When I was a lad, an STP sticker was just about the coolest thing ever. Mario Andretti had just won the Indy 500 in the STP-sponsored car and that we all wanted to put that oval black and red sticker on everything. But in those days, the marketing people hadn’t yet caught on to the mega-low-cost of creating a demand for people who want to emblazon everything with their logo. You practically had to be a professional racer to find an STP or yellow Pennzoil sticker. So, of course 11 year old boys wanted them – bad.
I would hound my dad every time we bought gas to inquire about STP stickers. In those days, folks didn’t pump their own gas, so I had to goad Dad into making the inquiry as the attendant handed him the receipt for the fill-up. It put my Dad in a rough spot – no way could he appear to act like a 11 year old kid, so he’d say to the attendant, “Oh, by the way, do you have any of those….” – big pause here as he put a look of disgust on his face – “STP sticker things?”. Sometimes they had them – usually they didn’t.
Soon afterwards, the marketing gurus realized the demand for stickers and what a cheap form of branding it represented, and they became ubiquitous. You could buy whole sheets of stickers and a book to put them in. Putting stickers in a book? That’s so lame!
No, stickers go on things! School binders, inside your locker, on the cigar box you keep your matchbook collection in, car bumpers, toolboxes, tackle boxes, workbenches. Later on, every fridge we had in our bachelor pads were covered in stickers.
And…beginning about the same time – luggage. I always liked the look of well-traveled luggage and it was a cliché that luggage would have stickers from the various places it had been. And, folks, aren’t instrument cases luggage too? Yes, indeed! So all my guitar cases were festooned extravagantly with stickers. When those stickers wore out, I put stickers over the stickers. When the cases wore out I bought new cases and put stickers on those, too.
I did feel, at first, like I was just being sensible. If you’re gigging a lot, you want your case to be easily distinguished from all the other cases. (If people want to be impressed by all the places you’ve been and all the stickers you have, that’s OK too.)
I have learned something though – actually a couple of things. First of all, I’m not the first genius to come up with this method of distinguishing my instrument case from all the others. Secondly, eventually, all stickered covered cases pretty much look the same. Even though the stripes on a zebra or spots on a leopard may be as individual as fingerprints, it’s not that easy to tell one zebra or leopard from others of its kind. And so it is with instrument cases.
It doesn’t matter – that was just an excuse. I just like the casual chaos of a riot of stickers on my cases. I’m not changing. If I’m lucky, it’ll totally go out of style and I will have a unique looking case!
