Gougetop Across The Atlantic

It was last August that I let go of my 1977 Les Paul Custom.

It is a metaphysical truth that "all good things must come to an end". If it weren't so, there would be no basis for values. I have seen a lot of guitars come and go in my life, but that one was the second-longest in my ownership: I played that thing for twenty-four years. Along the way, I used to sometimes idly wonder how it would come to an end. Hell; I should have been killed in three different motorcycle crashes, and it would have fallen to someone in my family to pack it up and do something with it.

The thing is, it was one of those crashes -- the last one, about fifteen years ago -- that finally sealed the deal. Two lumbar vertebrae crushed about forty percent were never going to be conducive to standing around with a nearly twelve-pound guitar slung over my shoulder.

(Precept: "When you play your guitar, you stand up like a man." -- Garry Bordonaro. ed.)

There came a day when I picked up the SG and while I was putting it on, I looked at the LPC hanging forlornly on the wall, and I realized that I hadn't touched it in many months. I began thinking about it, and realized a lot.

That guitar was the beginning of my serious attention to electric guitar practice. For the prior eight years or so, I had gone through an early Les Paul Deluxe, a double-cut Special with P-90's, which I never properly understood, and several other items. I was just playing, though, and had never been serious about electric gear to the degree that it requires. It was the look of that Les Paul Custom that fixed my attention. There is nothing like a Custom in Wine Red. I'll never, ever forget the very first time that I cracked that Protector I case. "I'm going to own this guitar, this very day."

My sister had called me from work, and told me that someone that she worked with had a Les Paul Custom for sale, for $450. I thought about it and asked her, "Do you have any idea what you're talking about?" She said, "I think so." I said, "I'll be right there."

I had $350 handy that day, and she loaned me a hundred bucks. Sure enough, I popped the top of that case and glory streamed before my very eyes.

"Sold," I said, and that was that.

It was a moment in history. You see, it was the height of the "pointy guitar" phase in American consciousness. The L.A. Big-Hair Metal scene was in full swing, and everybody concerned with hipness was after their Charvels and Jacksons with zebra-stripes and you name it. The Les Paul just wasn't cool anymore, unless you weren't concerned with being cool.

It was like a woman, to me. I couldn't keep my hands off it.

It brought me a hell of a long way. In the past five or six years, though, things began to change. It really -- in fact -- began in the mid-90's when I owned an '84 Explorer (White) with the fatter neck profile. I consciously observed and considered the similarity to my very first guitar, the 1952 L-47 acoustic, which had been my father's first guitar before he gave it to me at age thirteen. That thing is the spitting-image of the fat-50's profile that now drives the collectors crazy, and I grew up on it. The '77 LPC was a three-piece maple neck (wonderfully stable) with a not-quite Slim-Taper profile similar to the early-60's design, and it was beginning to dawn on me that it wasn't my favorite, at all. When the SG Special came to me in October of '03, I should have known that the LPC's time was up, but I didn't think about it.

It had started to hurt to play it. I try not to complain about the spinal thing because I know people with real back problems, but it was getting to the point where just an hour of so of that thing could get pretty noticeably painful. By last summer, it was just hanging there by itself, and that was starting to make me feel bad.

So, one day, I packed it up in its P-I and took it down to Rumbleseat Music, where we had a long discussion about these sorts of things. They gave me a fair price for it, and I sent it on its way. The last words I said before I let it go: "I hope someone plays the shit out of it."

Today, I received the following e-mail:

"Hi William,

I appreciate that this email is a bit out of the blue, so feel free to ignore it if you like...

I found your web site while I was googling for pictures of guitars. I was looking for pics of '77 customs as I have recently purchased one, and on your site I was somewhat surprised to find pictures of the actual '77 custom which I have just purchased. The red Les Paul custom which it would appear that you owned for quite some time is now over here in London, England. It looks like it went for sale on gbase.com and ebay.com in America, and was bought and shipped over to England. Then I subsequently purchased it from the UK buyer.

It's quite a distinctive guitar, with the silver selector switch ring and missing paint near the bridge. So I'm in no doubt that it is the same guitar.

So, the point of this email, I just wondered if you would like to share any info or stories about the guitar. Since you owned it for so long I can only assume that it meant a lot to you, so anything about it's past which you would like to share would be really interesting to me. I like old guitars as they usually hold a lot of stories, and this '77 in particular looks like it has seen a lot of action.

Like I say, please feel free to delete this email if you wish, I just thought I would get in contact, it would be gear to hear back from you."

It's a small world, now. I think that I have a new friend in England, through the very curious intimacy surrounding these instruments, and I will try to write some bits of history for him in the near future.