I just typed out a huge story about my dad's friend being given a check for 10,000 dollars by David Gilmore, but the forum screwed up and ate it. Long story short, my dad's friend, a homeless drifter, was playing guitar outside of some music hall when a guy comes out and tells him that he's really good, one of the best lefthanded guitar players he's met. But his guitar is all broken and ruined; he traveled cross country without a dime, from Boston to the west coast, and the thing was ten years old. The guy comments that he ought to be playing a much nicer guitar then that. So my father's friend makes a remark about how he's been living day to day for years, and they talk about how he was from Boston originally, and he makes a comment that he'd love this left-handed Martin back in Boston but he never even had close to the 9000 bucks they wanted for it.
Martin, for those of you who don't know, is a company that makes extremely high end acoustic guitars; left-handed guitars were MUCH harder to come by in the time before the internet, too. So that is why the damn thing was so expensive.
The guy says, "You know what?"
He pulls out a checkbook, writes a check, and shakes Bobby's hand with it. He says "Do the right thing" and then gets in the limo. Bobby looks at the check and, in his own words, "almost **** a lung" when he saw it was for $10,000 dollars--and the signature on it was "David Gilmour." (don't know if I spelled that right)
He loved pink floyd like all my dad's friends--he'd played mostly pink floyd songs, which is what he was doing when the guy took notice of him supposedly. I wouldn't believe a damn word of this story except for the fact that I met this guy Bobby, because the first thing he did was cash that check the minute the banks opened and bought himself a bus ticket cross country back here. He went and bought that damn guitar and still has it to this day.
He came back to find his girlfriend had gotten married and it kind of sucked because he was going to try and get his old life back like it was before he went and became a drifter. So he went off again but this time he was less crazy about it, he has some dayjob in Western Mass now waiting tables at a steakhouse. Sometimes he gets in contact with my dad and they jam together--and yes, he is using that same Martin left-hander. I wouldn't really even believe the story if it wasn't for the fact that I saw the guitar itself.
I don't know if the story is true or not. Either way they guy must have done something BIG to have gone from homeless drifter to homeless drifter with super rare guitar on his back. The guy was always a little weird but for some reason I believe the story, and so does my dad--after all, we've seen the guitar, and my dad swears it was that same one he always wanted when they were younger. Plus he was somehow able to afford to live in a hotel for almost a month when he first came back.
No one will ever know the truth but if it is true David Gilmour may very well have saved Bobby's life. I went to high school with his daughter and didn't even know it--he would have never even known he had a daughter if he hadn't come back to town to buy that guitar.
Funny how things work out, either way.