“The reason for the different-colour bobbins? We
used to buy our pickup bobbins and covers from
a company over in South Haven, Michigan, called
Hughes Plastics. Anyway, they ran out of black
material, but they had white. We were not gonna stop
production just for that. So we got white bobbins
and I couldn’t see any difference one from the other.
And I think white was a better colour for winding the
pickups, because you could see the wire in there a lot
easier than you could with the black.
“They put the PAF label on the base because they
started making them before they actually got the
patent for it, so the patent was ‘applied for’. Gbison
didn’t want to give [competitors] any information
as to what patent to look up to make copies. I think
that was the reason for it, because they carried on for
quite a while.”
FEEDBACK AND VIOLIN BOWS
Eddie Phillips
“I was in The Mark Four playing a Futurama and
I think it must have been the end of 1963 when I
saw a 335 in a local shop window. It was the look
that made me buy it, the colour, the shine – such a
nice guitar. I’d never seen one before. And it was a
fantastic lot of money, I think it was a 150-something
guineas, which was a colossal amount to pay for a
guitar. I part-exchanged my Futurama and paid the
rest on HP. Forever at one-and-six a week!
“What I did notice about the 335, straight away,
was this feedback that I’d never experienced with
the Futurama. I thought, Oh, it’s making this noise,
what am I going to do? And then I figured out you
could use it. The 335 was great for feedback. It was
a guitar just made for that sort of thing. It’s almost
like a dance with your amp. You have to position
yourself right – and even then, you could position
yourself in exactly the same place another night and
it wouldn’t work.
“But I’d got to a point where I could use feedback
quite effectively. Also, I was trying to figure out a way
to play something on the E string to keep it going,
like a drone, while I hammered on some kind of solo
with my left hand on the other strings.
“First I tried a hacksaw – I took out the blade and
put a guitar string in, tried sawing across the E string,
but that only resulted in me wearing three or four
massive grooves in the bottom horn of my 335 from
the ends of the saw [laughs]. So that obviously wasn’t
going to work.
“Next, I got a violin bow and tried that, and to my
surprise it actually worked. Okay, it didn’t do the
guitar a great deal of good – but it didn’t wreck it.
It did the job.
“The Mark Four had sort of gone into The
Creation, and we came out of that mid-60s mod
raving explosion on the London scene, just a mad,
mad time. When I picked up the bow, you’d see
the audience going oh, what’s going on here?
And you’ll notice now in the online videos of the
band that I removed the pickguard from my 335,
because I had to make room for that downward
stroke of the bow.
“Anyway, it was all part of this big fantastic thing
that was going on. I tried to give it what I thought it
needed. I suppose it was lucky that I found the 335.
Some things you just don’t realise at the time.”MISTER 335
Larry Carlton
“A friend of mine worked at the Mr B’s For Music
store in Palos Verdes, California. They had three
different 335s hanging on the wall and I didn’t plug
them in, I just played them acoustically and chose
the one that I ended up with. That was late 1969,
first thing 1970. My decision was a very practical
decision in the beginning, because I could cover many
different sounds and things with that one guitar.AN ORAL HISTORY OF THE GIBSON ES-335GUITAR MAGAZINE 67