Saloon in northeast Las Vegas uses donated instruments to help charities

Every guitar here has a story to tell. The tale of the black Ibanez is written in the luminous scrawl of a silver Sharpie.

“Suicide Prevention,” it reads, along with dozens of signatures all over the body of the instrument, right down to the fretboard.

Mounted on a wall at Saddle ‘N’ Spurs, or SNS, Saloon, a north valley honky-tonk where a cutout of John Wayne keeps watch over the bar, the guitar is more than a guitar: It’s a thing of remembrance, awareness, charity and loss.

“This guy came in and he had lost one of his best buddies to suicide,” SNS owner Bobby Kingston recalls as he explains instrument’s backstory. “He said, ‘I want my friend’s memory to live on through a guitar I donate. Maybe someone will be having a bad day, sitting in a bar, and they’ll look up and see a guitar that has “suicide prevention” on it. It could make somebody think.’”

SNS Saloon houses more than two dozen such instruments, most of them mounted above the bar, all of them covered in signatures, each autograph raising money for a given cause.

The way it works: A patron donates an instrument, designates a charity and then signs it. The instrument is displayed in a temporary spot next to the bar for others to autograph for a minimum of $2, though $5 is the norm.

Once said instrument is full of signatures, the money is collected, Kingston writes a check to the charity and the instrument joins the permanent collection above the bar.

The wide range of instruments includes wide-body acoustic guitars, violins and a flying-V bass donated by a biker club.

Some of them pay tribute to former SNS regulars who passed away; others reflect fundraisers that the bar has held for various causes, such as a benefit for Route 91 Harvest festival victims.

They tend to generate $200 to $900, Kingston says, depending on how many signatures can fit on the instrument.

Kingston, the fourth owner since the bar opened as a blues club in November 1984, began this charity drive in 2016, two years after he and his wife took over the place.

The first instrument, an Ovation Applause acoustic, was provided by the lady serving up beers to a handful of patrons on a Friday afternoon.

“I donated it to go to SafeNest,” bartender Jessi McGill says of the guitar that she and her husband, Chris, provided.

Since then, SNS has raised thousands of dollars for foundations such as the American Cancer Society, Aid for AIDS of Nevada and the National Federation of the Blind.

The bar has collected so many instruments that Kingston soon will be mounting them all over the room, adding signed drum heads as well.

“Eighty percent of these instruments are aimed at a cause because a loved one is gone,” Kingston says. “It’s remembering people.”

Contact Jason Bracelin at jbracelin@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0476. Follow @JasonBracelin on Twitter.