There are three major (and many other) "flavors" of the Les Paul,
The Standard, the Custom and the Deluxe. Each became famous in
the hands of the masters of day ...
The Standard in the hands of Duane Allman and many many others.
The Custom, with its ebony neck and ultra-low action, preferred by
They led the blues-rock and jazz-rock explosion of the 1970s and generated some of the guitar's best recorded music ever. Their virtuosity, tone, speed and approach are legendary, loved and incorporated by almost all generations of electric players to this day.
The Custom was the second issue of the Les Paul guitar, introduced to the public in 1954. Called the Gibson Les Paul Custom, this entirely black guitar was an expertly decorated work of art, and dubbed the Black Beauty. The Les Paul Custom featured a mahogany top to differentiate the instrument from its Goldtop predecessor's maple top. It also featured the new Tune-o-Matic bridge design and a pickup with an alnico-5 magnet in the neck position. In addition, since 1957, the Custom was fitted with Gibson's new humbucker pickups, and later became available with three pickups instead of the more usual two.
For the next two years I played and grew as a listener of cutting edge music, and then it happened ... February 4, 1977, my eighteenth birthday, I was playing Les to The Crusaders' "Spiral" on the turntable, when the strap broke and the guitar fell straight to the floor. The neck splintered in two, with the strings dangling the headstock and the first half of neck like a drunken marionette. AGGHHH ... To say I was devastated is an understatement.
Luckily I was a neighbor to, and a friend of a very young and talented Dave Schneider. Dave was incredibly cool and had a super cool family. He and his brother loved Gentle Giant, ELP and other leading JAM BANDS long before the term existed. Dave was a budding Luthier and soon happily agreed to fix Les! The project was born and Dave and I stripped off the black finish, bought a heavier brass bridge for better sustain and agreed that Gibson's laminated 3- or 5-piece necks would surely be outdone by a 1-piece, eastern maple neck with a flame maple fingerboard topped with wide low frets for un-matched playability and sustain! Dave was a naturalist and he loved the plain look of the maple cap, so we decided not to re-paint the guitar. Instead, we sanded it to within an inch of its life and applied a polyurethane finish which glowed for 25 years. (anyone who knows me or the guitar KNOWS I love to polish and maintain guitars!) I asked Dave not to try and replicate the Gibson headstock and I gave him "creative control" to design a headstock of his own to show his stamp on the project and guitar. (see pics below ...)
The guitar looked, sounded and played great as we added a Carvin M22SD in the bridge and a DiMarzio Super Distortion in the neck. Living close to NYC, we'd often go to Manhattan to see shows, especially Greenwich Village. TRUE STORY -> One night Dave and I brought the newly-finished guitar to a show (the Beacon I recall) where Al DiMeola was touring behind his first or second solo album. We went to the back door w/ the guitar and told them we we're with the band's security and Dave actually flashed some kind of ID to the bouncer. So we're hangin' backstage, pretending to be security, and Al comes over and we start tellin' him about the guitar and Dave's talents, and how we Dave can build him a "dream" Les Paul. We talked a while and Al played Les for a couple of minutes and liked it!
The guitar remained my primary instrument for roughly 20 years of my on-again off-again playing, but would never stay in tune! We determined the truss rod was not installed properly and my friends at Connecticut Music heated the neck on a press to try and correct the problem in the early 80s to no avail. Les, with his one-piece neck and hot-rod hardware sounded great, but was never really "right". Dave later went on to create instruments for many great players, to include Ravi Shankar!
The Eighties saw two significant events for Les. First, low on funds, I want down to "Guitar Row" on West 47'th in Manhattan, which is 1 full block of music stores. I tired to sell Les and I remember the guy in Manny's sayin "what's up with this thing?" ... So I told him the story and he said "smells like lemon pledge ... need a few bucks eh?" ... and I walked out and said "nope ... ain't doin' this to Les" Later I bought a beautiful '86 re-issue Gibson Firebird 5 and traded the WHOLE GUITAR for EMGs to be put in Les! They stayed in 15 years.
