All Hail Rock and Roll!

by

Few things set the stage for our lives, from the baby boomer generation through today, better than rock and roll music. Whether for you it’s an image of Chuck Berry duckwalking across the stage playing his Gibson ES-355, Jimmy Page’s live playing of “Stairway to Heaven” on his Gibson EDS-1275 Doubleneck or Kurt Cobain ushering in the Grunge era with his Fender Jaguar, these iconic images bring us back to the feelings of freedom, youth, rebellion, and the sheer unbridled joy of being alive.

And nothing exemplifies rock and roll like the electric guitar. It’s little exaggeration to say that without the electric guitar, we wouldn’t have rock and roll. Just the image of an electric guitar has, for us, a positive effect. In fact, numerous scientific studies show that women tend to find the same man significantly more attractive when he’s merely holding a guitar.

So, how did the electric guitar come to be? Prior to the late 1930s, the guitar, in its acoustic form, was limited to a small supporting role in large musical ensembles, largely due to its limited volume. The real motivation to create an electric guitar was to increase its volume. An electric guitar is one which uses one or more electromagnetic “pickups” to convert the vibration of its strings into electrical signals. The very first attempts to create an electric guitar were in the 1920s, but these experiments were very crude, primitive prototypes with limited practical application. Around 1932, two Los Angeles musicians developed an electromagnetic pickup comprised of two horseshoe magnets. This is the basic principle behind the method of amplifying electric guitars today.

Satisfied with the effectiveness of their pickup, these musicians, George Beauchamp and John Dopyera, had a local craftsman make a guitar to support their electromagnetic pickup. They took the prototype to Adolph Rickenbacker. Beauchamp and Rickenbacker formed a company to begin manufacturing the “Frying Pan” Electro Hawaiian Guitar. This guitar, officially the Rickenbacker Electro A-22, was a lap steel guitar made of cast aluminum and shaped like a frying pan. It was played lying across the player’s knees, was used mostly for Hawaiian music, and was the first of what was to become the famous line of Rickenbacker electric guitars. Rickenbackers have been used by great rock and roll bands such as The Beatles, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and R.E.M.

The first “Spanish style” electric guitar (meaning it looked like what you have historically thought of as a guitar) was built and sold by another early experimenter, Paul Loar. This guitar in turn inspired guitar pioneer Orville Gibson in 1935 to create the Gibson ES-150, which revolutionized the instrument and is often credited with being the first modern electric guitar. The ES-150 was an immediate success, but it did have its challenges. Vibrations from its hollow body were picked up and amplified by the pickup and created feedback, distorting the sound. This led the legendary guitarist Les Paul (for which one of the most popular Gibson guitars of all time is named) to develop a solid body electric guitar in 1940. This early attempt was referred to as “The Log,” as it was basically just a four-by-four piece of pine with pickups and guitar parts from an Epiphone Broadway guitar. Les Paul took this prototype to Gibson, who was unimpressed and skeptical about the prospects of a solid body electric guitar.

Thankfully for all of us, Leo Fender saw the possibilities, and in 1949, started selling the Fender Esquire, which became the first commercially successful solid body electric guitar. This guitar was renamed the Telecaster in 1951, has been in constant production since, and remains one of the most famous and popular electric guitars today. Some of the most recognizable stars known to be partial to the Telecaster include Bruce Springsteen, Keith Richards, Jeff Beck and Keith Urban.

During the 1950s and 1960s, the electric guitar had become arguably the most important instrument in popular music, and this period saw fierce competition between the top manufacturers, resulting in rapid development of new and improved models and manufacturing techniques. Many of the advancements in the field were made during this period, and today there are literally hundreds of electric guitar manufacturers, many specializing in specific genres (country, heavy metal, jazz, blues, classic rock). Many of the specific brands and models developed in this period, and discussed here, remain among the most popular and successful of all.

A BRIEF TIMELINE

1949: Fender developed the Esquire, which was renamed the Telecaster in 1951. In constant production since its debut, the Telecaster remains one of the most popular electric guitars of all time.

1953: Gretsch presented to the market the 6128 Duo Jet. Gretsch guitars, while not quite the household name of Fender or Gibson are a great historic brand in their own right and have been played by such guitar greats as Chet Atkins, Brian Setzer, Bo Diddley and Eddie Cochran.

