MY GIBSON LG1

I will have owned my Gibson LG1 acoustic guitar for 50 years today. I bought it in New York, from a shop called We Buy Guitars on West 58th Street, on Boxing Day 1975 when I was Melody Maker’s US editor based in the Big Apple, the best job I ever had. I’d spent Christmas Day on my own, hung over after a party the night before, and since no one had bought me any presents I figured I’d buy something for myself. 

I’d always wanted to own a Gibson. The first one I ever played was a 335 at Gargrave Village Hall in, I think, 1966. It belonged to the guitarist in a group from Barrow-in-Furness who came on after my group, The Pandas, opened the dancing on a Saturday night. I can’t remember the name of the group that came on after us but they were far more accomplished than we were. Their lead guitarist used a Fender Strat, their rhythm man the Gibson and the bass player a Fender Jazz. After they’d played our bassist John Holmfield and I chatted with them and, a bit gingerly, asked if we could have a go on their guitars. The rhythm man handed me his 335 and for five minutes I was in heaven. I owned a Futurama III, a cheap Strat knock-off with a dodgy action, and until that moment didn’t know what it was like to play a top quality guitar with a low action, with strings that were millimetres away from the frets so you didn’t have to press hard to make the note ring. I wanted a guitar like that and although I bought and sold a few others in the meantime, it would take me another nine years to get one.

It was crisp and chilly on Boxing Day 1975. I woke up bright and early and decided to walk from my apartment on E78th Street, down through Central Park and over to West 48th, New York’s street of a thousand guitars. I tried Manny’s – the city’s most famous guitar shop – first but all they had in the Gibson acoustic line, mostly J45s and J200s, were a bit too pricey for me. We Buy Guitars was more down market and inside I found the LG1, which was just what I was looking for. It cost me $165, plus $13 tax. On the back of the headstock is number 126577 which means it was made at Gibson’s Kalamazoo Plant in Michigan in 1963, according to the website that dates guitars from serial numbers. I still have the receipt, below. 

It has lived with me ever since, my most loyal friend. I brought it back from America, via Amsterdam to Leeds-Bradford Airport, in 1978, and down to London the following year. Foolishly, I lent it to a minor-league rock musician (who shall remain nameless) in the mid-1980s and when he returned it there were loads of scratches around the bridge and sound hole. Two other (bigger) stars, Elvis Costello and Alan Hull, have also played it and both offered to buy it but I turned them down. It now lives with me at our home in Surrey, propped up against the wall in the room that used to be our daughter's bedroom, which I now use as my office. 

A few years ago, I noticed a crack in the back and, having seen him on the TV show Repair Shop, I took it to David Kennett at Flame Guitars in Sutton. For £200 he repaired the crack, fitted a new bridge and generally spruced it up a bit but he wasn’t able to eliminate all the scratches. No matter, it still plays beautifully. Last week, as a 50th birthday present for my faithful old guitar, I restrung it with expensive D’Addario (custom light, 11-52) strings and it sounds as good as new.

         My son Sam, who will one day inherit it, started learning to play on this guitar about 15 years ago and is now streets ahead of me. Although I love guitars and the sound they make, I was never much good as a guitarist but I wish I’d had a Gibson to learn on when I was his age. 

        You are never alone with a guitar. I’ve played my old Gibson when I’ve been drunk and when I’ve been sober, when I’ve been stoned and when I’ve been straight. I’ve played it when I’ve been happy and when I’m sad. Indeed, when my sister rang to tell me that our dad had died – not unexpectedly – in 1997, the first thing I did was take the guitar of out its case and strum a few bluesy chords; I did the same thing at the end of a love affair in 1987 and when an old and dear friend died in 2020. Eighteen months later, when my great pal Johnny Rogan died, I played 'Mr Tambourine Man' Byrds-style on it is his honour. I have never played it in public but if I was called upon to do so I would probably play the riff from 'Substitute' or maybe 'Waterloo Sunset', two of the handful of songs I’ve perfected over the years. 

    

        My faithful old guitar is sitting here in the room where I’m typing this. If it could smile at me I think it would, and if it could hear me I’d tell it that it was far and away the best thing I’ve ever bought for myself in my entire life – fifty years ago today. 

