Guitars and Heroes: Mythic Guitars and Legendary Musicians

Guitars and Heroes: Mythic Guitars and Legendary Musicians

Jimmy Page

Jimmy Page, a one-man embodiment of the fantasy of the guitar hero. No other musician has achieved the same blend of mystery, charisma, sheer talent, and energy, and his aura was only intensified by his refusal to sing in his band (not even on backing harmony!) and his routine absence from TV sets and other interviews. Fans of Led Zeppelin were therefore able to project whatever image they wanted onto this skinny young man with his unruly hair and dragon trousers, this image, of course, being distorted by rumors of wild sex, satanism, and black magic, rumors that Page, with all the shrewdness that Robert Johnson had once displayed, never troubled to dispel.

His choice of guitars was always in keeping with this character. Even when he played a Telecaster at the start of the band’s career in 1969, it was a Telecaster that had been repainted by hand with a multicolored dragon pattern. This model with a rosewood fingerboard dates from 1959, a gift from Jeff Beck when Jimmy joined him in the band The Yardbirds. However, at the end of 1969, the Les Paul came along to replace the Tele as the band’s emblematic instrument, like a fifth band member. It is said that few guitarists have done as much to showcase the thick and edgy sound of the Burst, as though Led Zeppelin’s riffs had been written as a series of arguments in favor of this thing of beauty. His favorite guitar is a 1959 model whose neck was sanded down to make it more slender and thus more suitable for Page’s hands. The original tuning machines were also replaced with gold Grovers, to which Page had grown accustomed since his days playing the Les Paul Custom on which he made his Session Man compilation in the 1960s. Jimmy also took off the cover of his bridge humbucker to gain some high notes, a modification that was to be copied by several generations of fans even though they couldn’t really hear much of a difference.

Number Two was also a 1959 Les Paul (the Page legend goes a long way towards explaining the particular fondness that collectors have for this vintage over the ones from 1958 and 1960), slightly more somber than the original and modified in exactly the same way, with the added detail of some highly complicated electronics. Page fitted switches to it so that he could get fifteen different sounds from the two basic pickups, no doubt a habit acquired during his days as a session musician, when he had been expected to offer a variety of textures, a requirement that he was to retain as the captain of Led Zeppelin.

Joni Mitchell

Joni Mitchell is a true original. Ever since she first emerged on California’s folk scene in the late 1960s, she has never stopped reinventing herself and conquering the public and her peers through her resolutely non-conformist approach. None of her songs has been written in standard tuning, and Joni meanders with ease from one kind of tuning to another, depending on the needs of the song. In the early days, the only guitar she played was a Martin D-28, which consequently underwent all the different tunings used for the first five albums. At the end of the 1970s, Mitchell switched to an electric guitar, opting for an Ibanez George Benson, and so as to avoid having to tune it on stage between every song, she had five identical guitars so that she could switch from one to the next.

But the real revolution arrived in 1995, when she was given a Roland VG-88. This multi-effects guitar system can receive the signal from a hexaphonic sensor that modifies the sound of each string independently from the five others. In other words, the guitar (in this case a luthier-made Strat, then a Parker Fly chosen because it was very comfortable and no doubt also because it was something unexpected) stays in standard tuning, but the VG-88 changes the tunings heard. Modern technology at the service of acoustic songs: you could say it’s the best of both worlds.

Brian May

Few stories illustrate the proverb “necessity is the mother of invention” quite so well as the creation of the Red Special. Brian Harold May was 15 years old and wanted a guitar, like most British teenagers in 1963. His father was a skilled handyman, and the two of them therefore spent two years designing the instrument that Brian had pictured in his mind. The wood used for the body came from a table, the wood for the neck came from an old fireplace, the fingerboard inlays were made of mother-of-pearl buttons, and the vibrato arm was originally part of a bicycle saddlebag. In short, every element of the guitar was something that had been salvaged from odds and ends, with the exception of the three pickups, made by Burns and bought from a shop — though even these were modified. The whole thing was designed to suit the sound that May had dreamed up, from the hollow body designed to obtain lovely musical feedback, to the twenty-four-fret neck (a rarity at the time) with a very short scale, making it easy to hit the really high notes and bend the strings. The story might well have ended there and remained nothing more than a charming bit of romanticism. Except that after two years of taking the trouble not to leave out a single stage of the process, Brian managed to turn the Red Special (as he called his bit of gear) into a guitar that suited him perfectly. It could have been just a quirky and fun first guitar on which he could learn his trade before moving on to a proper guitar by a recognized maker, but his own musical voice and virtuosic playing style had developed in harmony with this gorgeous red number. It therefore remained his go-to guitar throughout his entire career at the heart of Queen, accompanying him wherever he went, from clubs to packed stadiums (including the gigantic Wembley Stadium) via the studios where it made itself heard on albums that have sold over 300 million copies. A number of luthiers have made copies of the Red Special, but the original still can’t be beaten, forty years after its creation. It was quite an amazing outcome for an instrument cobbled together out of part of a table and part of a fireplace.

