Why Alex Lifeson thought his favourite instrument wasn’t “a rock guitar”
Alex Lifeson had a number of axes that he favoured over the years. Whether it was his classic double-neck Gibson EDS-1275 or his more modern use of PRS guitars, the Rush guitarist wielded plenty of different six-strings across his five-decade-plus career. But no guitar has stuck with him like the Gibson ES-335, a semi-hollow body electric guitar that Lifeson had been coveting all the way back to his days as a teenager in Canada.
“I remember this was around the time I was probably 13 or 14, 15 years old… I used to go to a music store, Long & McQuade in Toronto, and I would sit on an amp, and I pull a guitar down and I would play for about an hour until the salesman came over and said, ‘Okay, kid, beat it,'” Lifeson recalled to Gibson TV for their YouTube series ‘My First Gibson’.
“And then I’d come back the next Saturday, and I would sit on another amp and pull a guitar down, I play for an hour, same salesman would come over and say, ‘Okay, kid, beat it.’ [Laughs] So, this would go on for weeks and weeks and weeks and months,” he added. “I played a 335, an SG, a Les Paul. Those instruments were just amazing to me. Like a Les Paul, for example. There was so much history in that shape. And the players that played that guitar. The SG was the same thing. I was a fan of Eric Clapton’s and he had that beautifully painted SG of his, the 335 Jorma Kaukonen from the Jefferson Airplane and Alvin Lee, BB King… You know, they were all ES players.”
Even though the Gibson ES brand had plenty of history around it, Lifeson didn’t exactly connect it to his favoured genre of music. “And there was something that was sort of unique about that guitar in a rock context. It didn’t seem like a rock guitar, like a Les Paul, or an SG was. I always wanted to have the Gibson, it was just a matter of timing.”
Eventually, just as Rush were beginning to come together, Lifeson was able to acquire his sought-after axe through original Rush drummer John Rutsey. “And the fall of, I think was it 1969, a friend of John Rutsey’s had the guitar put up for sale and I bought that guitar and I started playing it every waking minute that I had,” Lifeson recalled. “I just couldn’t stop playing it.”
“I had a very inexpensive starter guitar before that. Not at the level of a Gibson. I just couldn’t believe how easy it was to play. Not that I was as much of a player,” Lifeson admitted. “The neck felt so much smoother, the action was so much lighter and easier. I was used to an action that was two inches high off the string. All the simple things that I could play just felt so much easier.”
“I really looked forward to playing that 335. And I remember coming home from school every day and playing until dinnertime,” Lifeson said. “And then I said, ‘Forget about homework, I’ll just play guitar.’ You know those bar gigs that we were doing in the sort of the early ’70s to the middle ’70s when we got our first record deal? That was my main guitar. I had a backup guitar, but I tended to use the 335 more than anything.”
Lifeson favoured the guitar throughout much of the early history of Rush, including using it to record the band’s self-titled debut. By the late 1970s, Lifeson had upgraded to a slightly different model, the ES-355, but his use of the ES line of Gibson’s continues to this day.