GIBSON GUITARS FACING BANCRUPTCY

The news that Gibson, manufacturers of top quality guitars, is facing bankruptcy saddens your man at Just Backdated and comes as a bit of a shock, but after reading reports of the company’s problems I can understand the reasons, if not exactly sympathise with them.

Regardless of what they make, manufacturing companies, especially American ones, stick to the principle that unless the company's profits increase each year they are dead in the water. In order to achieve this after saturation point for the product it manufactures has been reached, they diversify, usually into areas loosely connected with whatever it makes, in Gibson’s case premium headphones and hi-fi equipment. It turned out to be a disastrous move and according to a report in today’s Guardian the guitar maker is now £276m in debt.

It seems that the guitar market is static these days, probably a reflection on the way music is going, and that there is a glut of used guitars out there for sale. This isn’t surprising when you consider that many first-time buyers of guitars lose interest when faced with the reality that – like any musical instrument – learning to play with any degree of fluency takes time, patience and endless practice. There’s no warning on the box about this, so after a year their guitar is on sale second-hand. Also, in my experience, decent quality used Gibsons – or Fenders or any other good make – are as good as new ones anyway, sometimes even better. In view of this it seems a tad ironic that Fender now produce new ‘old’ guitars, ie replicas of vintage models, artificially scuffed and worn, at eye-watering prices, but either way there’s insufficient customers for new Gibsons, which are, of course, also a bit on the pricey side.  

About ten years ago, on behalf of Omnibus Press, I was involved in discussions with the MD of Gibson’s London branch, then located in Rathbone Street, to publish a photo book of rock stars playing their guitars. It never happened, largely because we couldn’t reach an agreement on who would pay the photographers, pay the production costs and how many free books Gibson would be entitled to once it was printed. All they offered to contribute was the right to use their logo on the cover. It seemed to me that Gibson was looking for a hi-end promotional tool for its products in the form of a coffee table book and wanted Omnibus to pay for it, a sort of have your cake and eat it situation. I demurred but there was something else that made me feel uneasy. I found myself out of kilter with this MD fellow who was a bit of a whizz-kid and not really a music man, just a chancer who looked on Gibson guitars as some sort of ‘product’, like washing machines or lawnmowers. He seemed oblivious of the company’s history, knew sod all about rock’n’roll and when I showed him the little book about Gibson guitars that illustrates the top of this post, he showed about as much interest in it as if I’d shown him a picture of my dog.

I was given the booklet by Gibson’s in-house PR man in 1974 when I visited the original Gibson factory in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Unlike the man in London 25 or so years later, he was genuinely proud to be associated with the company, and I wrote about my tour of the factory for Melody Maker and also in this post: http://justbackdated.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/the-gibson-factory.html

It was a fascinating experience but since then, in their relentless pursuit of growth – or corporate greed, depending on your point of view – the factory moved to Nashville, and the company opened two more plants, one in Memphis (now closed) and another in Montana. I can’t help but think that if they’d stayed in Kalamazoo, where Orville Gibson founded the company in 1902, they wouldn’t be in this mess.

MY GUITARS

Back in the eighties I had a friend who worked at Vintage & Rare, the classic guitar shop, at their Earls Court branch and every now and then on a Saturday afternoon I’d hop on the tube from Ravenscourt Park and pay him a visit. My motive, of course, was the opportunity to try out a few ace guitars in the soundproofed room, and of all the many guitars I tried the one that I remember best of all was an early fifties Fender Telecaster which, played through the top boost channel on a sixties Vox AC30, sounded too cool to be true. It was easy to play, too, and the twang from the bridge pick up was as good a tone from any guitar I’ve ever played, and that includes Strats and Les Pauls.     

         But somehow I never got around to owning a Tele – I think the one at V&R cost £4,000 back in the eighties – until last Saturday when I decided to go for a cheaper option, a Squier Tele, Japanese but made under licence from Fender whose logo is on the headstock. I tried three in the shop, two cheaper Tele-style models but they were rubbish, with thick fretboards and protruding frets, compared to the one I bought which is smooth, and the colour of butterscotch, like a Tele should be. I’ve spent five days with it now and don’t regret the investment one bit. The action is terrific, and played through my gratuitously powerful Fender 100 watt Roc-Pro amp, sounds to my ears not that much different from the one at V&R all those years ago. Although this was about 20 times cheaper, the real thing wasn’t 20 times better.

