An associate at work wanted to buy a new Fender MIM Deluxe 60's Strat and mentioned he was selling his Epi Casino. When he told me it was 'just a couple of years old', even though I've wanted one of these reissues of the guitar that McCartney bought first which then led to Lennon & Harrison getting them in '64, I was only curious. Since Gibson opened their Gibson China factory in '03, and they'd severed ties with Samick/Korea, and the newer Chinese-build Casinos and acoustics I'd seen at a local dealer were kinda slipshod in fit & finish, I wasn't expecting much.

But when I stopped by after work to check it out, I was pleasantly surprised to find it in pristine shape. He prefers to play with a load of overdrive and distorition, and being a hollow body (not a semi-hollow like a Dot or other 335 types), he hated the Casino's propensity to feed back at high volume, so he didn't gig with it. He'd also gotten an SKB thermo-molded case for it.

Then, from its serial number that even though an '05, the 'R' at the head of the s/n revealed this one to be made August '05 in Korea by Peerless (formerly the Aria factory.

So I jumped on it: