Charlie's guitar

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Charlie's guitar

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First Introduced

"House of the Rising Sun"

Owned by

Charlie

Found by

Was bought by Charlie

Used by

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Charlie playing his guitar ("Live Together, Die Alone")

Charlie plays bass guitar for the group, Drive Shaft but also plays and writes songs on the acoustic guitar. After Flight 815, he believes that he lost his guitar somewhere in the wreckage. At the same time, he battles heroin addiction. Locke confronts him about this drug problem, ("House of the Rising Sun"), and asks him if he will make a symbolic trade for the last of his drugs for the guitar. He asks Charlie if he will "Look up", to which Charlie believes he means if he will pray. Locke repeats this, and when Charlie looks up, he finds that his guitar is hanging off a tree branch, having fallen with a number of the other items in the cargo compartment, but is undamaged. The guitar is an Ovation, which features a rounded plastic-backed shell.

Charlie can be seen in numerous following episodes playing his guitar. However, he continues to battle drug addiction when he finds the Virgin Mary statues (until he throws them out to sea).

Charlie goes on a mission with Desmond, Hurley, and Jin and brings his guitar despite the possibility and eventual reality that it starts raining. When Desmond saves Charlie from one of Danielle's traps, the arrow which Desmond originally had a flash of piercing Charlie through the neck, pierces the neck of his guitar instead, rendering it unplayable. ("Catch-22")

Trivia

Charlie's "sticker" Guitar in Desmond's flashback in "Flashes Before Your Eyes"

A sticker shown in "Greatest Hits" reads "I was here moments ago."

Charlie's guitar is an Ovation, which is made from synthetic materials. The bowl-shaped back of the body is Lycrachord (a substance having similar properties to plastic) and the top is HPL (high pressure laminate), which is basically wood chips pressed together under extreme pressure. The neck and fret board are also HPL, so water and humidity changes wouldn't affect the guitar itself. It's unknown how the metal strings are still in such great shape after being on a deserted island for 2 and a half months, although Charlie's guitar case may have kept the strings in good condition or may have had additional sets of strings in it.
In Desmond's flashback in "Flashes Before Your Eyes", Charlie is seen playing a different, similar colored guitar covered in stickers on the street in London, playing "Wonderwall". The same event is shown (sans Desmond) in "Greatest Hits", but in this version Charlie tilts the guitar slightly differently to show a sticker that reads "I was here moments ago," a reference to Desmond's lucid flashback.
The construction of the guitar prop with the embedded arrow for "Catch-22" by prop master Rob Kyker is described in a featurette "Lost in a Day" on the Lost: The Complete Third Season (DVD).