        

This guitar – pictured above – is actually the twelfth guitar I’ve owned, and being as how it’s the first one I’ve acquired since starting this blog, here’s my guitar history in all its unshapely glory.

         My first guitar, bought for me as a Christmas present in 1962 when I was 15, was a steel stringed acoustic shaped like a Spanish guitar with a round hole that probably cost less than £10. It was awful, of course – at the twelfth fret the strings must have been a centimetre high – though I didn’t know any better and neither did my dad who bought it for me. I persevered with it though, splitting my finger ends as I mastered E, A and B7, rock’s basic chords, and C, Am, F & G, the foundations of the Brill Building. We owned a grey Philips reel-to-reel tape recorder with a microphone attachment to tape your voice and also amplify it through the tiny speaker, so I figured that if you put the small plastic mike inside the guitar’s body you could electrify it; well, sort off as it fed back and sounded horrible but, as I say, I didn’t know any better but when I heard ‘Please Please Me’ in early 1963, and then ‘She Loves You’, I realised my timing as a guitar apprentice was spot on.

        

The next guitar I owned was a Futurama III, solid body, bright red with three pick-ups and designed to look a bit like a Strat, bought for £28 at a junk shop in York. A massive step up from the acoustic, I actually loved this guitar, polished it, changed the strings regularly and even bought a hard case for it. I also bought a Futurama 15 watt amp, not much poke really but good enough for what I needed, and a Watkins Copicat echo unit which, like some others bits of early gear I had, I now regret selling.

        

Then one night at Gargrave Village Hall when my group The Pandas were supporting a vastly superior group from Barrow-in-Furness their guitarist let me have a go on his Gibson ES-335, sunburst with dots on the neck, and for the first time in my life I realised what it was like to play a really good American-made guitar. My ambitions rose but I’d have to wait.

         The Pandas split up and I joined another group called Sandra & The Montanas, sticking with my trusty Futurama III on a combination of rhythm and lead but when I left them I had no further use for it and sold it for £20 to put towards an anonymous £40 acoustic 12-string, just because I wanted to see what they were like to play. It lasted until an offer came up to play bass in another group, so I swopped that (and the Copicat) for a used Hofner Violin bass, like Paul plays, which cost £35, and somehow converted the Futurama amp into a bass amp by getting a bass speaker, putting it into a new, home-made and very sturdy cabinet, and sticking the amp innards into a new box screwed on top. Well, it worked for a while. Then I realised I missed having a 6-string guitar around and bought an acoustic for about £40, make forgotten now, that looked a bit like a Gibson J45 and was a vast improvement on that first guitar I owned.

        

I left Yorkshire in 1969, just after I sold the Violin bass (another bad decision) and settled into a flat in Slough where I decided the time was right for me to get a decent guitar at last, so one day I took more money out of the bank than I should have and drove up to the West End to where the guitar shops were. I tried a few in shops in and around Charing Cross road and ended up, for reasons of cost (Fenders and Gibsons were beyond my pocket), with a used Gretsch Country Gentleman which set me back about £120, together with a fawn Vox AC30, six years old and a bit scuffed but going for a song at £60. Thus armed, I regularly pissed off the manager of the ladies hairdressers underneath the flat but thoroughly enjoyed myself with this combination for two or three years, including my early years on Melody Maker, just playing for my own amusement and hanging on to them both until MM sent me to America in 1973. I don’t regret selling the Country Gent but I do regret letting go of the AC30, especially as I’ve heard that the fawn ones are quite rare these days and actually worth more than the black and gold ones from that era. How was I to know that about 25 years down the line I'd need a decent amp again?

        

I didn’t take a guitar with me when I went to America. The only one I had at the time was the acoustic that looked like a J45 which I’d left at my dad’s house in Yorkshire and ended up giving to a friend. I figured I’d buy another one in America sooner or later but, in fact, it wasn’t until Christmas 1975 that I got around to it. As I recount in another post here, on Boxing Day in New York that year I found what I was looking for on West 48^th Street in a shop called We Buy Guitars, a used small-scale Gibson LG2 acoustic, circa 1958, so I paid the asking price of $165 + tax and slipped the receipt into the accessory compartment in its case where it has stayed ever since. 