In the early 90's, a catastrophic illness and more life events got me playing more and after I moved to Atlanta I started to write and play to the point where I formed
"Totally Savage". As Les would never tune consistently, I did not take him to gigs as I started to play out regularly.
I occasionally would gig w/ Les as the picture to the right and
below show but he usually remained home. I WANTED Les to
be my main axe but the demands of playing paying gigs did not
allow an inconsistent and fickle instrument, especially one that
never really tuned right!
This leads to late 2008, 30 years after Les was re-invented when I realized there was a solution! My great friend, former band-mate and Best Man at my wedding, Jonathan Holland, has steadily become an outstanding Luthier in the past two or three years. He works on all of my guitars and does meticulous work. Jon's website ->
Jon and I quickly hatched a plan to remove Les's neck and fix him once and for all! We searched for and found the most beautiful wood for a new neck and started the project to virtually re-build the entire guitar! We also found the exact replacement of the L5 bridge, one of the key components in the guitar's unique sound.
As the project started, one of Jonathan's first major tasks was to remove the flame maple fretboard, exposing the truss rod for what we hoped was a relatively easy fix. This done, Jon soon determined the truss rod was NOT the problem! The guitar had not played right or tuned right for 25 years because the frets were placed on the fretboard incorrectly, the intervals between them was wrong! It was, and would always be impossible for the guitar to ever tune correctly! THE MATH WAS WRONG! AHHHH!!
So, that's really GOOD NEWS as the neck itself is one-piece as I've said and is in great shape! We decided to add a sunburst finish, all new hardware, new truss rod, frets and killer pickups. The front is a DiMarzio "Air Norton" w/ coil-tapping, which, coupled with the maple neck (virtually unheard if on a Les Paul) provide a snappy and defined attack and sound, almost like a Tele or Les Paul Deluxe w/ mini humbuckers. In the back we're putting a Seymour Duncan "Custom Custom", a smokey and somewhat dark humbucker, rich with sustain and harmonics. The project is mid-way at this writing and the pictures below will document the evolution of what will surely once again be my "go-to" guitar along with my beloved Strat. Enjoy the story in pictures below! - Larry
"Les" is the nickname for my oldest and most precious guitar, a 1971 Gibson Les Paul Custom. This page details the history of the guitar and to some degree myself, and it's a great story, a great time in music and the story of the resurrection of a fine guitar. My friend Jonathan and I have embarked on a "mission" to revitalize and correct a 25-year old mistake made by some young and fearless guitar warriors of the 1970s, arguably the finest and most prodigious period in electric guitar history ...
I bought Les in 1975, from a great player, Sal Salvador, who I was taking lessons from in Stamford, CT. A local legend and extremely versatile guitarist, Sal Salvador was a capable soloist and accompanist, head of the guitar department at the University
of Bridgeport and appeared with many greats. He worked with
Terry Gibbs and Mudell Lowe in New York at the end of the '40s,
then joined Stan Kenton's orchestra in 1952. Salvador worked with
Kenton until the end of 1953, and appeared on the New Concepts of
Artistry in Rhythm album. He led bebop bands featuring Eddie Costa
and Phil Woods. Salvador was featured in the film Jazz on a Summer's
Day and headed a big band in the late '50s and early '60s. He worked
in a guitar duo with Alan Hanlon in the early '70s, and began recording again as a leader later in the decade. He re-formed his big band in the '80s, and was named to his position at the University of Bridgeport. Salvador led recordings for Blue Note (1953), Capitol, Bethlehem, Decca, Jazz Unlimited, Dauntless (1963), Bee Hive, GP, and Stash; he died September 22, 1999, at the age of 73.
I remember going to Sal's house and his wife would be cooking up a storm in the kitchen while Les and I worked on basic theory, chords and scales. The day I walked in I spotted this beautiful Les Paul "Black Beauty" in the corner on a stand. Like any teenage guitarist, I loved the look, lore and sounds that the leading guitarists of the day (Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Duane Allman, John McLaughlin, Jimmy Page) were creating with
this instrument, and these people and recordings have become many
of the all-time blues, rock and "performance guitar" superstars and
achievements of all time! I convinced Sal to sell me the guitar on a
payment plan and it was MINE!
