Alex Lifeson discusses his first guitar and his love of Gibson
Alex Lifeson’s obsession with Gibson guitars is well documented. During his time as the guitarist for American prog outfit Rush, he cemented himself as one of the genre’s most explorative players. Though best known for his effects-laden guitar riffs, Lifeson plays various other acoustic stringed instruments, including mandola, mandolin and bouzouki. With Rush, he’s also contributed backing vocals, keyboards and bass pedal synthesisers. Here, he explains where his love affair with Gibson began.
In a promotional video for the guitar manufacturer, Lifeson recalled receiving his very first guitar. “The first guitar I got was an acoustic guitar. It was a cheap Japanese guitar. It was $10 [around $80 in 2021 money], and I got it for Christmas in 1966. I played that guitar that whole year, as painful as it was – the action on it was terrible.”
After a year of building up callouses on his fingers, Lifeson thought it might be time to find something a little easier to play. “I begged for another guitar and I got an electric the following Christmas, and it was also a Japanese guitar, Canora, that I think cost my parents $59 [around $470 in 2021 money],” he continued. “So I played it as much as I could but I always dreamt about having a Gibson. They just seemed so beautiful and so out of reach. I used to go to Long & McQuade’s, a music store in Toronto, every weekend, and I’d spend a Saturday sitting on an amp and pulling down a 335, or maybe a Les Paul, or an SG. I would play for about an hour until the salesman came by and said, ‘OK, get lost, kid.'”
But that didn’t deter him. Lifeson would play for an hour, get kicked out and then return the next weekend and the weekend after that. “But that’s the dream that we all have, right? Always a Gibson. In 1976, I visited the plant in Kalamazoo, MI. While I was taking the tour there, I ordered a 355 in white, and a double-neck, and a Dove. In fact, I used the Dove for ‘Closer to the Heart.'” Of course, it is the white 355 that has become the signature Alex Lifeson guitar. “I just absolutely adore that guitar,” he said. “It served me really, really well, I think I’d seen more photographs of me with that guitar than anything else.”
Lifeson would later work with Gibson to develop the Axcess Les Paul Alex Lifeson model, customised to suit his requirements as a player. “It has a Piezo pickup. It has a Floyd Rose on it. It’s been sculpted so the hand can get up nice and high on the fretboard. It’s relatively lightweight, so it doesn’t kill you after a while.” It might cost an arm and a leg, but the Epiphone Alex Lifeson model looks like a dream. You can find out more here.
