SDPB: Well, let's start with the Explorer. That's such a distinctive design. How did that come to be?
Arian Sheets: Gibson was interested in really trying to create a splash with a distinctive model at the end of the ‘50s. And they were looking at some of the design elements of the period, the mid-century modern design with light colored wood, which was very popular and pared-back minimalist trim and something that looked truly modern and different. And they created three models. One was called the Modern, one was the Flying V, and one was the Explorer. I think they had a number of different models that they looked at doing but those were the three that they were more serious about. Well, the Modern was less popular among the potential dealers. So, it really came down to the Flying V and the Explorer. And the Flying V is the one that just looks like a V-shape and the Explorer is pointed and became the basis for a lot of models eventually.
But at the time it was just really out there. I mean, the shapes were very jaggedy and rough and didn't look like conventional guitar like shapes. And so they weren't very popular, but especially the Explorer was not very popular. And there are only a few dozen that left the factory in those original years, 1958, '59. And so there were some bodies that hung around the factory that just were never finished. It wasn't worth finishing them, and nobody really wanted them. But then gradually they would get finished off, a whole bunch of them left the factory in '63, '64. So they were fitted with pickups, trim, et cetera, for that time period. The one that we have at the National Music Museum was probably the last one, or one of the very last ones, to leave. And that was in 1967. So it's a hybrid of an original Limba wood body, that's an African hardwood. They called it Corina. That was the marketing name for it. So the body is from the original time period, '58 - '59, but the finish work was done in the 60s. So it has 60s pickups, potentiometers, pick guard, et cetera.
And this instrument had an interesting history. It was purchased by a Memphis area, musician who was friends with a lot of prominent musicians, rock musicians of that period. And John Entwistle of the Who bought it from him. And one of the things that's notable about the British rock musicians, they were very influenced by what was happening in the American blues' scene at the time. And they also coveted American instruments because for years, they were very expensive or not available in Britain. So they were a status symbol. And they weren't able to get them easily. So if a musician had an American instrument, it meant that they could afford to fly back and forth, or they had connections. Entwistle was collecting instruments, and it's funny because now you think, well, people are collecting these vintage instruments that are 50 years old or more, well, back then, these were almost new instruments, but they were still collectible to these musicians and desirable.
And Entwistle was a bass player, so I don't know how much he actually would've played this instrument, but he decided to trade it back to the original musician he'd acquired it from for a completely finished 1958 Flying V. And so this musician had it for this whole time period until we acquired it. And he also played it in John Entwistle's band, The Ox, which was when The Who was on hiatus. And so, it's a very interesting instrument in our collection.
SDPB: Are these types of design, including the Explorer, the Flying V, do they really sound that much different? Or is it just purely about the shape and the design?
Arian Sheets: It can be hard to say what actual elements contribute to the sound of an instrument, but it's very complicated. And I come from the bowed string instrument world, and some of my colleagues for years have had a misconception, oh, an electric guitar is just a board with electronics in it. That's really not true. There's a lot of aspects of the construction of an electric guitar that do affect the sound, from how the neck is attached to how the bridge functions to the type of wood it's made out of, the body. And then of course, you've got the pickups themselves, how they're wound, what kind of magnets they use. I mean, there are a lot of factors and then you've got another complication, which is they're amplified instruments. So you're running it through an amplifier, which again, changes what kind of tone quality. And that's the beauty of the electric guitar is, it's really amazingly flexible musical instrument. I mean, because of these parameters.
There are people who absolutely believe that the vintage instruments have the best sound. What it's probably more like is that it's a sound that we get used to because we've heard these very great musicians within a few years of when the instruments were made. That was what was available as the highest end of the line, the ones that were coveted. And so that sound albeit a very good sound, it's just something we get used to. And when you look at the quality of building, I really think we are in a golden age, as far as the quality of all sorts of instrument building, whether it be both stringed instruments, acoustic guitars, electric guitars. And so I couldn't say that these instruments are necessarily better, they're just, again, going back to this idea of the classic, there's something people are used to, and that they associate with some of the best music in the genres that they were played in.
SDPB: Let's talk about the other guitar, it's construction and how it's... Obviously it's different in design, but just what are the characteristics that differentiate it.
Arian Sheets: The Les Paul model. So Gibson was a little bit late to the game as far as building a solid body electric. And I think what really pushed them to actually finish developing a product and release it was the rise of Fender. And the concept behind what Leo Fender was doing, and Fender was based in California, Gibson of course, in Kalamazoo, on opposite sides of the country. What Fender was doing well, he initially started as a radio technician and an amplifier maker, and it was Doc Hoffman who previously had an association with Rickenbacker that really did the guitar in (Fender( for a while, but it developed into the Fender company and by the late 40s, they were designing and we're going to release the very first style of Fender Spanish Electric.
