[BluesDuke]

If not for Bloomfield's and EC's switch to the LP, the '57 - '60 models would most likely be just another vintage guitar.

They weren't even considered vintages before Mike Bloomfield and Eric Clapton picked them up. The old Les Paul line was all but worthless until those two began playing them. Bloomfield and Clapton had each bought theirs at bargain prices in the second hand shops. I'm not entirely sure, but I think Bloomfield might have been moved to buy his after picking up on Freddie King's earlier music, since Freddie King in the beginning played a 1954 Les Paul goldtop model; in fact, he is shown playing one on his early 1960s album (and it's a classic album for any blues lover), Let's Hide Away and Dance Away with Freddy King (as King Records was spelling his name in those days). He didn't switch to the bigger ES-355 until somewhere around 1969.

It was Bloomfield's and Clapton's popularity which triggered the unexpected upswing of interest in the old Les Pauls, provoking Gibson to revive the line (they'd made the SG into its own series, without the Les Paul designation, in 1964; Les Paul himself, interestingly, wasn't as thrilled with the SG as with the original Les Paul, though he played an SG on his 1967 album, Les Paul Now). Likewise, it was Clapton's popularity which put a huge jump into SG sales when his psychedelic-painted model became so familiar to Cream audiences (though John Cipollina of Quicksilver Messenger Service, Sam Andrew of Big Brother and the Holding Company, and - believe it or not - Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead turned up playing SGs in the earlier psychedelic era; not to mention, George Harrison played an SG for some numbers on the Beatles' final American tour in 1966).

The original Les Pauls were well along the way as hunted collectibles by the time Jimmy Page ambled along slinging his Les Paul Deluxe - Page had played a Fender Telecaster for his earlier career (with a God-awful botched psychedelic paint job on it, yet), including his entire term in the Yardbirds (1966-68); if anything, Peter Green (Clapton's successor in the Mayall group, before he formed the original Fleetwood Mac - his Les Paul was legendary for its pickups being set backward, producing a particularly distinct tone to its sound; Gary Moore is said to own that guitar now) and Jeff Beck had actually beaten Page to the Les Paul, playing one for most of the life of the original Jeff Beck Group. But it was Mike Bloomfield and Eric Clapton who got there first and launched, without exactly thinking they were doing so, the resurrection of the line and the collectible interest, pretty much as Jimi Hendrix would do with the Fender Stratocaster. (I remember, after CBS bought Fender, musicians catching onto differences and advertising guitars for sale as "pre-CBS" for extra value; interestingly, Hendrix didn't seem to mind playing the CBS-era Strat as well as the pre-CBS model. Hendrix was also known to sling a Gibson Flying V once in awhile, though that model is better associated with a fellow southpaw - blues giant Albert King - and with the Kinks' Dave Davies.)