rock solid

Take a piece of 4 x 4, attach sides, strings, a bridge and a pickup. This is the future of rock ’n’ roll – anyone interested?

Try to imagine, if you can, going to see the world’s most respected telephone company, around 20 years ago. You hand them a crude piece of plastic with an aerial sticking out of the top and say, ‘Hey, I’ve designed this thing called a mobile telephone, and everyone is going to come to rely on one before you know it’. After they stop laughing under their breath, they thank you for your interest in their company and send you on your way. So it was for Les Paul and the solidbody guitar in the mid-1940s.

GoinGelecTric

Gibson wasn’t averse to the electric guitar per se – the company introduced its first electric way back in 1935 with the metal-bodied E-150 Hawaiian guitar – but the solidbody was a totally different matter. In Gibson’s view, guitar making was high craftsmanship where traditional principles reigned supreme. As it happened, Gibson employee Walt Fuller designed the pickup that began it all, after being told to emulate Rickenbacker’s horseshoe design of 1932. The E-150 had a small, cast-aluminium body and Gibson later applied for a patent that, at its essence, negated the guitar’s body, relying solely on the electric pickup for sound.

“Walt was the one they chose to be in charge of the electric guitar,” Les told us earlier this year. “He went over to the library and I went with him. He had always worked with wood and he didn’t know anything about electronics, so that whole thing had to start from scratch: from the beginning. That was back in the early thirties.”

Fitting Fuller’s new pickup to a regular archtop, the 1936 ES-150 was born, the first commercially significant nonHawaiian-style electric guitar. Given both the EH and ES models’ success, quite how it took another decade-and-a-half for the electric solidbody to emerge is anyone’s guess, not least Les, whose early experiments had convinced him a solid body was the way forward.

By 1939 the electric guitar was gaining popularity. Les was a noted player himself who by that time and had met the electric instrument’s leading exponent, Charlie Christian – guitarist with the Benny Goodman band – at a Gibson clinic, surely firing his belief in the electric guitar’s future. As his career progressed and he had greater access to materials and equipment, Les’s experiments were many and varied. The most notorious and well documented was the Heath-Robinsonstyle contraption known affectionately as The Log, taken to Gibson as early as 1946, but rejected. It was a 4 x 4-inch piece of pine with the sides of an Epiphone archtop bolted on. To Les the premise was simple, as he explained to us in early 2009.

“I thought, I’ve got to go to something not heavy, but that’s very dense, very sturdy, that’s going to sustain the sound, and it’s gotta be something you love when you hold it, and immediately thought of something like a woman! Instead of an ironing board or a stick of wood with string on it, it would say something cosmetically as well as musically.”

The plank Takes off

Les’s latter-day memories were no doubt coloured by history and most likely extrapolated by legend, not least the differing account of who was actually responsible for the eventual Gibson Les Paul solidbody design. One account says it was all Les, the other suggests a stronger guiding hand from Gibson – notably 1950-1966 president Ted McCarty.

“I may have gone through at least 11 presidents and 10 years of trying to convince Gibson they should make this solidbody electric guitar,” Les told us. “For 10 years, when I wasn’t around, they would talk about the character with the broomstick with pickups on it… They made fun of it and didn’t take it seriously. It wasn’t until 1950/51, until I talked to Maurice Berlin and he was chairman of the board and he ran the whole Chicago Musical Instrument company, which included Gibson. He gave me full reign to do what I wished to do, and then came in the different presidents of Gibson and there were a lot of them. Some of them were not as good as others, some of them were just great.”

Whatever the minutiae, the cold fact is that Gibson’s reluctance to accept the solidbody electric guitar as a serious musical instrument let a certain Clarence Leo Fender in the door with his rudimentary Broadcaster in 1950. Gibson initially mocked it as the plank, but soon took notice as its popularity took hold. It was time to call that character with the broomstick – turn the page to see what happened next…