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To: UnBlinkingEye
The Beatles probably did more for guitar sales than any group in history. I'd still like to get a Rickenbacher...

This isn't exactly true, though they did put a kind of steroid shot into guitar sales. (Gretsch, for example, enjoyed some additional sales power thanks to George Harrison's use of two of their models, as they would in 1966 when they got a sponsorship deal to supply the Monkees with guitars and basses for the first season of that show - but Rickenbacker enjoyed a pickup in sales thanks to Harrison's and John Lennon's use of Rickenbacker guitars and, shortly afterward, the Byrds, whose Roger McGuinn used a Rickenbacker electric 12-string when they hit big.)

The real steroid shot for guitar sales came with the emergence of first Mike Bloomfield and then Eric Clapton as major stars who did it with nothing more than their guitar playing, and in the unlikeliest of ways: Bloomfield in 1966 switched from a Fender Telecaster to an old Gibson Les Paul, during the sessions for the second Butterfield Blues Band album, East-West. (Gibson had discontinued the original Les Paul in 1960, replacing it with what was called at first the "Les Paul SG" in 1961); Clapton, who played a Telecaster as a member of the Yardbirds, switched to a Les Paul he found second hand in a shop when he joined John Mayall's Blues Breakers in 1965. (Clapton's guitar had an interesting feature: a Bigsby tailpiece and tremolo bar, a feature Les Pauls never made standard on any model in its original life.)

Gibson noticed something striking: when each musician made the switch, sales of Fender Telecasters dropped and aspiring and professional guitarists alike were hunting down old Les Pauls. Bloomfield and Clapton (Gibson customarily creidts Bloomfield first) triggered the revival of the model, to the point where Gibson finally returned it to production in 1969. (Following them, Jimi Hendrix ambled along with his Fender Stratocaster, and sales of that guitar began to jump.) But musicians began prizing the older guitars, on the Bloomfield and Clapton impetus (Bloomfield's, I believe, was a 1957 model; Clapton's, a 1959), and the collectible guitar market was born.

An irony: Clapton's prize Les Paul was stolen shortly after he finished the sessions for Fresh Cream in 1966 (very few photographs exist of Clapton playing that guitar with Cream), and he found a replacement - a 1961 Les Paul SG Standard, the one he had painted (famously) psychedelic. He played that guitar throughout most of his time in Cream (though he also used a semi-hollowbody Gibson ES-345, similar to one B.B. King is seen with on the rear jacket of Live and Well, and a Firebird, such as he is shown playing on the front jacket of Live Cream. These latter two guitars he played at Cream's famous farewell concert at Royal Albert Hall; he also played the ES-345 at Cream's final New York concert, at Madison Square Garden.)
25 posted on 01/13/2002 11:25:07 AM PST by BluesDuke
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To: BluesDuke
The real steroid shot for guitar sales came with the emergence of first Mike Bloomfield and then Eric Clapton as major stars who did it with nothing more than their guitar playing, and in the unlikeliest of ways: Bloomfield in 1966 switched from a Fender Telecaster to an old Gibson Les Paul, during the sessions for the second Butterfield Blues Band album, East-West.

You may be right but I thought I had read that guitar sales exploded when the Beatles hit the scene.

I've got Butterfield's East-West album and another old album with Mike Bloomfield, Stephen Stills and Al Kooper called Super Session. I think I might have an old John Mayall and the Blues Breakers album with Eric Clapton in his pre-Cream days somewhere around here. I also have a Les Paul Custom sitting next to me as I type.

32 posted on 01/13/2002 11:38:56 AM PST by UnBlinkingEye
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To: BluesDuke
Thanks for the history. I learned to play on my father's 194* Martin. The first guitar of my own was my high school graduation present, a Les Paul Junior in 1960. I eventually traded it in for an ivory Les Paul Custom in 1962. The fretless wonder was the easiest fingerboard I ever found. My last guitar was an ES350. I'll always be a Gibson man.
39 posted on 01/13/2002 11:50:08 AM PST by gcruse
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