Launched in 1952 shortly after the Fender Telecaster, the Gibson Les Paul solidbody electric guitar was produced for a brief eight years. Overshadowed by the Fender Telecaster, the Les Paul went under the radar for decades before gaining its deserved and long overdue recognition as an instrument to be reckoned with. However, while most center-stage guitar players were wielding the Fender Telecaster, there were a handful of legendary players who gravitated toward and swore by the Les Paul. It’s no secret that Lester Williams Polsfuss (better known as Les Paul) was one of the. The Les Paul Manual highlights other rock legends that helped secure the model’s place in music history: Keith Richards, Zakk Wylde, Jimmy Page, Robert Fripp, and Jan Akkerman.
Les Paul
Lester William Polsfuss, to give Les Paul his birth name, is remembered mainly for his role in the development of the electric guitar. He was, after all, the man who could lay a reasonable claim to have built the first solidbody electric model, a 4×4-inch chunk of solid pine with a Gibson neck and the wings of an Epiphone acoustic fitted to give the look and feel of a conventional guitar. It became known as the “Log.” Of course, he later also gave his name to Gibson’s first solidbody electric guitar, which remains one of the most iconic musical instruments of the twentieth century—even if Paul’s specific role in its design may have been somewhat exaggerated over time. He would play a more pronounced role in the renaissance of the Les Paul, especially in the development of his “everything guitar,” the Les Paul Recording Model in the early 1970s.
Paul had, in fact, been America’s first celebrity guitar player. From 1950 he enjoyed a string of chart hits with his wife, Mary Ford, many of which featured his home-built electric guitar and were captured on a multitrack recording device that he had designed and built himself—several decades before this became standard practice. With a fifty thousand-dollar investment from his friend Bing Crosby, then one of the most popular entertainers in the world, the Ampex recording company hired Paul to help in the development of the first commercial eight-track tape recorders. This innovation alone would have been sufficient to ensure his place in the annals of music history.
Audiences in the early 1950s had been stunned by Les Paul’s studio magic, his multiple guitar “orchestra,” and Mary Ford’s rich vocal harmonies, produced in their studio on her own. So popular were the duo that during the 1950s they had their own syndicated radio and television shows. Although a highly accomplished jazz player in the mold of Django Reinhardt, his abilities were sometimes masked by the lightweight nature of his big hits and the cheesy hokum of his television appearances. The compilation Capitol Masters nonetheless offers an excellent and worthwhile introduction to his considerable musical skills.
Keith Richards
The unpretentious driving force behind the Rolling Stones, since the mid-1970s Keith Richards has been associated primarily with the Telecaster he calls “Micawber,” set up for five-string open-G tuning. However, in 1964 he acquired a 1959 Standard, becoming the first big-name Les Paul player, widely seen with what was then an unfashionable, out-of-production guitar. Richards used the Standard on such classics as “Satisfaction” (using a Gibson Maestro fuzz box on the iconic lead riff) and “The Last Time.”
In 1966, Richards switched to playing three-pickup Les Paul Customs, meanwhile selling his Standard (the so-called “Keith Burst”) to future Rolling Stone Mick Taylor. A former art student, Richards famously gave his 1957 Custom a fabulous psychedelic hand-painted finish. Until 1966, Richards used a Fender Dual Showman amplifier, before switching to Vox, Hiwatt, and Ampeg amplifiers.
Zakk Wylde
As part of Black Sabbath, throughout much of the 1970s singer Ozzy Osbourne fronted what many would argue was the first true heavy metal band. Based largely in the United States, Osbourne would also enjoy a substantial solo career, his backing band emerging as a breeding ground for some of the finest young rock guitarists of their generation. Everyone, of course, remembers Randy Rhoads, the young virtuoso who died in 1982 at the age of twenty-five in a tragic aircraft accident; Jake E. Lee had the unenviable task of filling his boots on stage. Then, in 1987, after sending Ozzy Osbourne a demo cassette of his own work, the job went to nineteen year-old Zakk Wylde.
