The SG Guitar Book: 50 Years of Gibson's Stylish Solid Guitar

By Tony Bacon

To many vintage guitar fans, it seems inconceivable that Gibson dumped the Sunburst Les Paul in 1960 and, during the following year, introduced a completely new design, the one that we know now as the SG (“solid guitar”).

At the time, however, it made good business sense. Sales of the Les Paul were faltering, and Gibson decided to blow a breath of fresh air through its solidbody electric guitar line. The company described the result as an “ultra-thin, hand-contoured, double-cutaway body.” The modernistic amalgam of bevels and points and angles was a radical departure, and this new book tells the story of all the SG models that followed: the Junior, Special, Standard, Custom, and more.

There are interviews with and stories about Gibson personnel through the years, and all the major SG players, including Pete Townshend, Frank Zappa, Eric Clapton, Angus Young, George Harrison, Gary Rossington, Tony Iommi, and Derek Trucks.

In the tradition of Tony Bacon's bestselling series of guitar books, The SG Guitar Book is three great volumes in one package: a collection of drool-worthy pictures of the coolest guitars; a gripping story from the earliest prototypes to the latest exploits; and a detailed collector's database of every production SG model ever made.

• Language: English
• Publisher: RowmanLittlefield
• Release date: Aug 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9781493079261

Book preview

THE SG GUITAR BOOK

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THE SG GUITAR BOOK

50 YEARS OF GIBSON’S STYLISH SOLID GUITAR

TONY BACON

A BACKBEAT BOOK

First edition 2015

Published by Backbeat Books

An Imprint of Hal Leonard Corporation

7777 West Bluemound Road,

Milwaukee, Wl 53213

www.backbeatbooks.com

Devised and produced for Backbeat Books by

Outline Press Ltd

3.1D Union Court, 20-22 Union Road,

London SW4 6JP England

www.jawbonepress.com

ISBN: 978-1-4803-9925-9

Text copyright © 2015 by Tony Bacon. Volume copyright © 2015 by Outline Press Ltd.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission, except by a reviewer quoting brief passages in a review. For more information you must contact the publisher.

DESIGN: Paul Cooper Design

EDITOR: Siobhan Pascoe

Printed by Regent Publishing Services Limited, China

15 16 17 18 19 5 4 3 2 1

CONTENTS

Cover

Half Title

Title

Copyright

Contents

THE SG GUITAR STORY

EARLY YEARS

THE 1960s

THE 1970s

THE 1980s

THE 1990s

RECENT YEARS

ENDNOTES

THE REFERENCE LISTING

WHAT’S HERE

MODEL LISTING

MODEL TIMELINE

SERIAL NUMBERS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

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THE SG GUITAR STORY

EARLY YEARS

A small club in Jacksonville, Florida, about 1990. Derek Trucks, eleven years old, is sitting in with the grownups again. He has his new SG and he’s standing in front of a Fender Super Reverb amp. He hits a note and it just takes off on him. Now that’s what I’m looking for, he thinks to himself, that’s the sound I’ve been wanting to hear. The young Derek is transported. There’s something almost magical about this experience, and as he plays more notes, he begins to feel as if the guitar is some kind of sail and that it’s picking up all the right frequencies. It’s exhilarating stuff, and he wants more of it. His wish will be granted.

For Gibson, the story of the SG began back in 1958, a remarkable year for the company. It was the year Gibson first offered guitarists the radical Explorer and the pointy Flying V. It was the year Gibson gave the Les Paul Goldtop a fresh sunburst finish, sold its first double-neck electrics, and came up with the revolutionary semi-solid ES-335. And it was the year Gibson launched a new double-cutaway body for the Les Paul Junior and the Les Paul TV. That’s right: all that in one year. Today, we recognise the importance of this astonishing list of introductions. Yet alongside the mighty V, Explorer, Burst, and 335, it’s easy to overlook those Les Pauls with their gently rounded double cutaways. Nevertheless, that practical and apparently humble design change started a sequence of events that would lead to a completely new double-cutaway solidbody Gibson. Those two double-cut Les Pauls marked the start of the story of the SG.

