.Riffing on the History of Guitar Player Magazine

To riff on Rumi, out beyond an abandoned CVS building on The Alameda, there is a mystical field where Guitar Player magazine operated in 1967. I will meet you there.

And to paraphrase rock producer Rick Rubin, the more personal I make the story, the less it will sound like every other news institution in San Jose.

Before we jam on The Alameda, however, allow me to first head south to Bascom Avenue, where Guitar Showcase launched a few years earlier, in 1965, before I was even born. Bud Eastman started the business, initially selling instruments out of a nearby garage. He then opened the first store at 2910 S. Bascom, about where the tile store is now.

For the grand opening in May of 1965, a huge party went down. If we are to believe a Mercury-News ad, the grand prize was a Regal R-235 guitar and case, a $115 value at the time. The store gave away ten-dollar credit certificates every hour. Local teenage band Syndicate of Sound performed live.

Guitar Showcase eventually outgrew its original store and moved down the street to the classic two-story location that several generations still remember, just down Bascom, near Foxworthy. That building was unfortunately demolished for housing a few years ago, with the Showcase business then moving into the smaller consignment building across the parking lot, while ditching the drums, keyboards and pro audio. Now it’s just guitars.

I am not a guitar player, I am a keyboard player, so I spent much of my teenage years perusing the keyboard department at Guitar Showcase. It was the real deal. The salesmen weren’t yakety-yaks. They were real working musicians with gigs in the industry, playing, producing or what have you. Showcase also had songbooks, magazines and all sorts of other stuff. So it’s a little depressing to see them in a much smaller building nowadays, but I’m not complaining. Time marches on.

All of which is important, right now, because Bud Eastman also originally started Guitar Player magazine and ran the original publication out of an office at 843 The Alameda, right where the boarded-up CVS now sits. This is not the same building. The original janky office structure that housed Guitar Player in the late ’60s was torn down before the current failed drug store was built. As usual, property owners and land use consultants made a fortune, and now it’s boarded up. Textbook San Jose.

Back when the magazine started, there was no other publication devoted to guitar players, gear, interviews and technique. It was a groundbreaking idea. Even though Eastman sold the magazine a few years after he started it, an entire family tree of publications can be traced straight back to those days. Not bad for a suburban wasteland.

This is especially mind-blowing to contemplate because, right now, the final print issue of Guitar Player magazine is on the newsstands, that is, if you can even locate a place that sells magazines. Showcase doesn’t. Neither does Guitar Center. Both stores told me to go to Barnes & Noble, where I indeed found several copies, with Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page on the cover. 

And it’s a great issue. Aside from Page talking shop about amplifier architecture, there’s a 14-page spread highlighting the 58-year history of the magazine. The very first cover from 1967 is pictured. The price was 35 cents and featured interviews with Chet Atkins, Charlie Byrd, Barney Kessel and the Jefferson Airplane. Also pictured was an original postage-paid subscription card addressed to 843 The Alameda in San Jose. 

Now, since Jimmy Page is involved here, I just had to summon the occult forces of the universe. I shuffled over to the failed CVS, where a mural proclaimed, “Greetings from The Alameda, San Jose, CA.” I held up the issue with Page on the cover so I could meditate on the beginning and the end of Guitar Player magazine, the Alpha and the Omega, as the Ancients would say. I was a traveler of both time and space, to be where I had been.

There should be a plaque in front of this address noting the history of Guitar Player. The ghost of Bud Eastman demands it.