This is the first of DAVID TURNBULL’s series of profiles on Canberrans with a story. This week, meet guitar tragic Ian Stehlik.

Ian Stehlik and Simon Wilkins share a passion for guitars. Not just what they sound like. What they look like and how they’re made. And the older they are, the better.

Ian and Simon are joint directors at Capital Vintage Guitars – a hobby turned business that sells vintage guitars and amps online.

“The first rudimentary electric guitars appeared in 1932, but acoustic guitars date back to Spain in the 16th century,” Ian says.

“There’s vintage and there’s vintage, of course, and for some time now the major guitar companies have been making modern reissues of their vintage models, but we tend to focus on items made before 1980.”

Ian’s guitar journey started as a teenager in Adelaide in the 1960s when he heard The Beatles and the Rolling Stones on 5KA.

“My dad bought a pub and there was a music shop across the road.

“I walked in there one day and there was a guy named Tony Faehse playing guitar. He had long hair and to a sheltered Adelaide Boys High kid like me that seemed exotic.

“I just loved the sound of the instrument and started lessons the next week.”

At 17, Ian applied for and got an American Field Service Scholarship that took him to San Francisco and then to Wausau in Wisconsin.

“School was a huge culture shock. No uniforms, kids with long hair. And girls!” he says.

“I was billeted with a conservative family like my own, but I always made friends with people who were into the same music as me, music by Elmore James and Muddy Waters.

“We’d jam together and go to shows in Chicago. 

“I remember seeing Muddy Waters pull up in a Lincoln Continental one night with all his amps in the back.

“Kids I was in class with had been to Woodstock the previous summer. It was another world and the music of the era filled my head.”

Desperate to buy an electric guitar, Ian mowed lawns on weekends, saved up and bought a Gibson Melody Maker for $140 – an instrument that still looks brand new.

When he returned home, he stopped going to Adelaide Boys High, finished school from home, and then – over the next 10 years paid his rent by playing in bands with his younger brother, Tom.

Along the way, his passion for guitars broadened.

“It wasn’t just the playing, I wanted to learn how to make guitars sound better, how to do basic repairs. How to look after them,” Ian says.

He also started dabbling in buying and selling, picking up guitars with minor defects from the classifieds in the local paper and repairing them.

With a degree in psychology and a master of business administration, work brought Ian to Canberra in the 1990s.

And that’s when he met Simon Wilkins.

“We played music together and joked about setting up some sort of business trading vintage instruments,” he says.

“It was all just talk back then, but when the kids grew, and left home, we got serious.”

It’s a perfect partnership. Ian knows guitars, and Simon knows amps. Moreover, Simon is an IT professional and got the Capital Vintage Guitars website humming. 

“This guitar thing is a lot more than just a hobby,” says Ian.

“Guitar people are a different breed. Of course they play, but they’re interested in lots more – the history of the instruments, who played them, all that stuff.

“Yes, we sell. The real joy, though, is finding old guitars and amps that might be tucked away in cupboards. We become custodians for a time and then find them a new home.

“Matching this guitar with the right person… that’s the most enjoyable thing.

“Matchmaking!”

Journalist David Turnbull is writing a series of profiles about interesting Canberrans. Do you know someone we’ve never heard of? Share the name in an email to David via editor@citynews.com.au