Gene Autry

It’s hard nowadays to picture the all-American cowboy without a guitar in his hands. Every bit as indispensable as his Stetson or his horse, the instrument became inseparable from the man in the popular imagination during the age of the westerns of the 1930s. In this period, at the height of the Great Depression, the public sought myths that would allow them to change the way they thought, and the bold and fearless cowboy was certainly able to do that. Not content with being hotshot marksmen, most of them were also accomplished singers and guitarists who released records whenever they were not acting in films, of which a huge number were churned out at an industrial rate.

The most famous singing cowboy of all was, of course, Gene Autry, the ultimate hero, whose horse, Trigger, even became a star in his own right. The riders of the great plains could never be accused of restraint, either in the costumes they wore or in the guitars they played. Autry’s instruments were every bit as colorful as the kitsch wonders played by the stars of country over the subsequent decades. Like his idol, Jimmie Rodgers, he wanted a top-of-the-line Martin, so he too placed an order for a series 45 with his name inlaid in mother-of-pearl on the fingerboard.

But whereas Rodgers had opted for the style classed as 000, Autry had chosen the enormous dreadnought model, the biggest guitar ever made by Martin. He can lay claim to having been given the first ever D-45 in history in 1933, and one of the first three D-45s with twelve frets clear of the body to be made in the pre-war period. He then took possession of two Gibson J-200s, the biggest model produced by Kalamazoo, in 1938; they were both also embellished with extravagant decorative elements, but these models were to remain unique items, never intended for the mass market. The general public would instead have to make do with little cowboy guitars decorated with scenes from westerns painted on the top, low-level instruments made by the firm Harmony, operating out of Chicago, and sold under the brand names Melody, Roundup, or Supertone in department stores or via mail order catalogs. It wasn’t until 1994 that the luckiest fans were able to get their hands on one of a limited edition of 66 Martin D-45 guitars, modelled on Gene Autry’s guitar.

Sister Rosetta Tharpe

The gospel genre is, of course, named after the Gospels in the Bible. Singing gospel music is thus about telling the stories of the Bible so as better to spread “the Word,” something that no one did in such an electrifying manner as Rosetta Nubin, aka Sister Rosetta Tharpe. Nubin started out as an artist in 1920 when she was just 4 years old, singing and playing for evangelical churches. At the age of 23, she left for New York, where she would find fame by signing a record deal with Decca. Her high-energy interpretation of the gospel was not at all to the liking of the most traditionalist wing of the faithful, but others were entirely charmed, so much so that Tharpe was the only black woman to be asked to make records to maintain the troops’ morale during the Second World War, and 25,000 fans were prepared to pay to be present at her third marriage in 1951, at a stadium in Washington, D.C.

Meanwhile, Tharpe experimented with a number of guitars before alighting on the right one. In the early days, she was often seen with a National Triolian, a guitar with a resonator (similar to a Dobro) which, at the time, made it possible to achieve greater volume than a standard acoustic guitar. She also appeared with a Gibson L-5 archtop, which, prior to the 1950s, came without a pickup. Tharpe managed to electrify her instrument, but as soon as a more convincing solution became available, she jumped at the chance to acquire it. In 1952, when the Les Paul was in its very first year of existence, she discovered the joys of the solid body and found the sound she was looking for, a sharp and brilliant electric shock. In 1961, sales of the Les Paul model had reached an all-time low, so Gibson replaced it with a new shape with a dual cutaway body, shaped like two little devil’s horns. This new version of the Les Paul was rechristened the SG in 1963, and Tharpe set her sights on a white Custom, the most sumptuous version of all, with three pickups and a vibrato arm. This vision of this gospel singer wielding this ultra-modern guitar with an outrageous amount of talent is still striking more than half a century later.