Introduction
It was the executive model that raised the spec of the Goldtop and armed a roll-call of seminal players. 60 years since the iconic ’57 incarnation, this is the true story of the Les Paul Custom - with testimony from the stars who wielded it…
To the window-shoppers of London’s Tin Pan Alley, it was a new arrival to quicken the pulse. The jet-black lustre of the hourglass body. The shimmer of 24-karat hardware. The twinkle of the diamond headstock inlay. It was 1959, and with the lifting of restrictions on US imports, the mythologised Gibson Les Paul Custom was suddenly a tangible reality.
I used to think anyone who’s got a Les Paul Custom has already made it
Steve Hackett
“When I was a kid,” Steve Hackett tells us, “I used to walk down Shaftesbury Avenue and Denmark Street, staring in the windows, looking at instruments I couldn’t afford. And I used to think anyone who’s got a Les Paul Custom has already made it.”
And that, of course, was what the Gibson boardroom wanted players to conclude when faced with the Custom. The firm had already planted its flag deep into the solidbody sector with its inaugural Les Paul release, the 1952 Goldtop. But within two years, Gibson had spotted the potential for a higher-spec executive model, priced a princely $325 to its predecessor’s $225 (and in a different league to the $99 Junior).
“You have all kinds of players out there who like this and like that,” Gibson president Ted McCarty noted in 1992. “Chevrolet had a whole bunch of models, Ford had a whole bunch of models. So did we.”