In 1967, my wife Iris, Babik and I had dinner at Restaurant Lucas on Rue Des Petites Ecuries, which is now a jazz club called The New Morning. After dinner and hours of struggling through my poor French and his not speaking English at all, Babik asked, "Il est possible pour tu a apporter un cadeau, pour instance, un guitar a l'etas unis?"   So he proceeded to open the boot of his car and give me Django's Epiphone.

By the way, when we got to his car, there was a parking violation ticket on it, which I took off and gave to him. He said it was an old one and he put it there himself, so as not to get another where he was parked.

We went back to London and I had friends of mine who ran an electronic representative firm pack the guitar like a piece of equipment for shipment to the United States and left it with them to be shipped. When we returned to our home in Cleveland, Ohio there was no guitar. I waited three months and finally got around to checking the small U.S. Customs office at the Cleveland Airport. They said they had it for three months with no consignee address on it??

I proved it was mine and I asked about duty. They asked where in Europe it was made. I said it was an Epiphone and was manufactured in New York, to which they said, if it's American, there is no duty!! Anyhow, that's the long and short of it. When I had a good look at the guitar I noticed that the fingerboard was rosewood and very grooved and pitted from Django's apparently very heavy finger pressure. If you look at other photos of Django's guitars, you'll notice the heavy wear on the fingerboard.

Also the frets were badly worn. Django's fix for worn grooved frets was to simply move the tailpiece over 1/16th of an inch, so the strings landed on an unused portion of the frets!!  Right away, that sounds like a Gypsy FIX!   The pick-guard was attached at the top next to the end of the fingerboard, but the other end had evidently lost it's support bracket. Django or someone had sawed a one inch thick piece of broomstick, to make a large round wooden washer, and screwed it to top of the guitar and the large end of the pick-guard to it! The neck was terribly warped, too much to even adjust with the truss rod. I didn't want to hang it on the wall, I wanted to play it, so I took the whole instrument apart, re-set the neck, planed the rosewood fingerboard, fitted new frets and two new mother of pearl square fingerboard inlays, did a cutaway on it, rebound the fingerboard , headpiece and body, fitted a second matching pickup with controls, sanded, fine sanded and re-lacquered the whole instrument. Following that, it was playable for the next few months, until the neck warped again and I put it to rest in its' case.

This sounds like a supreme act of vandalism to remove the traces of Django's apparent disregard for the Epiphone instrument and yet it was given so freely by Babik.  Others claim the Django's tour manager bought him a Gibson without a cut out for that tour.

The Epiphone brand was named after Epimanondas Stathopoulo, president of the company and one of the sons of the company founder, Anastasios Stathopoulo. Anastasios was a Greek immigrant and violin maker who came to America in the late 1800's. In 1923 Epi came up with a new name for his company based on a combination of his nickname and the Greek word for sound: "Epiphone." 1924 saw the release of the Epiphone Recording Banjo series. The popular Artist, Bandmaster, Concert, Deluxe, and Emperor banjo models soon followed. By 1928 Epiphone had bought out other banjo manufacturers to keep up with their own expanding business and had changed the company name to the Epiphone Banjo Company. The first production of Epiphone guitars coincided with the stock market crash of 1929, when the banjo boom also went bust. Epiphone Recording Guitars of spruce and laminated maple helped take up the slack for the declining banjo demand.