Custom Credentials

Joe talks through his new model’s inspiration

The Les Paul Custom surfaced in mid1954 and introduced the game-changing tune-o-matic bridge. Of course, that was pre-humbucker, so the P-90 soapbar at the bridge was joined by the Alnico V ‘staple’ at the neck. The sales line was “The Fretless Wonder – the incomparable Les Paul Custom guitar”. Originally, the all-black-finished Custom, aka the ‘Black Beauty’, was all Honduran mahogany with no maple top, and an ebony fingerboard. The three-pickup version was introduced late in 1957, effectively the same guitar but this time with the famous trio of gold-plated covered PAFs.

The Epiphone follows that style based on Joe Bonamassa’s ’58 model – “all nine and a half pounds of it,” he quips to Gibson’s Mark Agnesi in a recent walkthrough of his fabled Nerdville East HQ in Nashville – and a relatively new addition to his ever-growing collection, purchased at Hauer Music in Centerville,

Ohio, apparently.“This one here was a candidate because it’s not mint,” says Joe. “The neck was over-sprayed on the back because it had worn out and people clearcoat them sometimes. I got this guitar at the right price to do what I needed to do to make it a super-playable instrument.”

It needed refretting, too, says Joe: “The ‘Fretless Wonder’ thing worked at the time for the kinda music Les [Paul] wanted to play on it – super fast, no bends. But if you’re bending on it, it doesn’t work.”

“It was not mint… I got this guitar at the right price to do what I needed to do to make it a super-playable instrument”

The other oddity you’ll find on Joe’s ’58 model is the way that, in the centre position of the toggle switch, the middle pickup was voiced with the bridge pickup to create what Gibson stated at the time was a sound “for extreme highs and special effects”. Joe explains: “The middle and bridge pickups when voiced together are severely out of phase – not even cool outof-phase but severely tinny, unplayable. So what you do is you flip the magnet on the [middle] PAF to get them all going in the same direction and it kinda sounds like a SuperStrat, you know?”

The model lasted until its SG-style makeover in 1961, after which numerous greats wielded this different-sounding Les Paul. We’re talking Eric Clapton,Jimmy Page, Keith Richards, even Danny Gatton – and not forgetting Peter Frampton, of course, whose Custom was originally a ’54 routed for three humbuckers.