THE GUITAR LES NEVER LIKED?
It was destined to become more famous than the man himself, but what did Les really think of the Gibson Les Paul guitar?
Try any signature model guitar today and you’ll notice almost all of them have a few (what we might politely call) idiosyncratic features. Of course, these are precisely what the signature player has requested. To the rest of us, however, that fretless fingerboard, five-pickup layout, or speckled vermilion crossbones finish might seem, at best, odd and, at worst, completely mad.
Bear that in mind, and the story of the original Gibson Les Paul begins to make more sense. Les was just like any of us: he wanted his guitar to be personal, to work for him. He just happened to be a bit handier with the toolkit than most. We spoke to Les, in 2008: “I had in mind a
“I was cutting them up and modifying the pickups, bridges, controls, and just about everything else. All the things that I wanted just gave them a lot of grey hairs up there at Gibson” les paul
guitar that sustained and reproduced the sound of the string with nothing added: no distortion, no change in the response.” That was Les talking to me about his frustration with the hollowbody electrics of the 30s and 40s, and the way they suffered from feedback and poor tone.
“I wanted the string to do its thing,” he explained. “No top vibrating, no added enhancement – either advantageous or disadvantageous. I wanted to be sure that you just plucked the string and that’s what you heard. That was my whole idea. So I just went on my way.” Les continued to go his own way throughout his life and nowhere was he more obstinate and self-assured than with his beloved guitars.
Early on, in 1946 or so, Les punted one of his experimental electrics to the Gibson company. It was the Log, or the Clunker, or some other name Les liked the sound of. Whatever the name, he’d lashed together a peculiar workhorse. The body had a solid-wood centre, and he’d hacked two sides from an archtop and attached them, so it at least looked like a guitar.
To Gibson, Les was just another mad musician with a strange idea. The local paper ran a story about this trend, how Gibson had files and files of crazy ideas from outsiders – enough “to create the combined pandemonium of a four-alarm fire, dog fight, curfew chorus, and mouse-frightened female”. Among them was Les’s oddball semi-solid electric guitar. And then Fender happened.
Playing caTch-uP
Gibson needed to design its own solidbody electric to compete with the upstart Telecaster and company boss Ted McCarty had a lightbulb moment. He thought of Les Paul. Not as a guitar designer, but as the famous guitarist who’d just scored a massive number one pop hit with How High The Moon.
Ted had his team design a Gibson solidbody electric and then went off to find Les and make what we’d recognise today as an endorsement deal. The Gibson Les Paul of 1952 was the first modern signature model electric guitar.
Once the new Goldtop started to come off Gibson’s line, Ted sent Les his samples. Almost immediately Les set to work, hacking them up to his own requirements. Gibson’s team had designed the Les Paul for their own purposes: to appeal to as many players as possible. Les, however, wanted a guitar that worked for him.
Any photograph you see of Les playing Les Pauls in the 50s (and later) shows clearly that he had his own ideas about what a solidbody electric guitar should be – usually contrary to Gibson’s ideas. Gibson made some of Les’s personal instruments, especially the Customs, with flat tops rather than the production carved tops, or with fewer than the four standard control knobs.
And still Les nearly always modified them in some way. He might wire in a Gretsch pickup instead of the original P-90. Or perhaps he’d install a crude vibrato in place of the bridge. How about replacing Gibson’s gold knobs with chicken-head ones?
Les had fun with tools. “In the 1950s, Gibson was shooting guitars to me all the time,” he said, “and I was still cutting them up and modifying the pickups, bridges, controls and just about everything else. All the things that I wanted just gave them a lot of grey hairs up there at Gibson.”
You’ll know the story about Gibson dumping the original Les Paul models and replacing them with the SGs – and at first Gibson called them Les Pauls. Les didn’t much care for this. He didn’t like the shape, the horns, the cutaway, and the neck was too skinny. He posed with them in official 1960s Gibson promo shots and on the cover of his album Les Paul Now, yet when he played the occasional live appearance, he’d still use his old-style Gibson Les Pauls – modified and muckedabout-with to suit. By 1963, Les Paul’s name was gone from the new models and they continued officially as SGs.
Later in the sixties, Gibson relented and reissued the original single-cut Les Pauls, because Eric, Jimmy, Peter and the rest had shown just what they could do. Gibson also decided to produce some new Les Paul models that were much closer to the guitars that Les liked to play. These were the Professional and the Personal.
One of Les’s out-of-step preferences was for low-impedance pickups. He was pretty much on his own. Most electric guitars and guitar-related equipment were (and still are) high-impedance. Low-impedance offers wide-ranging tone, but that’s not necessarily to everyone’s taste.
MASS APPEAL
When Les went to Gibson in 1967 to discuss the reissues, he talked with passion about his low-impedance pickups and how Gibson should use them. Remarkably, he convinced them to go ahead. The Personal was, as the name implied, like one of Les’s own modified Les Paul guitars, right down to the strange microphone socket on the body.
Both the Professional and Personal had complex controls, and you couldn’t help but think they were built for recording engineers rather than guitarists. There was an 11-position Decade control “to tune high frequencies”, a three-position tone selector to create various in and out-of circuit mixes, and a pickup phase switch. The Personal even provided a volume control for that handy mic input.
The Personal and Professional were not successful and didn’t last long. Nor did the similar Recording models. The commercial lesson for Gibson was clear: make the Les Paul models that players want, not the ones that Les himself wants.
Les continued to modify and rewire and retrofit and generally fiddle with all his guitars, most of which no one else saw. Sometimes, those who went to see him live were treated to what he called The Les Paulverizer. This was something like the Les Paul Personal, only even more, er, personal. It had the low-impedance pickups, of course, plus a bank of knobs and an onboard tape-loop controller that he’d use to wow the audience with as Les conjured an approximation of his famous overdubbed guitar sound onstage.
When I last spoke to Les in 2008 and asked him what he’d like Gibson to change on the current Les Pauls, he said. “Oh gee, when you’ve got a classic like this, I don’t think I’d have done it any differently. But there were a lot of little things I fought for and never got, things probably that were more important, small things. Not that there was anything wrong with the guitar we had then. We’ve just learned over the years how to make them even better.”