In NY I enrolled in the Guitar Studies Centre, a music school run by Eddie Simon, Paul’s brother, to learn how to finger pick which I managed to do, after a fashion anyway, and because it was easier to learn this technique on a Spanish guitar I bought an Ovation with a wide fretboard and nylon strings for, I think, around $120. When I left NY I left the Ovation with a friend there and never saw it again but I made sure the LG2 came back to the UK with me. It is the guitar I’ve played more than any other, and on Boxing Day this year I’ll have owned it for 40 years.

Again as recounted elsewhere, around 1985, having settled in Hammersmith, I passed a newly opened guitar & amp shop in Chiswick called Gigstop and in its window was a Gibson Dove priced at £200. Knowing this was a bargain I went in and tried it out; nothing wrong with it, so I put down £20 deposit which was all I had on me and went back the next day with the remaining £180. I kept it for a year or two and eventually decided I didn’t need two Gibson acoustics and preferred the old one, so I advertised it in the back pages of Melody Maker for £500 ono, and got £450.

It’s probably worth £3K now, maybe more, another one I should have hung on to really. But the LG was all I needed and by now I had a sentimental attachment to it as well. Among those who’ve played (and coveted) it are Elvis Costello and Allan Hull.

         I was 50 in 1997, married with two young children, still hankering after an electric guitar but resigned to family responsibilities. So it was a complete surprise when I was presented with a beautiful American Strat, sunburst with a rosewood neck, at the party to celebrate.

Lisa, bless her, had asked friends to give her cash instead of buying me anything, so it could all be put into a kitty for one big present. New in 1997, I still have this great guitar. I bought a small practice amp but felt the need for something better, hence the big Fender amp in the photo behind the Squier Tele up above. Along the way I’ve bought a bunch of effects pedals too, the best a Line 6 kidney-shaped Pod that combines loads of FX.

         Which brings me more or less up to date. I bought a blue Fender electro-acoustic for (my son) Sam to take back to Uni with him when he started getting good, but he didn’t much like it and snatched the Strat instead.

I can’t say I blame him and, anyway, he’s better than me by a country mile now and deserves to have it. But I still hankered after an electric at home so bought the Squier Telecaster last weekend, throwing in the electro-acoustic as part exchange.

         I’ve never been much good as a guitarist, a happy amateur really, but along the way I’ve come to realise that good guitars are simply lovely things to own, objects of desire if you like. And since the age of 15 I’ve never been able to pass a guitar shop without going in to browse.

(The guitars and amps pictured are not necessarily mine, just pix I found on the internet that correspond with the models I am writing about.)

JIMMY PAGE: Session Man

While editing the early chapters of a forthcoming biography of Jimmy Page this week, three of which are devoted to his work as a session player between 1963 and 1966, my attention was drawn to the guitar playing on ‘My Baby Left Me’ by Dave Berry and ‘Leave My Kitten Alone’ by First Gear, just two examples of the casual brilliance Jimmy brought to records that weren’t even hits. Guitar playing like this certainly hadn’t appeared on records by The Beatles or Rolling Stones up to this point.

              Of ‘My Baby Left Me’, author Martin Power writes: “Alongside the likes of drummer Bobby Graham, bassist Alan Niven and, on occasion, legendary big band trombonist Don Lusher, Jimmy Page and Big Jim Sullivan helped form the crack team that Dave Berry had dreamed of. By the autumn of 1963, some of them had also cut Berry’s own favourite of all his studio recordings, a sterling cover of Elvis’ ‘My Baby Left Me’. ‘Yep, that’s the one I’d like to be known for,’ he said ‘Nothing like the Arthur Crudup original, nothing like Elvis, just our own version of the song. Jimmy Page on lead guitar, Alan Niven on slap bass – there were actually two basses on that, you know. But yes, a good song. I’m happy with that and really glad Jimmy was on it.’ Page was actually all over it. Providing a master class in snappy riffs and clattering chords throughout the verse and chorus before letting fly with a quite superb solo, Jimmy took Berry’s already spirited reading of ‘My Baby Left Me’ to another level.  ‘I remember the great solo that Jimmy did on that session,’ Sullivan later recalled. ‘It’s one of the best constructed rock solos on record.’”

