My Eko (“eeko”) breathed its last yesterday.
I’ve had only one guitar since college. My roommate Alan Behn sold me his Eko when I was a freshman (1973) and he taught me a basic fingerpicking pattern for folk music. I had been a rock & roller and had an old Gibson Melody Maker, which wasn’t useful to me any more. I paid $50 for the Eko and sold the Gibson for $50 to a friend in Houston. I considered it an even swap. You should search for “gibson melody maker” on eBay now. 😀
The Eko Ranger VI is built like a locomotive. It weighs a lot more than today’s guitars and is probably harder to destroy. Modern instruments sound better, though. The finish on mine has cracked a lot through the decades, so it’s fairly ugly when you catch it in the light just right. The pick guard had warped and fallen off years ago and my kids got tired of looking at the old glue (daughter said she thought it was jelly when she was a child) and they snuck it to a tech and had a new pick guard made for it one Christmas. Another Christmas my wife bought a decent case to replace my pasteboard one that had been ruined since traveling with a drama ministry in 1975. The thing has purtnere been through the war.
The bridge plate has been trash for years. Half of the strings were held in by passing numerous safety pins through the ball ends and then feeding the string up from inside the body. (Safety pins are made of hard, somewhat inflexible steel.) The bridge itself had various shims here and there, elevating the saddle and keeping it propped in a more-or-less vertical orientation. This probably contributed to the bridge cracking yesterday — it just split at the two ends of the saddle.
I’ve had the bridge unglued and reinstalled before and it’s just too much trouble to go through again for an instrument that’s on life support already. So now I’m in the market for another guitar.
The Eko never gave up in the forty years I’ve played it. The top stayed flat; the neck stayed straight; the rosewood fingerboard still looks good; the tone stayed true; the finish (albeit cracked) still shines like new, despite decades of travel and performing.
If someone wanted to repair and refinish this guitar, there’s no telling how many decades of life it still has. But a guy like me has no business investing the requisite hours and dollars to curate an artifact from the ’70s.
Thanks, Eko; it’s been great. I don’t wanna see you go, but you’d better go now.