Keef’s old ’Burst apparently relieved one collector of a million-plus dollars Which meant nothing to me when I was getting £15 a week. I remember him saying, like it was just a few days ago, ‘you should get one of these. His name was Robert Johnson, very good guitar player. He was always around the Denmark Street shops. (Image credit: Neil Godwin/Future) Price Explosionīernie was not only one of the first guitarists to realise that ’Bursts were special instruments, by the late 70s he also became conscious of their increasing value. “I’ve also been told that not all PAFs were created the same. If you look at the back of a Les Paul and see that the grain is very swirled, you know the mahogany grain is not as straight, I think that affects the sustain of the body. I’m not a scientist but I have been told that it has a lot to do with wood grain. “There are ’59s that sound better and play better than others. Some of our guitars might not have the most flamed tops, and some of them have unbelievably flamed tops, but I can assure you that every one that we have sounds great, and feels good, the way it’s supposed to. That’s just to make sure that we got the right combinations. “Of the 36 ’Bursts we have, I have probably turned away three or four for every one that I’ve bought. But don’t expect him to buy your ’Burst just cos it’s old. As the curator and CEO of the new Songbirds Guitar Museum in Chattanooga, Tennessee, he has almost 40 years of experience tracking down and purchasing exceptional vintage guitars. But the important thing was that they sounded good.”ĭavid Davidson agrees that not all ’Bursts are keepers. I mean, we knew they were good-looking guitars.
But we never thought about how good the Sunburst was or the flame. Someone said, ‘Oh, you got to change those. You changed them whether it was necessary or not. Actually, the heads were probably the only thing we looked at because we changed them to Grovers. None of us were looking at the contours, or the condition of the heads. “With my generation, it was more about if you like what it’s doing when you plug it in. You don’t think like that when you’re 22 years old. I didn’t know it would become a million-dollar guitar.
“I already had one - The Beast - and I got offered double the money I’d paid for the Keith ’Burst in 1974. “It’s not that it was bad,” he continues.
(Image credit: Neil Godwin/Future) Double 'Burst Bernie didn’t hang onto the guitar either.
The Les Paul wasn’t in his possession for the long haul. Perhaps it was because Keef was more of a rhythm player in the early days, or the fact that he was seen with so many different guitars at that time and since, but he never became a ’Burst icon like Eric. “He’s the unsung hero of the ’Burst,” says Bernie. Yes, Eric Clapton might have turned the world on its head with his Beano work in 1966, but Keith Richards was using one with The Stones on stuff like their ’64 US tour, on the Ed Sullivan Show, and to record a tune called (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction. “You know the famous one I let go because it wasn’t as good as The Beast? That was the Keith Richards one.” That is, the notion that every ’Burst is a stone killer. He’s also happy to dispel one of the greatest myths about the Les Paul Standards made between 19. Few men are better placed to explain the attributes of a ’Burst than Bernie. Especially if that rock star is ex-Whitesnake guitarist Bernie Marsden, longtime owner of ‘The Beast’, an exceptional example of a 1959 Les Paul Standard. Yet, how many of us have actually clasped, let alone played, the real McCoy? Should we simply trust the eyewitness accounts of rock stars that put the original guitars out of our reach by playing them in the first place?
#1960 les paul paf reading free
The plot thickens with Peter Green’s LP sound on John Mayall’s Blues Breakers’ A Hard Road and his early Fleetwood Mac stuff.īernie's happy to dispel one of the greatest myths about the Les Paul Standards made between 19 - the notion that every ’Burst is a stone killerįigure in testimony from cats like Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page, US blues icon Michael Bloomfield, Free genius Paul Kossoff, one-time Stone Mick Taylor, the much-missed Gary Moore and current ’Burst evangelist Joe Bonamassa and it’s obvious why few of us dare to argue that the late 50s Les Pauls are the pick of the six-string litter. But why do so many of us accept that the 1958-60 Les Pauls, and more specifically the ’59, are the best electric guitars ever made?Įxhibit A is Eric Clapton’s blistering tone on John Mayall’s Blues Breakers 1966 ‘Beano’ album.