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Thanks Lib!

I should have mentioned, too, that if it hadn't been for Mike Bloomfield (who began playing one on the crack Butterfield album East-West in mid-to-late 1966), Eric Clapton (who used one on the legendary Blues Breakers with Eric Clapton set by John Mayall and for parts of Fresh Cream before it was stolen), Peter Green (who used one when he succeeded Clapton in the Mayall group), and Jeff Beck (who used one in his first Jeff Beck Group in 1967), the original Les Paul guitars would have remained a dead issue. (They'd been phased out in 1960 and the SG was Gibson's original attempt to upgrade the Les Paul line, an upgrade Les Paul himself despised.) Those four, finding their Les Pauls in pawnshops or secondhand shops (Bloomfield's first was a '55 gold top; he traded it for his more familiar '59 flameburst before he left Butterfield to form Electric Flag), sent enough people scurrying to find the vintage Pauls that Gibson finally brought them back into production to stay in 1968.

By the way, I'm a proud owner and player of a beautiful Les Paul Studio made four years ago. With the burstbucker pickups it gives me the classic Les Paul sound without the bells and whistles . . .