Lace Music Products | Since 1979

Guitarist Makes Amazing Find - His Lace Helix!

2009-04-20

By Glenn Barr
Photo by Jayson Burke

Gone today, here tomorrow.

Rock musician and Lake Arrowhead Internet guitar store owner Bruce Martinelli (Aamp's Electric Guitar Store) was all smiles on Wednesday, thrilled to reverse the word order in the old clich/, as what he thought on Tuesday would be a $10,000 loss had been restored to him.

Martinelli, the 54-year-old lead guitarist of the rock band Nothing Matters, learned on Sunday morning that his car, a 1999 Ford Expedition, had been stolen from the Rite Aid parking lot in Blue Jay, where he’d left it the night before.

He filed a stolen-car report at the Twin Peaks sheriff’s station and began looking around, driving his other car through the Lake Arrowhead area, hoping against hope to find the vehicle and its contents.

Inside the green SUV, he said, he’d left a brand new Lace limited-edition electric guitar, worth about $900. As a guitar dealer, he’d been able to purchase only the fourth guitar of that particular model to be produced, and believes its value will increase over time because of its early position on Lace’s assembly line.

Also in the vehicle were his amplifier, a gig bag full of cords and other performance paraphernalia, and a full-length down coat, valued at $200, belonging to his girlfriend, Suzanne Granger, he said.

Counting the approximately $7,500 value of the vehicle, Martinelli was trying to resign himself to a loss of $10,000. He visited the offices of The Mountain News midday on Tuesday to recount his experience and ask for the newspaper’s help in recovering the stolen goods.

As things turned out, however, he didn’t need our ink to reverse his fortune, because on one of his forays into the forest later in the afternoon he spotted his missing SUV, parked at the unpaved end of Longview Drive, just off Five Points in Blue Jay.

Inside, he said, were virtually all the missing items, with the exception of Suzanne’s wallet, which had contained only about $12.

“I’m so lucky,” a relieved Martinelli said on Wednesday morning. “I thought somebody might have played a joke on me, or had gone for a joyride.”

After filing his sheriff’s report, Martinelli took matters into his own hands. “We were aggressively looking around,” he said. “I have a map, and we were going up and down every road, looking for it,” he said.

His search produced one moment marked by embarrassment. “We found a car that looked just like mine,” he said, right down to the color. It even had the same three letters on its license plate. When he tried to open the vehicle, he said, it set off the alarm, raising his concern that its owners might call authorities and report their car was being stolen.

At one point, he said, he spotted a California Highway Patrol tow truck on Highway 18, hauling away a vehicle closely resembling his.

Martinelli said he and Suzanne obtained a replacement driver’s license for her on Tuesday, and he replaced his cell phone on Monday, so now he has two.

Had the guitar, amplifier and gig bag not been recovered, Martinelli could have replaced them from his own Internet store’s stock. But there would have been no immediate hurry, he said, because Nothing Matters as a group has no gigs coming up soon although some members will be performing at the Earth Day on the Mountain event on April 18.

Last May 9, the popular group performed on Center Stage in Lake Arrowhead Village, and performed at summer’s end at a benefit concert for Operation Provider.

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