Here’s a link to listen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqL71rZjb2s

Of ‘Leave My Kitten Alone’, Martin writes: “Page’s performance on First Gear’s ‘Leave My Kitten Alone’ must surely rank as one of the finer guitar solos of the sixties. Signed to Pye records and managed/produced by Shel Talmy, First Gear were at the time tipped for big things, their North eastern cocktail of Elvis-style rock’n’roll and Mersey-approved beat pop as gritty, energetic and potentially promising as Van Morrison’s Them. With Talmy at the helm, the band entered the studio in the autumn of 1964 to record a single version of Ernie K-Doe’s ‘A Certain Girl’. In itself no slouch, ‘A Certain Girl’ motored along nicely on the back of lead singer Dave Walton’s behind-the-beat falsetto, some pleasing female backing vocals and Jimmy’s countrified string bends.

              “But it was when First Gear and Page ran through the B-side, a cover of Little Willie John’s ‘Leave My Kitten Alone’ that Shel Talmy’s interest was truly peaked.  ‘Jimmy was about 18, 19 at the time, with bushy black hair, and very quiet,’ Dave Wilton recalled to the BBC. ‘But then he did this off the cuff, lightning guitar break on ‘Leave My Kitten…’. Well, Shel came racing down from the control room and said, ‘What did just you do to get that!’ So, he (told) Jimmy he was going to take it again. First take, Jimmy played it note-for-note perfectly.’ The resultant solo really was a thing of beauty. All twists, turns and racing speed pick work, Page’s contribution to ‘… Alone’ distilled all he had learnt from James Burton, Scotty Moore and Buddy Guy into just 23 seconds. Yet, there was also something else that was utterly distinctive and unique. At the start of his solo intrusion, Page’s guitar actually sounded like it was riding a wave of electricity. No distinct notes per se, more a wash of undulating sound. Quite unlike anything else Jimmy (or anybody else) had recorded up to that point, it was the first real pointer of where Page’s muse would take him in later years.”

Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ezPQBv32kBo

The book, entitled No Quarter: The Three Lives Of Jimmy Page, will be published in the spring of next year. Updates on its progress and further extracts will appear on Just Backdated over the next few months. 

THE BEATLES & THEIR GUITARS, Part 2

By the time The Beatles began recording sessions at Abbey Road in late 1966 for what would become Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band their instrumental palette had swelled to proportions unimaginable to the band that recorded Please Please Me back in 1963. Indeed, the music on Sgt Pepper represents a peak for The Beatles in terms of instrumental variety; the albums that followed, by and large, saw the group gradually return to basics, back to the guitars and drums they carted around Liverpool and Hamburg.

For Sgt Pepper George Martin was called upon to commission whole orchestras, to recreate fairground sound effects and to seek out a note whose pitch could be heard only by dogs. But whatever demands their soaring imagination placed on their long-suffering producer, the humble guitar remained at the foundations of their music. Photographs taken during the sessions show Paul using a newly acquired Fender Esquire (right handed – upside down) with his Epiphone Casino never far away, and for the increasingly complex bass parts he almost certainly turned to his Rickenbacker.

         George, meanwhile, was also using his Casino, and sometime around 1967 he opted to repaint his blue Stratocaster in psychedelic colours with a nod to Jamaica; red, green and yellow in various patterns with an Indian motif and adding the motto Be Bop A Lula. John, too, opted to redesign some of his guitars, spray-painting the back of his Epiphone, but for the most part during the Sgt Pepper sessions John played electric keyboard instruments mostly supplied by the studio.

         In February 1968 all of The Beatles headed off to Rishikesh in India to study meditation with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, a relaxing experience that allowed them plenty of time to work uninterrupted on songwriting. John and Paul brought along their Martin D-28s and, individually now, composed several of the songs that would appear on the ‘White Album’, as the double album The Beatles is generally known. Under the tuition of Donovan, another meditation guest at Rishikesh, John learned to play the ‘claw hammer’ finger style he utilises on ‘Dear Prudence’.

         Back in the UK, work started fitfully in May on the ‘White Album’ with the first version of John’s song ‘Revolution’ which was deemed too slow for a single. In the meantime, the trend for modifying guitars continued with all three guitar-playing Beatles taking their instruments to be sanded down in the belief that a natural finish produced a better tone. This process was applied to their Epiphones, John’s Gibson J-160E and Paul’s Rickenbacker bass.

