DEAN GUITARS: On The Road To Ruin

all right guys welcome back to the guitar max channel okay so over the last several years almost all of the major endorsing artists of dean guitars have stopped working with the company guys like michelangelo badio rusty cooley dave mustain matt heffy jackie vincent vinnie moore they have all stopped working with the company now add to this that there is an ongoing lawsuit between gibson and dean and another lawsuit between dean and rita haney on behalf of dimebag daryl's estate and dynavik daryl had arguably the most iconic and famous signature guitars from dean and with the loss of all of those guitars those sales from the lineup plus some insider information that i'm going to share with you in this video i think altogether we are seeing the once mighty brand of dean guitars coming to an end okay guys so i've got some articles up here that i'm going to share with you guys i want to go through all of the stuff plus like i said some sort of insider information that some people who are closely connected with dean have told me personally and all of this stuff together leads me to believe that dean guitars has a one-way ticket to the dumpster behind guitar center okay first let's talk about the massive exodus of top tier artists endorsing artists from dean guitars in the past few years once upon a time dean guitars had a lot of endorsing artists with signature guitars and that's important because those signature guitars made up a really big chunk of their sales arguably the majority of their sales if you include the dimebag models and some other names that come to mind are guys like rusty cooley dave mustain and michelangelo video because they all had signature guitars that sold really well now the key here is that elliott rubinson who was the former owner of dean guitars he was the guy who had really established all of these relationships with the artists elliot had pretty much rebirthed the brand in the early 2000s and under his leadership it had become a major brand once again but elliott died of cancer in 2017 and elliott's son evan essentially inherited the company and it was shortly after that that all of these artists started to leave so with the loss of all of these artists with all these people leaving not only are they losing the promotion that those artists brought to the company but they're also losing all of the sales from the signature guitars that those artists had with dean now to be totally honest and in dean's credit they have brought out some pretty cool regular production models non-signature guitars in the past couple of years although some of them look suspiciously like the rusty coulee models but okay whatever and also they have had one really big name sign on as endorsing artists lately and that has been carrie king from slayer but what's odd about this is that he only signed on with dean after slayer had announced their retirement so that seems sort of anti-climactic okay but now we've got to talk about these lawsuits now i've got these articles up here let's go ahead and check these out now these are from guitar.com and i'm going to have a link in the video description below so you guys can read this on your own here yeah guitar.com dean guitars sued by dimebag girls estate over body shape trademarks and breach of contract let's read here so the estate of dimebag daryl has announced the termination of the late pantera guitarist posthumous endorsement deal with dean guitars and has also filed a lawsuit against dean's parent company armadillo enterprises for allegedly breaching the terms of their contract the suit also accuses the company of filing unauthorized and fraudulent trademark registrations pertaining to the razorback and stealth body shapes so those are the body shapes that are used for some of the dimebag daryl signature guitars okay in a statement posted on dimebag daryl's website the guitarist partner partner rita haney announced the end of the dime estates relationship with dean and then they're quoting her here after much consideration it is with great sadness that i announced the long-standing relationship between dimebag and dean guitars is over she continues unfortunately we were forced to file a lawsuit against dean guitars it was necessary for us to end dime's endorsement of dean guitars to continue to honor and celebrate his legacy the way he deserves and in the way he had laid out they go on to say here and they go on to point this out and this was something that's really interesting that i think sometimes people forget about in terms of the endorsement deal that dime had with dean is that even though people associate the ml body especially indian guitars with dimebag daryl he didn't actually have an endorsement deal with them until much much later in in his career and in fact he signed that endorsement deal just a few weeks before he died so really you know early on he played dean's in the 90s he was playing washburns and then only in the early 2000s did he actually get connected with dean guitars in a business way and that again had a lot to do with elliot rubinson kind of building up the company again in the early 2000s okay now back to this article here they're going to say the suit also claims that dean had filed with co-defendant concordia investment partners for numerous quote unauthorized and fraudulent trademarks for the razorback and stealth body shapes despite the original agreement allegedly stipulating that all designs and trademarks would remain the sole property of dimebag and only giving dean permission to continue using the body shapes after the agreement had ended so basically what they're saying there is that dean guitar's uh was trying to get uh trademarks for the body shapes of the designs the dimebag of the guitars that dimebag had designed and that that dean was never supposed to own those trademarks that all of that sort of intellectual property should have stayed with dimebag or in this case dimebag's estate now a little bit further down in this article uh rita haney goes on to talk a little bit about working with evan rubinson who again is the son of elliot rubinstein evan like i said sort of inherited the company after elliott died and she says here she found it quote incredibly difficult to work with dean ceo evan rubinson and found him to be incredibly disrespectful and often times belligerent to the legacy of dimbag daryl so this lawsuit basically has two big things in it one is that they feel that maybe there is some money that is owed to the dimebag estate that has not been paid from dean guitar so they're asking for a full accounting all the way back to 2004 and then the other thing is this issue of the trademarks where they feel that uh maybe dean guitarist allegedly was trying to own the trademarks uh when they should have the ownership of that should have stayed with dime's estate so it's a really big deal because you know the dean guitars brand has had this agreement with dime's estate for many many years you know more than 15 years long time and and those guitars all of those you know the body shapes and even just the regular ml series signature guitars those have become so associated with gene guitars and it's it's hard to imagine them not being together anymore okay but now that's just one lawsuit that dean guitarist is involved in so let's go ahead and check out the other one also from guitar.com and i will also have a link for this in the video description below gibson sues dean guitars over alleged trademark infringement more trademark problems okay now this this was actually from a while back this has been going on for a while but this lawsuit is still going on they still have not resolved this yet and there's a lot of money at stake