Gibson presented the new rounded-double-cut body style in its promo magazine, the Gibson Gazette. Both the Les Paul Junior and Les Paul TV guitars have taken on a brand new look - double cutaway body design plus a lovely new finish for each, the report said, describing the new body as ultra-modernistic in appearance and practical in performance. The Gazette said the design "gives these instruments a sleek, well balanced look while providing maximum access to all 22 frets. This is a feature every guitarist desires - to reach full chords down the entire length of the neck. All music becomes easy and effortless with the new double-cutaway."¹ That word access would become a key feature in the unfolding story of the SG. For now, however, Gibson was absorbed with the sales of its new thing: solidbody electric guitars.

Gibson had introduced the Les Paul in 1952, a couple of years into Ted McCarty’s tenure as president at the firm. When he joined in 1948, Gibson was struggling to get back to full-scale guitar production after World War II. The Gibson Mandolin-Guitar Manufacturing company was founded back in 1902 when a group of businessman joined with Orville Gibson, who’d been making fretted instruments in Kalamazoo for about fifteen years. The Chicago Musical Instrument Company (CMI) bought a controlling interest in Gibson in 1944. Since 1936, McCarty had been at Wurlitzer, an instrument company and music-store chain, where he’d trained as a manager. Maurice Berlin at CMI recognised McCarty’s qualities as an experienced and capable music-business exec and appointed him as Gibson’s general manager. Two years later, in 1950, Berlin promoted McCarty to the top spot and made him president at Gibson.

One of McCarty’s early tasks was to get the factory back to efficient working by improving the way the various departments communicated with each other and refining the production systems. McCarty told me: Gibson had foremen in this department and that department, but then I’d come across one that didn’t have anybody in charge. You can’t run a factory like that. So I chose a man, John Huis, who had been with Gibson a great many years. He was a foreman at that time, in the finishing department. I made him superintendent, and he and I worked together. We decided that every day we would go through the factory and find one operation that we thought could be improved.

When they weren’t thinking about their own products, managers at all the big American guitar manufacturers, including Gibson, would keep an eye on their rivals’ new models. This usually meant no more than wandering over to a booth at one of the regular trade-show gatherings for a casual spy on an opponent, and checking out the ads and news items of competing firms in the trade press. But as the new decade dawned, some unexpected developments called for specific action.

One of the first signs of something distinctly new in electric guitars had come with the 1950 edition of The Purchaser’s Guide To The Music Industries, an annual listings book published by the US magazine The Music Trades. An ad inside by Fender Fine Electric Instruments of California revealed a ripple of individuality from a company that so far had made little impression. Among its steel guitars and small amplifiers was a rather thin-looking cutaway electric guitar. Esquire was the tagline next to the picture of the instrument, adding: The newest thing in Spanish guitars - fine action, new tone, perfect intonation. What Fender didn’t say explicitly turned out to be a fundamental point: this was a solidbody electric guitar. It was the first of its kind to be sold commercially, and it would change guitars, guitar-playing, and music. But not immediately.

In the years that followed, Fender gradually expanded on that first solidbody electric, quickly changing the model’s name to Telecaster and then adding a solid electric bass model, the Precision. Gibson, like its rivals, had its ear to the ground and could not let this new idea slip by unchallenged. Without too much delay, McCarty set a team to work on a Gibson solidbody, and it took them about a year to develop satisfactory prototypes. McCarty decided that Les Paul, the most famous guitar player in America after his smash hit ‘How High The Moon’, would be the

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1958 GIBSON FLYING V

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1958 GIBSON EXPLORER

■ Gibson had a busy year in 1958, introducing the odd-shaped modernistic Explorer (below) and Flying V (above) and changing the finish of the Les Paul Goldtop to sunburst (right), among others. The company was worried about the way that sales of some of its solidbody electric models had fallen and set about designing and issuing a series of new and revised models in an attempt to revive interest among guitarists. The Flying V and the new semi-solid ES-335 were featured in the 1958 Gibson catalogue (right), as were the existing Les Paul models which for now remained in the original single-cutaway style. However, Gibson also had in mind a design change for some (and eventually all) of the Les Pauls.

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1958 GIBSON LES PAUL STANDARD

best man to endorse the new guitar. Gibson launched its solidbody Les Paul Model, known today as the Goldtop, in 1952.

