Who was the first guitarist to popularise the Gibson Les Paul?
Rock and roll images are burnt into the brains of adolescent music fans, long before they even get the chance to listen to the music that inspired it.
I saw Freddie Mercury standing on Wembley’s glittering stage long before I heard A Night At The Opera and Ozzy Osbourne snarling down the barrel of a camera before I heard ‘War Pigs’. But none of those photos provoked my curiosity quite like Jimmy Page clutching a Gibson Les Paul.
While Led Zeppelin had a subconscious presence in my life, it wasn’t until I saw the archival images of rock and roll royalty, wielding his magic wand, that it sparked an adolescent intrigue to turn back the clock and understand all things music.
Using Page’s guitar as a tour guide, I embarked on a glittering whistle-stop journey of rock and rolls exciting history that ran through Black Sabbath, Neil Young and Frank Zappa, championing the crunching riffs of their greatest hits. Suddenly, the story behind the picture made complete sense to me, and no longer was Page an ancient silhouette from a mystical time gone by, but a signpost for how all future music could be understood.
It was largely that second Led Zeppelin album that I had to thank for it. It was the first Zeppelin album on which Page used the Gibson Les Paul, and set out a sonic blueprint that the band would follow for the decade after and use as the foundations for modern rock and roll.
“I played the Les Paul on ‘Whole Lotta Love’ and ‘What Is and What Should Never Be’, and that decided it for me,” Page said, “it was definitely going to be the Les Paul from then on. I always wanted to make a change for each album sonically, and that was my first decision for Led Zeppelin II.”
In many ways, then, the guitar was the sound of the 1970s, where rock took off into an entirely different dimension and became the tour de force we all loved it for, but in reality, the guitar had been kicking around for a long time, quietly shaping the humble beginnings of rock music.
Who was the first guitarist to popularise the Gibson Les Paul?
The guitar was initially made in 1951 by the guitarist Les Paul, who was recruited by Gibson as an instrumental consultant, in a bid to create something that competed with the wildly popular Fender guitars.
Eventually, the company stumbled on the Sunburst model in the latter stages of the ‘50s, but its initial releases were riddled with problems, and the model was often deemed too heavy by experts. But then in 1964, a young Keith Richards was seen clutching a Sunburst as The Rolling Stones broke into the mainstream, thus skyrocketing the guitar into cultural relevance.
Classic Rolling Stones songs like ‘The Last Time’ and ‘Satisfaction’ were played on the Sunburst, making its warm sound profile the bedrock of the band’s sound and subsequently that of every other band in Britain. Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page were all cited as adopting the model under the influence of Richards, and together forged a new rock and roll sound under the stewardship of this now iconic guitar.
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