of 148 pages Les Pauls
Explore the beauty & heritage of Gibson’s Legendary family of electrics
n o s g i b h
The definitive guide to gibson’s greatest electric guitar
Les paul history prototypes & Rarities goldtops pickups & hardware customs tone tweaks juniors maintenance & Setup Sunburst standards player interviews guitar galleries
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his is the guitar we all wanted to own. Poring over the pages of Guitarist magazine as a teenager it was the images of Les Pauls that I lingered the longest over. Something about this particular model of electric guitar still conjures magic of a unique kind, no matter how many you come into contact with over the years. Why? As always, the music made with this guitar provides the most compelling answer. When you listen to Eric Clapton play Hideaway on the celebrated ‘Beano’ album with the Bluesbreakers, the sound of his Sunburst Les Paul Standard through an absolutely cranked Marshall combo is the very essence of all that is viscerally exciting about guitar. Likewise you only have to picture Leslie West playing a Les Paul Junior at Woodstock to hear, in your mind, one of the other great signature tones in electric guitar – the full-throated howl of a P-90. Given all that, it’s ironic then that none of the variants of the Les Paul was originally intended to scream – but rather to smoothly intone the cool, pithy phrases of jazz. It’s testament to Gibson (and Les Paul’s) design that it has shone in every role thrown at it since then. Like other guitars, there are good ones and bad ones. The best, arguably, are rather more subtle of voice than the Les Paul’s powerful reputation might suggest. Inside this issue, you’ll get inside the tonewoods, hardware and heritage that make this king of electric guitars such a formidable musical tool – and a tonal touchstone for all eras of rock ’n’ roll. Jamie Dickson, Editor
Editor Jamie Dickson Managing Editor Lucy Rice Art Editors Paul Tysall, Richard Hood, Luke O’Neill
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Other contributors include: Tony Bacon, Owen Bailey,
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Chief executive Zillah Byng-Thorne Non-executive chairman Peter Allen Chief financial officer Penny Ladkin-Brand Tel +44 (0)207 042 4000 (London) Tel +44 (0)1225 442 244 (Bath)
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Neil Godwin, Will Ireland, Simon Lees, Rob Monk, Kevin Nixon, Jonathan Roncalato, Joby Sessions, Phil Sowels, Jesse Wild, Jeff Yeager
C o n t e n t s
Guitarist magazine would like to thank World Guitars, and the kind owner of the Gibson Mark Knopfler 1958 Les Paul Standard above, for the loan of this stellar guitar
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history 006 .............. Les Paul Introduction 008 .............. Les Paul Biography 016 ............... H enry Juszkiewicz Interview 018 ............... L es Paul Milestone Models 020 .............. Les Paul Guitar Anatomy 022 . . ............. Les Paul Tones
goldtops
customs
024 . . ............. Introduction 026 .............. 1952 Gibson Les Paul 027.. ............. 1953 Gibson Les Paul 028 .............. D ream Rigs: 1956 Gibson Les Paul Goldtop & 1959 Fender Champ 030 .............. 1957 Gibson Les Paul
068 .............. Introduction 070 .............. History 076 .............. 1955 ‘Black Beauty’ 084.............. D ream Rigs: 1969 Gibson Les Paul Custom & Marshall JTM45 Reissue 086 .............. P eter Frampton: Gibson Les Paul Custom 092 .............. PAF Pickups
Sunbursts 032 . . ............. Introduction 034 . . ............. History 040 .............. 1958 Les Paul Standard 046 .............. D ream Rigs: 1958 Gibson Les Paul Standard & 1958 Fender Super 048 .............. 1959 Gibson Les Paul 052 . . ............. Bench Test 062 .............. 1 960 Gibson Les Paul Standard 064 .............. K irk Hammett: ‘Greeny’ Les Paul
Juniors & Specials 096 .............. Introduction 098 .............. History 106 . . ............. 1955 Gibson Les Paul Junior 107 ............... 1959 Gibson Les Paul Junior 108 ............... P-90 Pickups
the sg YEARS 110 . . .............. Introduction 112 ................ History
Heroes 120 ............... Introduction 122.. .............. Gary Moore 128 ............... Jimmy Page 134 ............... Slash 140 ............... Don Felder
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tribute
A life Les or di n a ry Lester William Polsfuss – better known as Les Paul – was one of the greatest players the world has ever seen. But the guitar that still bears his name also went on to achieve a legendary status. This is the story of both the man and the machine © Andrew Lepley/Redferns
