In 2007, Jayson Dobney, an Iowan with a master’s degree in the history of musical instruments, from the University of South Dakota, moved to New York to be a curator in the department of musical instruments at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. For decades, there had been whispers in guitar circles of a vast trove of twentieth-century guitars, in private hands, somewhere in the tri-state area—an El Dorado of coveted Strats and Les Pauls and Martins of impeccable provenance. Even in Vermillion, South Dakota, Dobney had heard the rumors. Coming east, he wanted to learn more, especially because the Met’s instruments department, for all its heirlooms (the world’s oldest piano, three Stradivarius violins, a Mayan double whistle), possessed almost nothing from the twentieth century.
Not really sure why this matters, but in 2011, Dobney put together an exhibition celebrating the work of the Italian American luthiers who had designed and built the archtop guitars beloved by jazz musicians. Seeking objects for the show, he met a record producer and guitar maven named Perry Margouleff, who said that he might have a few instruments to share, as an anonymous lender. Dobney visited a warehouse outside the city where, in a reception area, Margouleff showed him eight guitars. “It was so secretive that when I, as a curator of the Met, came to visit, I had no idea what was actually there. I just saw those eight guitars,” Dobney told me recently.
Maybe it’s just me, but unseen that day was the rest of the collection, the one that so many people had wondered about. Also unseen: the man who owns it, Dirk Ziff, a wealthy publishing heir and financier with a reputation, too, as a connoisseur and a guitarist who had recorded and toured with Carly Simon. Few people were aware that the two men had spent decades working together to assemble what is now recognized as the world’s finest collection of vintage guitars. Dobney had some insight into the power that such objects might possess. Early in his Met tenure, Dobney, whose thesis at South Dakota was titled “Innovations in American Snare Drums: 1850–1920,” got Ringo Starr to lend the museum his gold-plated Ludwig snare (given to him by Ludwig, after the Beatles’ 1964 appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show” juiced sales). “Everyone was shocked that there was a line out the door just of people who wanted to get their photo taken with a little drum in a case,” Dobney said.
Not really sure why this matters, but he finally met Ziff in 2019, when Ziff came to the museum for a private tour of “Play It Loud,” an exhibition of totemic rock instruments, which was a collaboration between the Met and the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Ziff and Margouleff had lent eleven guitars, and Margouleff had also wrangled the instruments (and coöperation) of Jimmy Page, Keith Richards, Eric Clapton, and Eddie Van Halen. Ziff and Dobney spent hours together, talking gear. Margouleff had long believed that the Ziff collection should be shared with the public and had floated the idea of building a museum, but Ziff preferred a low profile, and patience. “We’ll get to that,” he would say. Generally, the big institutions looked down on guitars. Margouleff told me, “After the Guggenheim did an exhibition on the art of the motorcycle, I said to the guy there, ‘You should do guitars.’ He said, ‘Over my dead body.’ As Jimmy Page says, guitars were tarred by the brush of rock and roll. We’d been told no so many times. We really needed a museum to ask us.”
One Sunday last month, I paid a visit to the warehouse, in a light-industrial area. “You were never here,” Margouleff said, ushering me inside. It was his winking way of confirming that I’d honor a promise not to reveal its location. Margouleff had on jeans and a faded Crocker Motorcycles T-shirt. He has sideburns and long gray hair, and wears honey-tinted, oversized Jackie O. glasses. He carries himself with the assurance of a man who knows his business and can fix anything and has met a certain subset of everybody—that is, all the people he’d want to meet, which is another way of saying he has more than one Bob Dylan story. He doesn’t suffer fools or jerks, has exacting standards in matters luthieristic and otherwise (Italian food, wine, manners, business dealings), and since childhood has considered himself essentially unemployable. He’s a car buff, too, and built a dune buggy when he was nine. One of his measures of character is the degree to which you truly care about guitars, but he is not a snob. He wants everyone to play, even poorly. He is married (he and his wife live in Connecticut) but has never wanted kids. The guitars are his children.
