1958 Gibson Les Paul Standard
Gibson had an uncanny knack for creating iconic instruments a few years before the general public was ready for them. The F-5 mandolin was first built in 1922 but it wasn’t until Bill Monroe started playing one in the 1940s that people began to cotton on to how special they were. Gibson made lots of four string banjos with flathead tonerings in the 1930s but only a tiny of handful of five-strings. When Earl Scruggs came on the scene with his flathead Granada suddenly a cottage industry started up to make five-string necks for all of those old tenors and plectrums. And then there is the sunburst Les Paul Standard, which was introduced in 1958. Gibson first started making the Les Paul Model in 1952 with a gold painted top and single coil P-90 pickups. When they renamed the guitar the Les Paul Standard and switched to a sunburst finish and the new-fangled humbucking pickups, guitarists barely noticed. Sales of the new style were lackluster and in 1960 Gibson dropped it from the catalog in favor of the new SG. Within a few years players realized that the Les Paul Standard was actually a great guitar and in 1968 Gibson reintroduced it and it’s been in the mainstay of the line ever since.
The guitar here is a very clean example from 1958. It shows signs of use like the belt buckle wear on the back and the nicks around the edges of the headstock, but no gross signs of abuse. The plastic keystone buttons shows signs of shrinking and decomposing, which seems to be the inevitable fate of most of the plastic used on vintage musical instruments. The humbucking pickups on this guitar were invented by Seth Lover, who actually designed them for use on lap steel guitars. (If you’re keeping score at home, humbuckers were first used on the Multiharp and the Royaltone in 1956.) I’ve been lucky enough to have played a couple of 1958 Les Pauls, and they really are everything people say they are. The have big, chunky necks, which I really like, and sustain that lasts forever. This particular guitar is priced at $180,000 (yikes!) but I have to say that if I had that much money burning a hole in my pocket I would be sorely tempted to buy this. If you’re also tempted, just call the fine folks at Gruhn Guitars and they will be happy to help you reduce that unsightly cash burden.