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ester William Polsfuss was born June 9 1915 in Waukesha, Wisconsin. Known throughout his life variously as Red Hot Red, Rhubarb Red, The Wizard Of Wisconsin and of course Les Paul, he holds the unique position of being one of the forefathers of the solidbody electric guitar, and indeed its most enduring and successful endorsee of all time. On top of that, he was an electronics innovator who helped shape recorded music as we know it, not to mention a stellar guitarist and an international star in his own right. Les passed away on 13 August 2009, aged 94. Here, we retrace an extraordinary life in music…
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Necessity is the mother of invention, and thankfully Lester’s mother let him go ahead and invent! Child tinkerer to electronics innovator – a whistle-stop tour from Rhubarb Red to Les Paul
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he young Lester Polsfuss was obsessed with music and tinkering with things in order to make sounds from the get-go. As he told Guitarist early in 2009: “What started me pulling things apart, was that we had a Player Piano in the living room [when aged nine, Les famously modified the cut-out holes to see what effect it would have on the music], a Victrola [basically, a gramophone in a cabinet], a radio and a telephone.” Part of Les’s fixation was driven by an interest in radio. He’d learned how to make a crystal set [a simple radio receiver] and hung around the transmitter to listen, where he was soon noticed. “The next thing I know I’m studying electronics and I’m heading towards making a recording device,” he told us. “It’s something that surely wasn’t around Waukesha when I was nine years old! There wasn’t such a thing as a recording device, so I had to build it. I went out to the radio station that was just about to go on air and I started
Les & Recording Les began experimenting with recording in his early teens. “My father happened to own a garage,” he recalled, “and he had equipment and a lot of parts. It was up to me figure out how to make some kind of device to record on, so down at the garage I put together my first recording machine.” Les worked out how to make a Cadillac flywheel into a turntable and used a nail to cut grooves into celluloid. “The next thing was to make a pickup, which I made out of the telephone receiver. I played it through my mother’s speaker in the radio. They weren’t the best quality in the world, but it was the beginning.”
Words Mick Tay lor
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talking to the engineer, and he started to teach me electronics.”
A l o u d e r g u i ta r Alongside his interest in recording, it soon became apparent that Lester also had another little problem to solve. Performing as Red Hot Red around 1928-9 at a barbecue stand halfway between Waukesha and Milwaukee, he decided to address a common problem, for which we should all thank him: the need to get more volume out of the guitar… “I talked the owner into letting me build a PA system,” explained Les, “and the story was that somebody in the back seat of a car said, Red, your voice is fine, your harmonica’s fine and your jokes are funny, but the guitar isn’t loud enough! “The way it started was that when I took a phonograph pickup and jabbed it into the front of the guitar, I had a guitar that was amplified, but I had a lot of feedback,” he continued. “So I filled it with tablecloths and socks and everything
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Les became obsessed with recording music at a young age and it fuelled
© dan grossi / AP / Press Association Images
I could think of; in the end I filled it up with plaster of Paris, none of that worked, and I finally destroyed the guitar. I decided to pick the most dense material that I could find, and put a string on it, so I found a piece of railroad track that was about two and a half feet long and a piece of wood two and a half feet long. I placed a part of the telephone under the strings, fed it into the radio and I’m running to my mother and saying, I’ve got it! And my mother says, ‘The day you see a cowboy on a horse playing a railroad track…’ She grounded that idea in a hurry. So that went out the window and I said, ‘Well, then I’ve got to get something that’s not heavy…’” What resulted, eventually, after much experimentation was the groundbreaking Log concept, about which you can read more on page 10. Rewind to 1932 and Les left high school early to join Joe Wolverton as Sunny Joe and Rhubarb Red: their radio broadcasts beamed across the nation, helping the USA to escape in part from the struggles of the great depression. The following year in Chicago, Les would work playing country and good-time music on daytime radio, then indulge