The Story Behind Minnesota’s Enormous 72-Foot Backyard Guitar

Guitars are the epitome of cool, so when I saw there was a giant guitar poured into someone’s backyard in a northern Twin Cities suburb, I had to know the story.

ALSO INTERESTING: Secret 1800s Cemetery Is All That’s Left of a Vanished Minnesota Ghost Town

Get our free mobile app

Minnesota Man Built a Giant Concrete Guitar in His Backyard You Can See From the Sky

Minnesota already has some tributes to its music legends with Prince’s Paisley Park in Chanhassen and Bob Dylan Way in Duluth, and now, tucked away in Blaine (just north of Minneapolis), one man decided his yard needed its own rock ’n’ roll monument: a concrete guitar so big you can see it from an airplane.

And yes, it’s exactly as wild as it sounds.

From above, it looks like a Les Paul fell from the heavens and landed perfectly between the trees and a pond. On the ground, it’s a 72-foot-long, 22-foot-wide concrete creation…with a fire pit where the pickups should be, because why not?

WCCO found the man behind it, a lifelong music fan and former frontman of an ’80s band called Bad Credit, Erik Lund.

Lund told WCCO he traced one of his own guitars, dug up the yard, and worked with a local construction company to fill it with concrete. And just like that, his unusual idea became a Minnesota backyard landmark.

At first, it was his little secret; even his neighbors had no clue. But once Zillow and Apple Maps aerial images picked it up, and it landed on the Quirky Minnesota Places Facebook page, the mystery guitar went viral.

Some people even speculated that Dylan himself might live there. Lund just laughed. “I made a couple of comments on there saying, Oh yeah, it doesn’t really belong to anybody famous,” he told WCCO.

READ MORE: Mysterious Concrete Structures On The Side of a Minnesota Hwy Have a Secret Past

And that’s the beauty of it. Lund didn’t build the guitar for attention; he built it as a tribute to the music and musicians he loves. “It is different, and if somebody sees it, they are going to go Wow, that is different,” he told WCCO.

So the next time you’re flying into the north metro, forget counting lakes. Look down. Somewhere in Blaine, there’s a giant guitar big enough to make every wannabe rocker, myself included, nod in approval.