And that model eventually became the Telecaster. The concept behind it was to have something that was very simple, that had a bolt on neck. The original intention was, instead of when you wore the frets down or the fingerboard down, instead of getting that repaired, you just order a new neck. Now, of course, that is sacrilege for the vintage guitar market. You've got the serial number stamped on the end of the neck. So this was becoming very successful. I mentioned that Fender was based in Southern California. That's where a lot of really important musicians were working at the time. You had Jimmy Bryant and Western Swing. Jimmy Bryant was one of the first artists to adopt a Telecaster and Gibson really, they were the big behemoth in the field and they were behind the ball.
So in 1952, they released the Les Paul model. Now, the Les Paul model was a more substantially built guitar. It didn't have the bolt-on neck. It had an arch type top on it. And it wasn't really designed by Les Paul. It was more a product that was created by Gibson, and they had Les Paul sign-on to market it. There were some aspects where he had feedback. The instrument we have in our collection is from 1952, which is the first year that the instrument released. It's the second type. There are some that were slightly different types from that period. This one does, has binding on the neck. The very first ones did not have binding, cellular trim. It has a wraparound trapeze, they called it style tailpiece. This was an adaption of design of Les Paul's, but they really didn't do it right. And it didn't function quite as intended. So by the next year, in 1953, they put a more conventional electric guitar bridge on it. So this is their first attempt at doing a solid body electric guitar. And again, it was Gibson, it was a high-quality product, and it became a classic.
SDPB: Tell me a little bit about Les Paul too.
Arian Sheets: Les Paul, was really an interesting artist. He was one of these people who had a career that just spanned decades and decades. He started off as a country artist and he really switched between genres. He did jazz. He did the Les Paul and Mary Ford (duo) - I don't know whether you'd call that pop, but he was really quite innovative and very interested in technology. And early on, he claims to have taken the needle from the gramophone that his mother had and stuck it into the soundboard of his guitar and ran the sound through the amplifier and speaker on that. And that's entirely possible. I mean, there are lots of people who were experimenting at that time with these types of things. He was associated with Gibson by the 30s and they did send him instruments periodically. They sent him a prototype of their ES-300, for example.
Les was certainly messing around with what he called his log guitar, which was just basically a hunk of wood with pickups in it. And then he took the sides of an electric arch top and just stuck them on for appearances. Les, he didn't claim to invent the electric guitar, but he certainly didn't stop people from crediting him with it. And that was really unfortunate because he did not, no one individual invented the electric guitar. And there were lots of people who were probably even more influential than Les Paul with working with Gibson. One is Elvino Rey, who was primarily a pedal steel player who's extremely active with developing the electric guitar in the mid-30s with Les Paul.
But Les Paul really did become a household name and a very important touring artist. And certainly, by the 50s his duo with Mary Ford was really a hit. And Les also was a real innovator with multi-tracking and sound recording and production and things like that. So he was somebody that Gibson already knew that they'd already worked with. And he really was the right name to pair with the product to introduce something new and interesting like this.
SDPB: I'm going to show my ignorance. Are there Les Paul guitars, I mean, guitars that Les Paul actually built? And then there are a Gibson Les Pauls? And now I understand there are Les Paul style guitars?
Arian Sheets: Yeah. So, Les Paul was a tinkerer. His house in Mahwah, New Jersey was just jam-packed with stuff, guitars that he would saw up and reconfigure. I mean, the guy could not have a nice-looking guitar and not cut crude holes in it and stick this there and that there, I mean, he would Frankenstein anything because he was just after sounds. So Les would absolutely Frankenstein instruments together and make things for himself. And that way predates the actual development of the Les Paul model per se. Then you've got the Gibson Les Paul license, where they licensed his name and made this particular guitar. And then you've got, because it is a classic model, now you've got a lot of instruments that look like the Gibson Les Paul, but they're by many different companies. It's not something, it's way past being something where you're violating a design. But you do have to be careful about some things like, for instance, the styling of the letterhead that you don't cross Gibson and have them come after you, but the actual outline of the body and the type, it's really is a type of guitar now.
SDPB: Okay. And what differentiates that as a type from any other type? In what way is it really different from another solid body?
Arian Sheets: That's a really hard question to answer, how the Les Paul is different from any other solid body. I think it has to do with design preference of the player, what they like in terms of the sound, what artists they're modeling their own playing style after. There is something a little bit genre specific about certain designs of guitar. I mean, yes, you can use a Les Paul guitar to play Bach on the guitar if you want to. But it comes to be that the Les Paul is associated with certain styles of music or certain styles of playing and people might, the same player might choose a different type of guitar to play a different style of music. That goes back to the Explorer in that it really was not very popular when it was first released. Nobody really knew what to do with it, or where it fit in. Later, it became, that type of design became popular among heavy metal musicians. And you ended up with these kinds of designs that took the instrument even further.
And in some ways, they look like one of those martial arts weapons that you throw with all the pointy stuff all over them. And a lot of those, the design language originated with the Flying V and they Explorer. Whereas the Les Paul was definitely a more traditional looking instrument.
