Even if, like me, you scarcely know the first thing about electric guitars, you’ll definitely be familiar with the Gibson. It’s the legendary American brand you can hear Jack Bruce and Eric Clapton playing on Cream’s ‘White Room’, and Mark Knopfler on Dire Straits’ ‘Money For Nothing’, and Dave Grohl on ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’.
Paul McCartney uses a left-handed Les Paul Standard as his main stage guitar; John Lennon wrote most of his songs on The White Album on a Gibson he borrowed in India from Donovan; Bob Marley’s Les Paul Special is buried with him; U2’s The Edge is a fan, as is Bob Dylan, as were Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson. Yep, and it almost goes without saying, Jimmy Page played ‘Stairway To Heaven’ on one too.
You don’t even need to like that kind of music to appreciate what a contribution it has made to western culture. Babies have been conceived to it; lives soundtracked by it; multi-million dollar careers and multi-billion dollar industries built on it; movies and commercials enhanced by it; memories made of it.
True, civilisation might not have worked out so very differently if Orville Gibson had never established his mandolin and guitar company in 1902; or if Gibson had never branched out into solid body electric guitars with the Les Paul in 1952 (Fender was already making its rival Telecaster by then).
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