Primarily influenced, both in his playing and stagecraft, by Randy Rhoads, Wylde succeeded in giving a rawer edge to Osbourne’s sound and in doing so became a significant influence on the generation of shredders that followed; Wylde is capable of soloing at impossibly high speeds, has an extraordinarily wide and controlled vibrato, and is a master of the pinch harmonic technique.
Wylde has a large collection of Les Paul Custom models which he plays on stage through a Marshall JCM800 with a pair of 4×12 cabinets. His original battered 1981 Custom was given its (now characteristic) black and white concentric circle paint job in 1987, and he refers to it as “The Grail.” Similar designs have graced most of his subsequent guitars, including his own Gibson and Epiphone signature Les Paul Customs. Curiously, this wasn’t the image he’d had in mind. With his first photographic session for Ozzy Osbourne looming, he wanted a unique paint job for his guitar, just as Randy Rhoads had his own trademark polka dot finishes. “I asked for the Hitchcock Vertigo design [the spiral from the film’s opening credits], but it came back with the bull’s eye on it. I had to do the photoshoot the next day, so I was like, fuck it!”
Jimmy Page
At the age of thirteen, James Page made his first television appearance on the UK talent show All Your Own. Asked by presenter Huw Wheldon what he planned to do when he left school, the well-spoken teenager declared his intention to become a biological researcher. But Page soon succumbed to the musical bug and by the middle of the 1960s he had become one of London’s most sought-after session musicians, making uncredited appearances on tracks by the Rolling Stones, the Who, the Kinks, and Herman’s Hermits. In 2010 he recalled, “I was doing three sessions a day, fifteen sessions a week. Sometimes I was playing with a group, sometimes I could be doing film music.” When Eric Clapton left the Yardbirds in 1964, the band turned to Jimmy Page as a possible replacement. At this time, the guitarist was then making such a lucrative living as a hired hand that he turned down the offer.
Page eventually would join the Yardbirds at the end of 1966, by which time the group was in commercial decline. Disintegrating on the eve of a Scandinavian tour, Page offered to put together a group to fulfill the dates. Along with drummer John Bonham, singer Robert Plant, and top session bassist John Paul Jones, the New Yardbirds were born. On returning to the UK, the group changed its name—from an earlier suggestion by the Who’s Keith Moon—to Led Zeppelin. It would swiftly become the most commercially successful heavy rock group of the era.
In the studio, Page enjoyed total control over the band’s sound—it’s testimony to his skills as a producer that, in terms of clarity and sheer power alone, these recordings rate among the finest in rock music history. From the 1969 debut to the death of drummer John Bonham in 1980, Led Zeppelin issued a string of peerless classics, most of which topped the album charts across the globe. Of these masterpieces, Led Zeppelin II is regarded by many critics as the greatest rock album ever made.
Page played a number of different instruments during his time with Led Zeppelin, but largely worked with Les Pauls— indeed, his three favorites are simply known as numbers one to three. The most noteworthy is “Number One,” a rare 1959 Gibson Les Paul Standard sunburst that he bought from Joe Walsh for five hundred dollars. It can be heard on such classics as “Whole Lotta Love,” “Rock and Roll,” and “Black Dog,” and has been modified numerous times over the past four decades, with a variety of different pickups and switching configurations employed. According to London auctioneer Cooper Owen, this guitar could expect to fetch more than one million dollars—in the unlikely event that Page should ever want to sell his favorite instrument.
Robert Fripp
The end of the 1960s saw the gradual emergence of a new breed of rock musician. These were players who had usually received some type of formal training and were as likely to draw influence from J. S. Bach or John Coltrane as Chicago blues musicians. This was an era when rock music got serious. And none were more serious than Robert Fripp.