         In between tracks for ‘The White Album’ the group also recorded the single, ‘Hey Jude’, featuring John on acoustic guitar and Paul, who added his bass part later, on piano. Not until the Love album release in 2005 could the virtuosity of Paul’s high-end bass work on this song – particularly on the fading chorus – be fully appreciated. ‘Hey Jude’, of course, was the perfect single for the group to launch their Apple label so ‘Revolution’ was consigned to the B-side, and a faster version was laid down with Paul on Rickenbacker bass and John playing his Epiphone Casino through a fuzz box.

During the ‘White album’ sessions George was presented with a dark red Gibson Les Paul by his friend Eric Clapton, the same instrument on which Clapton played the solo on ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’. Clearly taken with it, George used this Les Paul for much of the rest of 1968 and into 1969, and can be seen playing it on the promo clip for ‘Revolution’, alongside John with his now blonde Casino and Paul on one of his old Hofner violin basses.

         It was round about this time that Paul somehow got it into his head that The Who were embarking on the heaviest rock music ever recorded and, not to be outdone, wrote and sang ‘Helter Skelter’, perhaps the most controversial Beatle song. Leaving aside the regrettable Charles Manson connection, ‘Helter Skelter’ is among the most rowdy, unrefined songs the group ever recorded, with wildly distorted guitars, John plucking a Fender VI six-string bass, and a false ending before a resumption that sounds not unlike The Who climaxing their stage act, with Ringo complaining loudly about the blisters on his fingers. In complete contrast ‘Blackbird’ features Paul solo, softly finger-picking his Martin D-28 with casual precision.

         John too had demonstrated his versatility by shifting gracefully from Yellow Submarine’s ‘Hey Bulldog’, another slice of heavy Beatle pie, to more sensitive work on the ‘White Album’ like ‘Dear Prudence’ and the double-entendre filled ‘Happiness Is A Warm Gun’. ‘Bulldog’, however, features John mainly on piano but George crunches in with the recurring ascending riff, and contributes a suitably heavy solo, on his Gibson SG.

         With the ‘White Album’ sessions concluded the group was in a state of disarray, uncertain about their future, and only Paul’s enthusiasm held them together. The sessions for what became Let It Be were fractious and unfulfilled and, ultimately, the tapes were shelved until after the release of Abbey Road, the last album The Beatles recorded together. Only two songs from the Let It Be sessions escaped early and were released as a single in April 1969, the toe-tapping rocker ‘Get Back’ for which Paul resurrected one of his Hofner violin basses – the set-list from the Beatles last concert at San Francisco’s Candlestick Park still taped to it – while John played the solo on his sanded down Epiphone and George strummed the chugging rhythm on his dark brown Telecaster, as he did on the single’s emotional roller-coaster B-side ‘Don’t Let Me Down’.

         Unusually, only John and Paul appear on ‘The Ballad Of John And Yoko’, John’s diary-like song about his eventful marriage and honeymoon. John plays acoustic and electric guitars, probably his Martin and Epiphone, while Paul plays bass on the Rickenbacker and, not for the first time, drums. The highlight of the B-side, ‘Old Brown Shoe’, is the rumbling bass riff on which Paul’s line is doubled up by George playing his Telecaster through a Leslie speaker.

         The Beatles convened as a group for the final time at Abbey Road during July and August 1969. For the most part Paul returned to his Rickenbacker for bass playing, and Martin and Casino when he played regular guitar, as did John, while George used his Les Paul and two Fenders. On ‘I Want You’, John’s cri de couer for Yoko, he and George overdubbed their electric guitars over and over again on the relentless, distorted arpeggio while John added the increasingly strident white noise on a Moog synthesiser.

         The Beatles’ swan song, at least in the UK, was the ‘Let It Be’ single, on which – surprisingly – John played bass on a Fender VI bass which Fender had given them around the time of the ‘White Album’ sessions, and George played his Telecaster. ‘Across The Universe’ was started back in early 1968 but had proved troublesome, and John was evidently unhappy with the way it turned out, initially offering it as a track on a charity album to benefit the World Wildlife Fund. In the end the song appeared on the Let It Be album, and features, predominantly, John strumming his Martin with George adding background touches on tamboura and sitar.
          In little under 15 years John, Paul and George had progressed from their earliest, poorly-made guitars on which they first learned to play to a vast arsenal of the very best American-made electric and acoustic guitars that money could buy. In many ways The Beatles lit the touch paper for the massive upsurge in guitar sales that occurred during the sixties and which, even today, makes the guitar the dominant instrument in all of rock music. The manufacturers of Fenders, Gibsons, Martins, Rickenbackers and the rest owe The Beatles a huge debt but the extraordinary music that the group produced was the product of their imaginations rather than the instruments on which it was performed. While they certainly couldn’t have made an album like Abbey Road with their Gallotone Champion, Zenith 17 and Egmond guitars, it takes more than simply great instruments to make music like The Beatles.

