Well, just the two of us got it to page 3. Let's see how far we can push this thing.
Tony will be so proud of us.
I am. I really am.
We made it to page 4.
I'm enjoying learning about guitars too. Always liked the Telecaster.
Okay, here's some more guitar learnin' for yuz.
The two instruments that people think of when they think of electric guitars are the Fender Stratocaster and the single-cutaway, carved-top Gibson Les Paul. We have to differentiate the particular Les Paul because the Les Paul name was applied to so many different and dissimilar guitars. The Les Paul Standard, Custom, and Deluxe are all carved-top models. The Les Paul Specials are not, and what has come to be known as the Gibson SG (made most famous by Tony Iommi (Black Sabbath), Frank Zappa, and Angus Young (AC/DC)) was originally known as a Les Paul. But the Les Paul people think of is the carved top style played by Jimmy Page, Peter Frampton, Slash, and many others.
Of these two, the undisputed bestseller is the Stratocaster, by a very, very long shot. Les Paul proposed to Gibson in 1941 that they build a solidbody electric guitar, and they told him to pound sand. A decade later, radio-repairman Leo Fender - who couldn't even play guitar - began marketing the Broadcaster which was renamed the Telecaster, and Gibson sniggered...until Fender sold a shit-ton of them. Then Gibson took notice. But rather than imitating Leo Fender, they built a "real" guitar. Not a couple of pieces of wood bolted together with pickups, but an honest-to-God fine musical instrument. It had a carved top like a violin, a set-in neck designed at an ergonomic angle, and was made of fine hardwoods - Mahogany, Rock Maple, Sugar Maple, and Brazilian Rosewood. By comparison, Fender's instruments were canoe-paddles, made of wood nobody really wanted - Red Maple and Ash that had been salvaged from swamps.
Problem was, Gibson's furniture-quality instrument was expensive. It was beautiful, but only professional musicians could justify the expense. See, what Leo Fender lacked in instrumental skill he more than made up for in understanding of manufacturing efficiencies. Ten or more of Fender's canoe paddles could be built in the time it took to build a single one of Gibson's guitars. and Gibson's instruments required luthiers to build them. Fender hired Hispanic laborers - plentiful in Southern California - and, significantly, a lot of women. Electric guitar pickups require lots of thin wire to be wound onto bobbins, and Fender used what essentially were modified sewing machines to do it. The most desirable vintage Fender guitars have pickups wound by Abigail Ybarra and her protege Josefina Campos.
So Gibson built a gorgeous, fine musical instrument that only successful musicians could afford, and Leo Fender built cheap instruments that a diligent teen with a paper route could manage to afford. And there were a lot of teenagers in the US in the 1950's. You can see the writing on the wall. The 1959 Les Paul guitar is now widely considered to be the apotheosis of electric guitar design - the best electric guitar ever created. Only about 750 of them were made in 1959, and the model was completely discontinued in 1960. Meanwhile, Fender sold far more Stratocasters in 1959 alone than there were Gibson Les Pauls built between their introduction in 1953 and discontinuation in 1960...and the Stratocaster was just one of Fender's lines.
After their discontinuation, those carved-top Les Pauls languished in music stores at bargain-basement prices, until a young British guitarist who was just beginning to make a name for himself in London encountered one - a 1960 model - in a music store on Charing Cross road in 1965 and bought it on the cheap. A year later he took it to a recording session with the band he'd recently joined, plugged it into a Marshall JTM-45 amplifier, turned the volume all the way up, and made a sound that sent shockwaves through the world and sent every subsequent rock star scouring music shops all over the world looking for every one they could get their hands on and eventually driving prices into the stratosphere. The young guitarist's name was Eric Clapton.