1954: Fender launched the Stratocaster. Designed to be an upgradeto the successful Telecaster, the Stratocaster had three pickups for a wider variety of tones, a spring tension vibrato system, and a double cutaway body designed to allow the player improved access to higher notes. The guitar is one of the most famous of all time, has been in constant production since 1954, and was most famously played by guitar heroes such as Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, Stevie Ray Vaughan and David Gilmour.

1958: Gibson first offered the ES-335, the world’s first commercial thin-line, semi-hollow body electric guitar. Before 1952, Gibson only offered hollow body guitars, which were preferred by some players due to the warmer, woodier tones they produced compared with their solid body counterparts. But this came with the problems of feedback and distortion when highly amplified. The semi-hollow body design was an attempt to claim the middle ground: a warmer tone without the attendant feedback issues. It was immediately successful and remains so today. Notable guitarists associated with the ES-335 include Chuck Berry, B.B. King, Warren Haynes and Dave Grohl.

1961: Due to its unpopularity and lack of sales, Gibson dropped the Les Paul from its lineup in 1960, replacing it with the Gibson SG. The SG, which stood for “solid guitar,” was designed with a thinner and lighter flat-topped mahogany body with double cutaways (as with Fender’s Stratocaster), allowing easier access to higher notes and considered more modern in appearance. Originally called the Les Paul SG, the design was strongly disliked by Les Paul himself, so Gibson changed the name to simply SG. The SG remains in production today and is Gibson’s best-selling model of all time. Players associated with the Gibson SG include Angus Young, Frank Zappa, Derek Trucks and Pete Townshend.

AND THE BEAT GOES ON

Of course, no list can begin to cover the full landscape of electric guitars. In the intervening six decades, literally hundreds of guitar makers have come and gone, and hundreds remain today. They tend to fall into several categories:

-- Economy-oriented brands such as Squier (a division of Fender), Epiphone (once a higher-end brand but now a lower cost arm of Gibson), Ibanez and Yamaha all offer products of very good quality without breaking the bank.

-- Some brands are geared toward specific genres such as heavy metal. While you will certainly see quite a few Gibson Les Pauls and SGs, and even the occasional Fender Stratocaster, on a heavy metal stage, brands such as Jackson, Ibanez, Charvel and ESP-LTD build guitars that specifically lend themselves to this particular playing style.

-- Boutique brands such as Shabat Guitars, LSL Instruments, Novo Guitars and K-Line offer unique designs frequently based on the famous designs you’re used to from the 1950s and 1960s but often handcrafted and with various details that their designers consider improvements over the originals.

-- Super premium brands such as Paul Reed Smith, Suhr, Anderson Guitar Works and Knaggs Guitars are examples of brands which utilize fairly traditional designs (with a few changes which set them apart) but put premium materials and superb craftsmanship ahead of affordability. This results in electric guitars which exemplify quality, but which the average guitarist cannot afford. Paul Reed Smith (PRS) is probably the best example of this category. Smith established a partnership to create a factory in 1985 and early on produced no more than one guitar per month. He would then take the guitar to concerts by major stars and try to get backstage to show, and hopefully sell, a guitar to famous players. Early customers included Peter Frampton, Ted Nugent, and Al Dimeola. Things took a turn when Carlos Santana acquired a PRS guitar and many soon followed. Today, PRS produces about 1,100 guitars per month.

THEN AND NOW

A lot has happened in the world of electric guitars since the days when the Telecaster, Stratocaster Les Paul, SG and ES-335 debuted, but you would be hard p

ressed to attend a rock concert today, either national in scope or in your local pub, without seeing one of these guitars on stage. Many people feel that the actual guitars physically produced in the 1950s and 1960s are superior to anything which has come since, and these survivors sell for exorbitant prices. This particular market is so robust that both Fender and Gibson have high-end “Custom Shops” where they attempt to remake these models exactly (or as closely as they can) to the exact specifications from the specific year and model the customer desires. The nostalgia that these guitars evoke allows the companies to charge on average twice as much as for their standard models.

We humans love to “pick a side,” and guitar brands are certainly no exception. There are die-hard Fender folks and obsessed Gibson fans who swear that their brand is best. But clearly there is no best. The multitude of brands, models and styles of electric guitar which have come to be in the years since Gibson offered the first ES-150 in 1935 make us all richer for their existence and indeed make the world a better and more melodic place. Long live Rock and Roll!