his love of jazz for fun, rubbing shoulders with greats such as Art Tatum and Django Reinhardt in the evenings. The latter’s playing had the most impact on Les’s own style. It was in 1936 that he produced his first recordings, then in 1938 he moved to New York (where he worked weekends at Epiphone and developed the Log) and again to Los Angeles in 1942, as his skills and demand as a player increased. He was soon playing and recording with the likes of Bing Crosby – who supported and encouraged Les’s home studio development – The Andrews Sisters and many other big names of the period. It was also during the mid-1940s that Les was rubbing shoulders with other pioneers of the music world, including the likes of Leo Fender and Paul Bigsby. “I met both of them in my back yard,” recalled Les. “They came over to listen to people I was recording in Los Angeles. Neither one of them played an instrument and they needed to get the feedback from the player. My studio was just my garage in the backyard and it was a perfect place for us to sit and talk and chat for hours about how to make an electric guitar and an amplifier to suit the customer.”
his creativity
The new sound It was around this time that Les was motivated to make the next big step forward in his sound. “My mother came to visit,” he recalled. “She said, ‘I heard you on the radio last night’. I said, ‘I wasn’t playing on the radio, I was here playing with The Andrews Sisters’. She says, ‘Well you should do something about it, because they’re sounding just like you’. So I got thinking about it, gave my notice, and went to my garage and said, ‘I’m not coming out of that garage until I have a sound that’s different from anybody else’. It took a couple of years of working on ideas; new sounds, a new way of recording. I didn’t know it was going to change the world, but I knew it was going to make some noise!” What Les had been working on was developing his revolutionary recording style where he could layer guitar parts, speed them up and slow them down and employ techniques such as delay, phasing and flanging – creating a totally unique sonic palette for him to work with. Capitol records released Lover (When You’re Near Me) in 1948 and a whole new sound was born. It was the first use of multitrack recording as we know it, using equipment Les had put together himself. Later that year, a serious car crash meant Les nearly lost use of his picking arm, but he famously requested that the arm be reset in the playing position!
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After a period of convalescence, Les released his first self-recorded music with his then-wife Mary Ford (née Iris Colleen Summers) in the early fifties; the couple had met through Gene Autry in 1946. With the combination of Les’s incredible playing, unique sound and Mary’s pure, perfect-harmony vocals, they were destined to be international stars. Listening to those cuts now – How High The Moon, Tiger Rag and Mockin’ Bird Hill – and it beggars belief to think that Les not only had the musical vision to imagine the sounds in the first place, but also the technical desire and tenacity to physically create and record them. It was certainly an incredible journey, a long way from the nine-year-old kid pulling apart his mother’s piano.
Les who? So how did the man himself feel, several decades later, if somebody thought Les Paul was ‘just’ a guitar, and not a man behind the instrument? “That doesn’t bother me at all,” he laughed. “That’s not my goal in life; to go down in history as something other than just another guy. As far as I’m concerned, I’m just a guitar player and my job is to go out there and play and entertain and do my thing. That’s it. If I have to go around telling everyone how great I am, then there’s something wrong with my act.”
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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?
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ry 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.
Going electric
Words Mick Tay lor
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The pl ank tak es 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…
© Jon Sievert/Michael Ochs Archives/Gett y Images
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.”
History |
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Les and The Log – the guitar that went at least some way to convince Gibson of the future
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T he gu i ta r Les n e v er lik ed ? It
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ry 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.
Words Tony Bacon
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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