THE BEATLES & THEIR GUITARS, Part 1

A couple of years ago I was asked to write introductions to four Beatles sheet music books aimed at guitarists and decided to talk about about the instruments they used. The ‘guitar’ book was in two parts, one dealing with the period up to and including 1966, the second 1967 onwards. Then there was a bass book and finally a drum book. This is the first ‘guitar’ intro, which will be followed by the other three over the next few days.

First and foremost The Beatles was a band of guitarists. As a teenager John Lennon picked up the guitar because Elvis played one, and he learned a few rudimentary chords to front his skiffle group The Quarrymen. John invited Paul McCartney to join because Paul was more advanced on the guitar than him and knew how to tune the instrument properly. George Harrison arrived several months later because Paul, and eventually John, both recognised his superior guitar skills. The drums – and the band went through several drummers before Ringo arrived – seem in hindsight to have been an afterthought or at least a perpetual problem, just as they are with most bands of beginners.

         John, Paul and George taught themselves to play. John might have picked up a banjo chord or two from his mother Julia, Paul probably inherited some musical talent from his father, who played trumpet in a Liverpool jazz band, and George had a lesson or two from an older player, but when they got together they learned to forge their own style, expanding the guitar’s rock vocabulary as they did so. Countless hours of honing their craft in Liverpool and Hamburg, much of it in front of demanding audiences, led to an instrumental fluency that not only matched their rivals but bred in them an instinctive sense of musical communication. Once they’d mastered these skills they were ready to take on the world.

         John was a rhythm guitarist, one of the best ever. His speciality was not so much his encyclopaedic knowledge of chords, some of them his own invention, but his immaculate timing and a fearsomely powerful right hand strumming action that powered the group, the engine that propelled it forward. Paul learned to play a regular guitar first but took over on bass at the beginning of 1961 and, probably because he knew his way around a piano, became one of the most inventive, melodic bassists of his generation, the group’s harmonic core. George, a rockabilly fanatic, was simply in love with his instrument from the word go and determined to master every style he could, and to use his skills on any other fretted instrument he encountered, not least the sitar. He was the group’s instrumental backbone.

         In the mid-fifties, when John, Paul and George first decided to learn to play guitar, the choice of instruments was very limited. Guitars were a novelty then and those that were available to British schoolboys were cheap and badly made, with poor actions and inaccurate fretting. Because of import restrictions, well constructed American models – Fenders, Gibsons and Gretsches – had yet to arrive in the UK so the three future Beatles split their fingertips on poor quality guitars bought for them by mums and dads who knew no better. This was not necessarily a bad thing: learning on an inferior instrument demands a greater degree of dedication and perseverance than learning on a quality guitar, and makes the eventual upgrade that much more satisfying.

         Accordingly, John’s first guitar was a Gallotone Champion which was bought for him by Julia through mail-order, and which he is seen playing in the now famous photograph of The Quarrymen at the Woolton Church Fete on July 6, 1957, the day he met Paul. His future partner’s first guitar was a Zenith 17 which, because he was left-handed, Paul would have had to restring and play upside down, with the scratch plate above the soundhole and not below. Both subsequently acquired Hofner Club 40s, superior certainly and better looking but still far from ideal. George’s first guitar, meanwhile, was a second-hand Dutch-made Egmond but by the time he joined the Quarrymen he’d graduated to a Hofner President.

         It wasn’t until the Beatles went to Hamburg in 1960 that they equipped themselves with anything approaching professional instruments. John went for a Rickenbacker 325, a short-scale solid body, and Paul’s first bass, after the Hofner he inherited from Stuart Sutcliffe, was the famous violin bass, also made by Hofner, the first of many similar models he would own. George’s first electric guitar was a Futurama III, an inferior Stratocaster copy made in Czechoslovakia by Resonet, but in 1961 he got his first Gretsch, a Duo Jet and, in 1963, a Country Gentleman designed for Gretsch by the country guitarist Chet Atkins. By now both John and George had also acquired Gibson J-160E acoustic guitars with single electric pickups at the base of the fretboard, which they are seen playing in early photos and TV appearances.