here so let's go ahead and take a look at this gibson brands has filed a multi-million dollar lawsuit against the parent company of dean guitars and luna guitars in a texas court the guitar giant that's gibson is alleging trademark infringement trademark counterfeiting unfair competition and trademark dilution on the part of florida-based armadillo distribution enterprises incorporated among other allegations gibson is accusing armadillo and again armadillo is the parent company of dean guitars which also owns drum maker d drum of running a foul of seven of its trademarks these include the body shape design of the flying v the explorer es and sg as well as the dove wing headstock design the hummingbird name and the moderna trademark now obviously gibson has taken a lot of flack for this lawsuit here because the big thing and they pointed out in this article the big thing that's weird about this is that dean guitar says making has been making their guitars for decades with the same body shapes and only now gibson is complaining about it and what's really interesting about this is that gibson really only you know they they really only filed this lawsuit once that big change in management happened where eliot rubinson the former owner died and then his son evan took over right around that same time is when gibson filed this lawsuit now that could be a coincidence and i'm just speculating here but maybe gibson was thinking hey there's a big change going on at dean maybe the company is a little bit unstable maybe now is a good time for us to go in there file this lawsuit and because of all the other changes and the disruption that's going on at dean maybe dean guitars will be more likely to back down and you know give up or lose the lawsuit maybe that's what gibson was thinking and again i'm just speculating i don't really know for sure on that part so aside from both of those really big lawsuits there have been other changes at dean as well so if you've been paying attention the past few years you probably have noticed that dean guitarist has just been much less visible in the industry i think a big part of that is because of all those endorsing artists that left so they're not bringing attention to the company like they used to but then the other part of this is the conventions right like the namm conventions um dean used to have a just like a huge thing you know they had a big booth they would have concerts you know they had the dean girls all this stuff you know these models that were promoting the brand and so forth over the past like three to five years that has dwindled down down down down down to where it's completely gone away in in the last uh the last namm show obviously not last year because it was cancelled but the year before the last namm show dean they barely had a presence at all like you had to go up an elevator and go through a door and say a password and all this stuff and they would have like you know a handful of guitars in there that were like their new models they barely did anything and they haven't been doing much advertising and all of this stuff right so just the overall presence of the company has really been dwindling okay but now let me give you this other information that i want you to consider aside from those articles so i have recently talked to two different people who have intimate knowledge of what's going on at dean guitars and i want to make it clear here i can't tell you who these people are and i cannot prove or disprove this so you can you know at the very least you can consider this stuff as the kind of rumors that are going on around the company but i personally have no reason to not believe these people but again i you know this these are allegedly uh what's going on at the company so one person told me as to why a lot of these former endorsers left the company and and they told me that simply they weren't being paid that dean guitars owed them a lot of money for royalties on these signature guitars and so there were basically you know the artists were supposed to get uh like a percentage of the sales from their signature guitars because their name is attached to it maybe they were involved with the design or something like that and they weren't getting the money they had before but after some changes in the company uh they were not being paid and so this went on and on and they were just kind of being ignored and blown off by the company and so these people left so that's what i heard now the other person told me that uh basically when evan took over the company when he inherited the company after his father's father died in his first week at the company one of the first things he did was he went out and he bought a new lamborghini now don't get me wrong i love lamborghinis i'm hopeful that someday i can afford a fake one at least but i think essentially when he went out and did that as one of his first acts as the new ceo of the company that really rubbed a lot of people the wrong way and that they felt that maybe he didn't have the best interests of the company in mind and uh that he just might not be steering the company in a good way and this same person also told me that just a lot of the things that evan was doing was very very different from the way his father had done them in particular he had hired back several people that his father had fired so that just kind of caused a lot of disruption in the company so again at the very least these are the sort of rumors that are going around with dean guitars it's possible that they're not true i don't really know but it ties in with everything else we're talking about and i wanted to share that with you guys now i think the elephant in the room here is that all of these changes and really all of this trouble started around the time that elliot rubinson died and evan his son evan took over the company now look i don't have a problem with evan rubinson i don't know the guy personally and i'm trying you know try to imagine being in his situation your father dies and then you are essential you know basically that the family company the family business falls on you to take care of i think that guy is probably just in a position that he never wanted to be in maybe never imagined being in you know and suddenly he has all this stuff that he all this responsibility that he never planned to have so look i i have sympathy for that and i think we all should but the bottom line here is that dean guitarist has lost a ton of sales from losing all of these signature models and they've got two major lawsuits if they lose either of these lawsuits that could be enough to sink the company even if they win both lawsuits unless the company can really turn things around and change the direction that they're going in it to me this looks like we're seeing a very slow death of dean guitars okay but now i want to hear from you guys has anybody out there recently purchased a dean guitar is it like a new model i'd love to hear what you guys think about that new stuff because i haven't had a chance to really check out any of the new models from the past couple years so let us know what you think in the comment section below and guys if you enjoy videos like this checking out new guitars and just talking about guitars and you have not already subscribed please consider subscribing right now thanks a ton for watching thumbs up and i'll see you soon [Music] you

Channel: Guitar MAX

Views: 145,748

Keywords: dean guitars, rusty cooley, mab, michael angelo batio, dave mustaine, vinnie moore, kerry king, guitar max, max carlisle, guitar endorsement, signature guitar, jacky vincent, matt heafy

Id: hZBtBSb4bqc

Length: 16min 4sec (964 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 02 2021