This story originally appeared on Jodi Shapiro's Travis Bean website.

I own two basses, a regular-shaped one with horns and a wedge. I bought the "normal" one through the mail from some guy in texas for $300 including shipping. I thought I was very lucky. turns out, I was even luckier about nine months later. We were on tour in the midwest when I heard about a wedge-shaped bean bass that was hanging on the wall of a malt shop in Kansas City. We happened to be heading in the right direction to stop by K.C., so naturally I had to go check this thing out. I was very excited and schemed at great length about how exactly I was going to get this thing; the friends who told me about it (thank you, Engine Kid) had offered a hundred bucks for it and the boss turned them down, correctly surmising that the bass was worth more.

Anyway, my wife and I devised this plan: we would enter the malt shop like we had just stumbled in to get a shake, she would glimpse this weird instrument on the wall and kind of like it, we would casually ask if it was for sale and if so for how much. She would leave and I would haggle with the owner under the pretense of buying it for my wife as an anniversary present. The key here was to not let the guy know that we knew it was a wildly rare (36 made) guitar.

Well, to make an already long story a little shorter, it worked like a goddamn charm. The bass was stringless, stuck upside down between two garage doors, and covered in grease and dust, not to mention a godawful homebrew metallic blue paint job. Nevertheless, my wife swallowed hard and feigned a modicum of interest in the thing. The guy first said forget it, not for sale, but if it was, it'd cost a lot. I asked him how much a lot was, he said $300, which seems to be the magic number among people who don't really know much about these instruments. Secretly, I rejoiced. We carried out our plan, and I became the proud owner of what after a little cleaning and tweaking has become the best playing and sounding bass guitar I've ever had the pleasure of holding.

A couple months later a friend of Engine Kid's dropped by the malt shop and noted the bass's absence. The owner laughed at how he'd pawned it off on some sucker from Montana for a whole three hundred bucks, but turned a couple different shades of red when the customer filled him in on what it's probably really worth.