His 1968 debut was as part of the band Giles, Giles and Fripp, a trio that mixed English psychedelic whimsy with a heavy jazz and classical influence. In retrospect, The Cheerful Insanity of Giles, Giles and Fripp seems well in advance of what was going on at that time, and a genuine urge to push the boundaries of rock music became increasingly clear when they morphed into King Crimson.
Making an extraordinary live debut in July 1969 supporting the Rolling Stones at London’s Hyde Park in front of an audience of almost a half a million, the band’s debut album, The Court of the Crimson King, was a huge commercial success that effectively ushered in the progressive rock era. At the heart of the band’s sound was the Mellotron—an early type of sampling keyboard that used mechanical tape loops to create orchestral effects—and Fripp’s nimble Les Paul playing. His style combined effortlessly fluid movement across the fingerboard with a demanding alternate and cross picking technique.
By the middle of the 1970s Fripp had taken King Crimson into increasingly obscure areas, eventually leading to the collapse of the band. During this time he began working with Brian Eno creating influential abstract delay loop soundscapes using a pair of linked Revox tape recorders. He called this “Frippertronics.”
In addition to periodically reforming King Crimson, Fripp also developed Guitar Craft, a kind of personal-development course for guitarists which taught his preferred system of New Standard Tuning, where the guitar is tuned (from bottom to top) C-G-D-A-E-G.
Jan Akkerman
Born in Amsterdam and active with professional rock ’n’ roll bands from the age of thirteen, Jan Akkerman first found moderate success during the 1960s with Brainbox, a popular Dutch blues band.
Focus formed in 1969 when Akkerman met the conservatory-trained flautist and keyboard player Thijs van Leer playing in the pit band of the Dutch production of Hair. The Focus sound hinged on the virtuoso abilities of the two musicians, both skilled soloists with an ear for creating an attractive melody. These attributes can be heard on the band’s two worldwide hit records, Van Leer’s “Sylvia,” surely one of the most beautiful guitar instrumentals in the rock oeuvre, and their joint composition “Hocus Pocus.” (Those unaware of Focus should track down the six-minute video clip of the band performing both pieces on the British television show The Old Grey Whistle Test in 1972, in which “Hocus Pocus” is played at a breakneck tempo with Akkerman tossing out effortless solos of remarkable dexterity. It’s been said that during the week after the clip was first broadcast, the band’s label had to operate their pressing plants around the clock to keep up with demand for Focus records.)
During this period, Akkerman used a 1972 Les Paul Custom “Black Beauty” model. Like many guitarists of the period, he was happy to perform his own modifications, most notably ripping out the neck pickup and replacing it with a Gretsch Filter ’Tron. He later realized that he’d “kind of screwed up the wiring, but that gave that special tone to it . . . I like the one [the Gibson humbucker] near the tailpiece, that’s a very good pickup . . . you get the clarity, and that special tone from the Gretsch pickup.”
Akkerman used both Fender and Marshall amplifiers, sometimes in the same rig, but for recording, his Les Paul went into a Fender Twin Reverb. The only pedal he used at this time was a Colorsound Power Boost/Overdriver, which he claimed “could get a single-coil pickup sound.”
Akkerman left Focus in 1976 but has remained hugely productive, touring globally and recording more than thirty solo albums. He has since played a Gibson Les Paul Personal, which he had re-topped with a tiger-stripe cap, and both pickups and low-impedence electrics were replaced with a set of three humbuckers.
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This is the ultimate hands-on, how-to manual devoted to the famous Gibson Les Paul, updated with the latest models and guitar tech advice.
This book is a step-by-step, heavily illustrated guide to everything about Gibson Les Paul guitars! It shows owners and dreamers the basics of selecting and buying your guitar, how to use it, and how to keep it rocking once you have one. Let world-renowned guitar expert Terry Burrows be your guide to this awesome instrument.
Gorgeous shots of Gibson Les Paul guitars and guitar parts, alongside images of well-known musicians playing Gibson Les Pauls, make this a book no fan will want to miss!
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