifier section, musicians who had come through, some of them locally known, some of them not known at all. All of them real in the way that music store photographs are real, which is to say they had played here or nearby and Ed Luftman had thought to document that.

Ed Luftman had owned the shop on Cookman Avenue for 11 years. He had opened it in 1960 with money he had saved from a decade of doing repair work out of his garage and he had kept it going through years when keeping it going required the kind of patient stubbornness that does not make for interesting stories, but is the actual engine of most things that last.

He knew what guitars were worth. He knew what guitars sounded like. He knew the difference between someone who played and someone who wished they played. And he had learned, over 11 years, to make his decisions accordingly. So, the man behind the counter did not look up. He was restringing a Telecaster that had come in for a setup, and the restringing required attention.

And the person who had come through the door would either ask for help or they wouldn’t. The young man who came through the door was 21 years old. He was wearing jeans and a white T-shirt, and he had the particular look of someone who had already been thinking about this visit for longer than the visit itself would take.

The focused, slightly tense expression of a person with a specific destination inside a room and a finite amount of money in his pocket, and a clear sense of how far apart those two things might be. He moved past the acoustic wall and the effects pedals and the amplifiers that were too expensive to consider.

And he went directly to the back corner where Ed Lufman kept the used electrics, the instruments that had passed through other hands, that carried the particular quality of things that had been used seriously, that cost significantly less than the new guitars on the main floor, and that sometimes, if you knew what you were looking for, were worth significantly more than their price suggested.

He stopped in front of a guitar that was hanging slightly apart from the others. Not because it had been displayed with any particular intention. And Lufman was not a theatrical man and did not arrange his inventory for dramatic effect, but simply because it was slightly larger than the guitars on either side of it.

And it therefore ended up with a few extra inches of space, the way tall people end up with space around them in crowds without anyone planning it. It was a 1950s era Gibson ES-295. Hollow body, gold finish that had aged over 20 years into something darker and more complicated than gold. A color that didn’t have a name in any paint catalog.

That existed only on instruments that had been played and kept and played again over a long enough period that the finish became a record of everything the guitar had been through. The kind of color that told you something had happened. The young man stood in front of it for a long time. He had been playing guitar since he was 9 years old.

Which meant he had been playing for 12 years. And 12 years of playing meant he had developed the kind of relationship with instruments that goes beyond preference into something closer to physical knowledge. The ability to stand in front of a guitar on a wall and understand from the body shape and the neck angle and the specific quality of light on the finish something about what it would feel like in his hands before he had touched it.

He had this with some guitars and not others. He had it now standing in the back corner of Ed Lefman’s shop looking at a gold Gibson that had been played by someone else for 20 years. He reached up and took it off the wall. The weight was right. The neck was right. Not the dimensions, which he would check in a moment, but the feeling of it.

The way a neck either belongs in a hand or doesn’t. This one belonged. He brought it to playing position and ran his thumb across the strings without plugging in. Just to hear the acoustic resonance of the body. And the sound told him something that confirmed what he had already understood from looking at it. This guitar had been played.

Not displayed. Not kept as an object. played regularly by someone who understood what it was. Ed Luftman had looked up by now. He watched the young man hold the guitar with the specific attention of someone who had been in the business long enough to distinguish between people who were handling an instrument and people who were playing one.

This young man was playing one, and he hadn’t plugged in yet. He watched him for a moment. Then he went back to the Telecaster re-stringing because people who knew how to hold guitars did not need to be sold to. They needed to be left alone to make their own decisions. The young man found an amplifier, a small Fender that was sitting unplugged near the wall, and asked if he could use it.

Ed Luftman said yes without looking up. The young man plugged in the Gibson and sat down on a stool and began to play. He played for 40 minutes. Not the displays of technique that young guitarists sometimes attempted in music stores, the fast passages and the borrowed licks that were designed to demonstrate capability rather than to make music.

He played the way he played when he was alone, working through ideas, following one thing into another, stopping and going back and trying a different direction. The kind of playing that was a conversation with the instrument rather than a performance for a room. Ed Luftman listened with the half attention of someone who has learned to distinguish between noise and music in his peripheral awareness, the way people who work in libraries develop the ability to sense the difference between the quiet of concentration and the quiet of someone about to cause a problem. What he was hearing was music. He kept re-stringing the Telecaster. At the end of 40 minutes, the young man unplugged the guitar. He stood up. He carried it back to the counter and set it down carefully, the way you set something down when you are placing it somewhere temporarily, rather than

returning it to its resting position. He said, “How much?” Ed Luftman looked at the guitar. He had bought it 3 months ago from the estate of a musician who had died in Neptune City, a session man who had worked in New York in the 1950s and 1960s, and had come back to the shore in his later years, and had left behind, among other things, a 1950s Gibson ES-295 in a condition that spoke to the care of someone who had depended on the instrument professionally for decades.

Ed had cleaned it and checked the electronics and set the action and put it on the wall at a price that reflected what he knew it was worth to someone who knew what it was and what he suspected it would would sell for to the actual buyers who came through his door, which were not always the same number.

