au revoir (revisited)

"Peter Frampton has been reunited with the Gibson electric guitar he played on Frampton Comes Alive, three decades years after it was presumed destroyed in a plane crash.
     It turns out the guitar did not burn up in November 1980 when a cargo plane crashed on takeoff in Caracas, Venezuela, on its way to Panama, where Mr. Frampton was to perform. Instead someone plucked it from the burning wreckage and later sold it to a musician on the Dutch Caribbean island of Curaçao. [...]
     Last month, the tourist board official, Ghatim Kabbara, bought the guitar with public funds and traveled to Nashville to hand it to Mr. Frampton in a tattered gig bag. Mr. Frampton said he knew as soon as he picked the instrument up that it was the same 1954 Gibson Les Paul with customized pickups that he had played for a decade. It was an emotional moment, he said.
     'For 30 years, it didn’t exist – it went up in a puff of smoke as far as I was concerned,' Mr. Frampton said in a telephone interview.
     Mr. Frampton said he was given the guitar by a man named Mark Mariana in 1970. Mr. Frampton had been playing with his band Humble Pie at the Fillmore West in San Francisco, and he borrowed the guitar from Mr. Mariana for a show because his own instrument kept feeding back when he soloed. He fell in love with it. Made of Honduran mahagony, it was light in his hands, and the neck was thin, the fretting action light, suiting his small hands. 'I used it for both sets and my feet didn’t touch the ground,' he recalled. saying he thought, 'This is the best guitar I have ever played.'
— James C. McKinley Jr., The New York Times
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