The Goldtop sold well at first. Electric guitars were catching on and the solidbody style took off, providing Gibson with some good guitars to challenge Fender’s increasing sales. In 1954, Gibson’s historian Julius Bellson estimated that back in 1938, hollowbody electric guitars made up no more than ten percent of Gibson guitar sales, but he saw that the proportion of electrics to the rest had risen to fifteen percent by 1940, to fifty percent by 1951, and that by 1953, following the advent of the new Gibson solidbody, no less than sixty-five percent of the company’s total guitar sales were of electrics. Gibson’s electric line at that time included nine electric hollowbody models - Super 400CES, L-5CES, ES-5, ES-350, ES-295, ES-175, ES-150, ES-140, ES-125 - plus the solidbody Les Paul Goldtop.

In a move designed to widen the market for the solidbody guitar, Gibson issued two further Les Paul models in’54, the cheaper Junior and the fancier Custom. A year later it added the Les Paul TV model, essentially a Junior in what Gibson referred to as a limed mahogany finish, and the Special, a two-pickup Junior. Of course, we know now that the Les Paul in a few of its various guises would become a real star and something of a world-beater. Back in 1957, however, Gibson was worried by a stall in the sales figures.

The success of the original Les Pauls peaked around 1956. The Junior sold a record-so-far 3,129 units that year and then slipped back (to 2,959) in’57. The Goldtop had scored best in its second year, 1953 (2,245), and the Custom in’56 (489), but again both models had since been on a downward trend (in’57, the Goldtop sold 598 and the Custom 283). The Special was the only one with any kind of increase, but Gibson’s general conclusion was that many musicians were still cautious of this new-fangled solidbody electric guitar - and that they needed new features to keep musicians interested.

The new features that Gibson settled on for now were those rounded double-cutaway bodies and fresh finishes for the Junior and TV, introduced late in 1958 and also applied to the Special soon in the new year. Gibson was clearly taken with the double-cut style, which it also used on its new 335 and double-neck models of 1958. For the Les Pauls, Gibson redesigned the existing flat-topped single-cut Junior and Special shape, flattening the inside of the lower cutaway and rounding off the horn a little, adding an upper cutaway, and pushing the twenty-two-fret neck further out. The P-90 pickups and the generally simple vibe remained. Ted McCarty told me the redesign was a reaction to players’ requests. They wanted to be able to thumb the sixth string, is how he put it, but they couldn’t do it if the only cutaway was over on the treble side. So we made those Les Pauls with another cutaway, so they could get up there. We did things that the players wanted, as much as anything.³

The Junior’s new look was enhanced with a fresh cherry-red finish, while the revised TV adopted a rather more yellow-ish finish than the single-cut version (Gibson called it cream). When the double-cut design was applied in 1959 to the Special, the result was not an immediate success because of a design mistake, a rarity for Gibson at the time. The company’s boffins overlooked the fact that the rout for the neck pickup in the Special’s new body weakened the neck-to-body joint, leaving the neck likely to snap right off at this point. The error was soon corrected by moving the neck pickup further down into the body, which resulted in a stronger joint. Gibson would seem to forget this lesson, however, when it came to another double-cutaway solidbody design with the neck pushed out of the body - of which more shortly. Anyway, the double-cut Special, too, was offered in the new cherry or yellow finishes, but - and this still causes confusion today - the yellow Special was never called a TV model. The single-pickup flat-top Les Paul is a Junior, unless in limed or cream or yellow finish, when it’s a TV; and the two-pickup model is always a Special, whatever the finish.

Gibson also started a move to change the name of its solidbody series. Ted McCarty told me later that the company began removing Les Paul’s name from guitars in 1959 because the association was becoming less of a commercial bonus for Gibson. Les Paul was the perfect choice when Gibson had looked around for a suitable endorser to promote its Fender-rivalling solidbody in 1952. But his popularity as a recording artist had declined, with no more hits after 1955. Gibson figured a change was overdue.

There’s no evidence to tell us who chose the new name to replace Les Paul, but whoever it was, he went for simplicity. The new name was SG. It stood, modestly and straightforwardly, for Solid Guitar, and it began to appear in Gibson publicity material in the later months of 1959. Printing deadlines and other working methods at Gibson meant that changes to the guitars hardly ever coincided precisely with the catalogues and pricelists the company published.

The first sign of a change came when the existing double-cutaway TV started to be made without the usual Les Paul TV logo on the headstock, and it was renamed on the November’59 pricelist as the SG TV model. At the same time, the existing