O
nce the beating heart of youth rebellion, rock
’n’ roll is now of pensionable age and the
tools that powered its evolution are knocking
on a bit, too. The Les Paul is a case in point,
but Gibson has chosen the 60th anniversary of its
most lusted-after incarnation to release what may be
the company’s best, most vintage-accurate Les Paul
Standard since Eisenhower sat in the Oval Office.
Billed not just as a tribute, but a ‘clone’, this 2019
model incorporates some of the R&D that went
into Gibson Custom’s Collector’s Choice and True
Historic lines, saluting the instrument used to such
blistering effect by the likes of Keith Richards, Eric
Clapton, Michael Bloomfield and Jimmy Page. From
period-correct hangtags to 3D-scanned top and neck
carves and chemically recreated old-school plastics,
the idea is to give Les Paul aficionados a guitar that
ticks all the right boxes without costing as much as
a house. Time to dig a little deeper...WHY ’59?
For most vintage-guitar collectors, sunburst Gibson
Les Pauls from 1958-60 are the Holy Grails. Over
the years, Gibson’s various reissue models have
encouraged guitar players to think of particular
features as specific to certain model years, but thereality is that 1 January 1958 didn’t see Gibson throw
away its gold paint and immediately start applying
cherry sunbursts. Of the 434 Les Paul Standards that
left Parsons St, Kalamazoo in 1958, approximately
half were Goldtops.
Production officially switched over to sunburst
finishes and two-piece maple tops during July 1958,
but the earliest factory ‘Bursts’, as they’ve become
known, were serial numbers 8 3087 and 8 3096.
According to Gibson’s ledgers, these instruments
shipped on 28 May 1958 and were logged as having
a “special finish”.
We encountered 8 3087 – generally regarded as the
‘First Burst’ – at Carter Vintage Guitars in Nashville
in 2016 and it’s a spellbinding instrument. Although
its three-piece maple top isn’t quite as aesthetically
pleasing as the centre-joined, two-piece tops that
followed, in every other respect, it appears that
Gibson already had the formula nailed.
That said, some small but significant changes were
phased in during 1959. For many, this crystallised the
Les Paul Standards made during the period through
to early 1960 as the high-water mark of electric
solidbody manufacture. And we’re not referring to
the move to squarer corners on the jack socket plates.
The key updates from a playability standpoint wereABOVE Gibson’s alnico III
Custombuckers are unpotted
for a more authentic
PAF-style sound
OPPOSITE TOP The metal
parts are aged for a
suitably vintage look
OPPOSITE MIDDLE The
switch tip is period-correct
Catalin, while the ‘poker
chip’ surround is silkscreened
cellulose acetate butyrate
OPPOSITE BOTTOM The
butyrate top-hat knobs
were originally recreated
for 2015’s True Historic range
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