The Gougetop

Still on the LPC tip, here's a nice photograph of my '77 which I nicked from Rumble Seat Music when they had it on offer.

The name: shortly after the last Harley crash, I came upon, in a mall shop in Cleveland, a fine silver bracelet crafted in the manner of drive-chain links. Feeling quite sentimental over Piglet, I spent my entire per diem in hand that week and never took it off again.

The top finish of that Les Paul Custom wasn't flawless when I bought it, but I took pretty good care of it and it polished beautifully. It's a fat-spot Norlin: right in the middle of what many will always swear were Gibson's worst years. The carve of the top was flat and they weren't especially careful about pieces they matched together; there are some really horrendous Norlin top seams out there. With all that, however, that color, in the Custom dress, made some actually not-bad maple really work.

It was some weeks or months later that I observed the first serious scratches in the finish and attributed it to that silver bracelet falling in exactly the same spot just above and between the bridge and TP-6 tailpiece, whenever I played it. By then, the thing was well-enough -- or badly enough -- done that it didn't much matter to me.

Through the 90's, I got a lot of work done with that thing. For several years, it was probably the most intensive practice regimen that I maintained since I was a teen-ager, and most of that was at playing with Dad and Michael very almost every single day. When I moved to Atlanta, I arrived there off the road with a tour bag and that LPC in a Tough Traveler gig-bag. (I need to write those people a letter. That bag is some of the best money I ever spent. Somewhere around here, I have a photograph of me at the airport in Jakarta with The Gougetop in their bag with at least twenty years of roadwork on it.) Once established, I began recording at home, when I was there, and I toured with that guitar when I wasn't and could do that.

(...depending on the gig. I didn't take it on Hank Jr. because that was mostly a weekend thing and I could afford three or four days without it and just naturally worked hard on it when I was home. Also: Hank was a combat schedule. Guitar practice almost would have never fit in any of it at any point in the sixteen or eighteen hour -- or more -- days. I took it out on the Bolshoi Ballet American tour in '89. Also: Club MTV Live, and The O-Jays several times. Sometimes it worked, but it often didn't.)

I had had my left pinky finger in the game for lead work for about ten years at that point (which could tell you about how slow some of this was for me) and was just starting to feel like I was playing things -- rock music and blues things -- maybe worth listening to. I drove my conditioning hard in those years, happy to play two or three-hour sessions all by myself. I spent a lot of time doing that with pulling arrangements out of memory of driving lights from the side of the stage almost two hundred shows a year and watching Alan Bradley (one of my best friends and guitarist in the first band that ever hired me) playing Aerosmith to Beatles to Tull to Zappa and everything between in rock parts. I remembered stuff that Alan has long forgotten (we got together a couple of years ago), and got in all kinds of technical and physical shape at playing it every day.

And before it was over, that silver bike-chain bracelet just gouged the shit out of that lovely Wine Red maple top.

I actually wondered, occasionally, how deep it would go. I wondered a lot of things, like, how the hell guys like Slash or Joe Perry get away with wearing gobs of silver on their right hands and not shredding the Christ out of their Les Paul tops. Some people have argued that they're rich, and it probably doesn't matter to them, which misses the point. Hell; I'm not rich and I did it anyway. It really got to be a remarkable hematoma (Jim, in London, called it "distinctive") in that maple surface. It spoke a lot about my physical approach to the instrument, in ways that I'd really had no way of thinking about. It was data, inflicted on the instrument: "Well, his right-hand technique is pretty consistent, at any rate."


So, that's what happened.

~~~~~

I started taking the bracelet off when I started playing Dad's ES-355.

(Of course, I always took it off when handling someone else's guitar. That LPC is the only one I ever gouged. I don't believe I ever thought I might be interested to explain it.)