Page 18 - Guitar Classics Magazine - The Les Paul Bible 2019

THE ORAL HISTORY OF THE LES PAUL

“Mary came down. He says: ‘Play this, Mary, I want
to hear and see what you think of it.’ She took it and
played it, and she said: ‘I love this.’ Les said, ‘Let me
have it,’ and he played it some more, and he turned
to Mary and said: ‘Look, they’re getting too close to
us, Mary, I think we ought to join them. What do you
think?’ She says: ‘I like it.’”

Les Paul
“It was a lat-topped guitar at that time, it was not an
archtop. I designed everything on there except the
belly, the arched top. I had a lat-top. I sat there with
Maurice Berlin at CMI, and he said: ‘You know, I like
violins.’ And he took me through his vault and showed
me his collection, and he says: ‘Would you consider
making it in an archtop?’, and I said I’d love it. He
said: ‘Nobody else – Fender, nobody else – can do that,
and we have the facilities to do it.’ So I said: ‘By all
means, let’s do it.’ So we made them.”

Ted McCarty
“Les had taken his Epiphone and had made a lot of
changes to it, put some pickups on it that he had
made. I had been after him for a couple of years,
trying to talk him into Gibson, hadn’t been successful.
So I said: ‘That’s what we want to do, we want to call
this the Les Paul model.’ I told him that we would
“I SAID: ‘I’VE GOT SOMETHING HERE, pay him a royalty. I’m not an attorney, and nor was
Phil Braunstein, nor was Les. So we started making
LES, THAT I’D LIKE YOU TO SEE.’ WE a contract. And I have a theory about contracts. The
more simple they are, the better they are. If you have
HAD AN AMP AND WE HOOKED THIS ive pages of gobbledegook, what I call ‘boilerplate’,
you hire a smart lawyer and he’ll ind loopholes in it.
GUITAR UP. HE PLAYED IT – AND A simple one, anyone can understand. So we started
out on it, irst thing we did was write out how much
HE PLAYED IT AND HE PLAYED IT…” we would pay him per guitar.
“We agreed it all that night. So I came back to the
factory and now we had a Les Paul model. I’d been
trying to get Les to let us make him a guitar for years,
FACING PAGE LEFT The Log – MAKING THE DEAL with no success, but we inally had something that he
Les Paul’s original prototype Ted McCarty liked. So then we started to produce them.”
“Les and his group were at a hunting lodge in
FACING PAGE RIGHT
Delaware Water Gap, which is up in the mountains GOLDTOP/CUSTOM/BURST
This beautiful ’59 Burst was
in Pennsylvania. I had been talking to Les by phone, Ted McCarty
the inspiration for Gibson
and I talked to Phil Braunstein, his inancial manager, “We did the gold inish because it covered the
Custom’s 2016 Minnesota
a New York accountant. So I made a date with Phil, blemishes in the wood, the cosmetic appearance.
Burst, 39th in a series of
painstaking recreations lew into New York, had breakfast, got in his car, and If it was maple [like the later Burst], it had to be
of storied instruments I had this [prototype] guitar with me. iddleback maple, had to be perfect, couldn’t have
“It was an all-day drive from New York down any blemishes, couldn’t have any mineral streaks in it.
FACING PAGE BOTTOM The
there, we got there at night, pouring down with rain, But we used to cover it up with that [gold] paint.
lack of ingerboard binding
a miserable night. “I said: ‘I’ve got something here, “We added the Les Paul Custom just to have
and the diagonal bridge pickup
Les, that I’d like you to see.’ We had an ampliier another one. You have all kinds of players out there
height-adjustment screws
denote that this now-heavily and we hooked this guitar up to it. He took it, and that like this and like that. Chevrolet has a whole
modded 1952 Goldtop model he played it – and he played it and he played it. bunch of models, Ford has a whole bunch of models.
is one of the irst ever made There was this balcony upstairs with bedrooms And there was a good reason for it. We were having
leading off it, and Mary Ford was upstairs, so he more and more of a problem getting real good clear
hollered up: ‘Mary, come down here, I want you mahogany from Honduras. We’d get mahogany and
to see this.’ it’d have streaks in it and whatnot. So that Les Paul
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