RITCHIE BLACKMORE A 'Distressed' Strat Body (I'm not quite sure where to start on this, but I'll have a go. It is well known that the ex-Deep Purple guitarist had a fondness for Strat abuse and then attempting to brain a member of the public by throwing the remains of the poor unfortunate guitar out to be ravenously devoured by the audience. I suppose you had two choices, a lump on the head & coma or catch the damn thing as it whizzed towards you. One such piece is this, caught beautifully & without personal injury by a member of the audience at the aptly named Rainbow Theatre in London on the 'Rainbow Rising' tour, after Ritchie destroyed the guitar he was playing during the encore & threw the bits into the crowd. I'm kind of surprised that it's a wobbly three bolt microtilt, but then I don't suppose you really want to demolish that pre-CBS Strat, do you ? This piece of volcanic ejectamenta is approximately half of the cream body of a seventies three bolt neck Strat. By some miracle, the tailpiece, tremolo arm and the ends of the strings have survived, along with the ENTIRE leather strap that is bolted to the back & the horn very securely. Naturally enough, the guitar has split along its weakest points, these being the routing areas for the pickups [missing], volume & tone pots [missing] and the neck [missing]. What's kind of cool is that the entire strap is still attached, all the string tails are still in the block & the Fender plate with serial number 677923 is still on the back. This comes with a letter of provenance from the agile person who actually caught this flying lump of Strat debris, signed and dated, stating what it is & a copy of the Christies catalogue from 1997 where it was previously marketed, along with the 'Lot 23' tag dated 4th Sept 1997. As a piece of memorabilia, it doesn't come much better than this. YOU could actually own a piece of the guitar destroyed by Ritchie Blackmore himself, onstage with Rainbow at The Rainbow, still fitted with the strings he played during the encore, the tremolo arm he used and the strap that kept it on his body until such time as he decided to break it. A fantastic item. A one of a kind, never to be repeated, offer as this is one of one!)