         John had also taught himself to play the harmonica, an instrument he first picked up when he was 12. He can be heard playing it, in intros that establish the melody line, on The Beatles’ first three singles ‘Love Me Do’, ‘Please Please Me’ and ‘From Me To You’, though from this point on it’s guitars to the fore, as it was for most of the songs on their debut album. Remarkably, ten of the 14 songs on Please Please Me were recorded at EMI Studios, Abbey Road, London, in one day – February 11, 1963 – and for the two most upbeat songs on the record, ‘I Saw Her Standing There’ and ‘Twist And Shout’, it’s likely that John and George used the Rickenbacker 325 and Gretsch Duo Jet respectively. ‘Twist And Shout’ was the final song to be recorded that day, at 10 in the evening, and some reports have John – grappling with a cold and his voice raw from the day’s efforts – stripped to the waist to belt out what was, at the time, the most frenzied piece of pop music recorded this side of the Atlantic.

         After a break for touring The Beatles reconvened at Abbey Road on 1 July to record ‘She Loves You’, the song most associated with that chaotic summer of Beatlemania. A photograph taken in the back yard at Abbey Road that day shows John with his Gibson acoustic and George with a new Gretsch Country Gentleman, a double cutaway model, on which he would have played the song’s descending arpeggios.

         The sessions for The Beatles’ second album were spread out during the summer and autumn of 1963 but, all the same, only seven days from their hectic schedule were set aside for recording the songs. By now George was using his Country Gentleman in the studio for solos and fills, and for rhythm John alternated between his Gibson acoustic and the Rickenbacker which he used for the fast-paced, dense rhythm track on ‘All My Loving’. The final single of 1963, the one that broke them in America, was ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’, on which the instrumentation was probably the same as ‘She Loves You’ and, indeed, ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’.

         The Beatles’ third album, A Hard Day’s Night, was the first on which all the songs were group compositions and by this time George had bought his Rickenbacker 360-12, the 12-string with the jangly tone that was to inspire Roger McGuinn’s Byrds, and which can be heard on the title track and ‘You Can’t Do That’. In the studio George was also using a José Ramírez Spanish guitar, as heard on ‘And I Love Her’.

         For ‘I Feel Fine’ both John and George doubled up on the tricky riff, with John using the Gibson acoustic which was prone to feedback, hence the iconic burst of electronic whine at the beginning of the record. It wasn’t until they learned something about studio techniques that The Beatles realized a song could fade out at the end instead of coming to a natural climax, and for ‘Eight Days A Week’ they reversed the effect, fading in at the beginning with George’s chiming Rickenbacker and John’s acoustic Gibson playing in unison.

         In 1965 The Beatles expanded their guitar collections considerably, with John, Paul and George all buying – or more likely being given – Epiphone Casinos, and Paul adding a Rickenbacker 400IS bass to his array of Hofners. John and George also got sonic blue Fender Strats – John played his on ‘Ticket To Ride’ – and George added a Tennessean to his collection of Gretsches. Paul also acquired an Epiphone Texan acoustic for writing in the studio and performing ‘Yesterday’ live.

         As a result of all these acquisitions it becomes increasingly difficult to state accurately what instruments were played on what songs, especially as Paul was inclined to play the odd guitar part himself as well as bass. George had bought his first sitar in time for the sessions for Rubber Soul, and can be heard playing it on ‘Norwegian Wood’. During 1966 he acquired a Gibson SG Standard and can be seen playing it in the promotional films for ‘Paperback Writer’ and ‘Rain’, both of which were shot at Abbey Road.

         Photographs taken by Robert Freeman in Studio 2 at Abbey Road during the Revolver sessions show all manner of guitars racked up behind the group. The more successful they became the more they were inclined to experiment, and more instruments were used. Sooner or later – like all superstar rock musicians – they were given guitars as presents by other musicians, though the evidence suggests they didn’t give many away themselves. Those they did have become extremely desirable collectors’ items which fetch astronomical sums at auctions of rock and roll memorabilia.