He said, “$200.” The young man was quiet for a moment. $200 in 1971 was not the same as $200 now. It was the equivalent of considerably more, a number that for a 21-year-old in Asbury Park with a part-time job and a band that was not yet making enough money to call it income was not a casual number.

It was a number that required calculation. It required knowing exactly what else the $200 was currently committed to and whether any of those commitments could be renegotiated and on what timeline and with what consequences. It required knowing what he would eat for the next 4 days and whether his share of the rent was current and how much gas was in the van that the band used for equipment and whether the van’s needs could wait.

And it required running all of this arithmetic quickly and arriving at a number that was either yes or not yet. He looked at the guitar on the counter. He looked at it the way a person looks at something they have already decided about when the looking is not decision-making but confirmation.

A last verification that the thing is real, that the conversation with it in the back of the shop had actually happened. That the weight and the neck and the sound of the body resonating without amplification had actually been what they felt like. Ed Luftman, who had been watching him, said, “200. Take it or leave it.

” Not unkindly. Not as a pressure tactic. Not as the move of a man trying to close a sale before a customer’s nerve failed. Simply as a statement of the situation. The way a person states the altitude of a mountain. Not to discourage the climb, but because the altitude is the altitude and there is no point in discussing whether it might be a different altitude on a different day.

Ed Luftman had been pricing guitars for 11 years. He had priced this one correctly. He did not negotiate on guitars he had priced correctly because negotiating on a correctly priced guitar was a form of dishonesty that he was not willing to participate in, regardless of which direction the dishonesty ran.

The young man was quiet for a long moment. He looked at the guitar. He looked at Ed Luftman. He did the arithmetic one more time. Then he said, “I’ll be back.” He came back four days later with $200 in cash, which he had assembled from three different places that he would not have wanted to describe in any detail.

Which is the way young musicians assemble money when the thing they need to buy is worth more than what they currently have and less than what they currently need in total. But will be worth it in ways that are not quantifiable in the moment and that they understand on a level that precedes calculation.

He set the money on the counter. Ed Luftman counted it. He wrapped the guitar in a cloth and put it in its case and set the case on the counter. He said, “Good choice.” The young man picked up the case. He said, “I know.” He went out the door into the Asbury Park afternoon. The guitar he bought that day in Ed Luftman’s shop on Cookman Avenue in Asbury Park was a 1950s Gibson ES-295 in a finish that had no name in any paint catalog.

He played it in the clubs on the shore for the next 2 years. He played it in the bars where the E Street Band was finding its footing, where the audiences were sometimes large enough to matter and sometimes small enough that you were playing for the room and not for the people. He played it at the Student Prince and the Upstage Club and the Stone Pony and venues that no longer exist and venues that still do.

He played it on the night that a club owner in New York told him he would never make it. And he played it on the night that he sold out a theater in Philadelphia for the first time. And he played it in the rehearsal sessions for what would become Born to Run. Sitting in a studio with the rest of the band trying to find the sound that was already in his head but had not yet made it all the way out.

He did not take that guitar into the Born to Run sessions. By then he had other guitars, better guitars in the sense of being more expensive and more modern and more suited to studio recording. And the ES-295 moved a different role. The role of the guitar that was there when he needed to think rather than perform.

The guitar that lived on a stand in whatever room he was using as a writing space. The guitar he picked up when an idea was still too new and too fragile for the guitars that were attached to microphones and amplifiers and the expectations of other people. There is a version of this story in which the point is the money.

The $200 that turned out to be worth so much more. The bargain that the 21-year-old from Freehold didn’t know he was making because he couldn’t have known in 1971 what was coming. But that is not the real point. The real point is what Ed Loftman heard for 40 minutes while he was re-stringing a Telecaster.

The real point is the 40 minutes of playing that wasn’t a performance for anyone. That was a 21-year-old talking to a guitar to find out what the guitar had to say. And finding out that what it had to say was considerable. And making a decision based on that conversation that required saving money for four days and coming back.

The real point is that the guitar knew him and he knew the guitar. And the knowing happened in the first 30 seconds of holding it. Before he had plugged in. Before he had played a note that anyone could hear. That is what it is. The connection between a player and an instrument that cannot be manufactured or predicted or priced.

It either exists or it doesn’t. Ed Loftman had seen it happen in his shop perhaps a dozen times in 11 years and he recognized it when he saw it. And he set the price at $200 and told the young man to take it or leave it because the price was correct and because some transactions are are really about the money even when they are stated entirely in terms of money.

The young man’s name was Bruce Springsteen. He came back 4 days later with the money. He took it and the guitar, which a session musician in Neptune City had played for 20 years and which Ed Loftman had cleaned and set and priced correctly and sold to a 21-year-old who could barely afford it, went on to be present for the writing of songs that would be heard by hundreds of millions of people over the following 50 years.

$200, take it or leave it. He took it. And some things that are priced correctly turn out to be beyond price and you only understand this later when you are looking back at the moment of purchase from a distance of decades and realizing that what you bought was not the guitar.

You bought the conversation with the guitar. The guitar threw in the rest for free. If this story resonated with you, please subscribe and leave a comment. Tell us about a decision that cost you more than you could really afford and that turned out to be the right one. Share this with a musician or someone who loves music or someone who has ever stood in front of something and known before they could explain the knowing.

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