Guitar geeks, rejoice with me - my Les Paul is back from the dead!

asthmaticeog

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Sat Jul-17-04 12:45 PM
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Guitar geeks, rejoice with me - my Les Paul is back from the dead!

1996 - I purchased the above guitar for $300. It was a battered shell, no electronics, barely any hardware. The fingerboard was practically concave, the frets almost flat, and the neck had a badly done, plainly visible glue joint in it where the headstock had once snapped off. It was painted a ghastly blue, a paint job obviously done by a total hack - the binding was oversprayed! It had holes in the body where the previous owner had once installed, then removed, coil-taps (the little dark spots inbetween the knobs in the above pic are the plugs I eventually filled the holes with). I put $300 into some good pickups and tuners, and didn't bother with the neck work, as it played surprisingly well despite its thrashed-ness. So there you go, a great-sounding vintage Les Paul Deluxe for $600. Looked like shit, but you could do way worse.

1998 - in one of the dumber moves of my life, I lost my temper with my band of three years (I have the patience of Job when it comes to collaborating with other musicians - these guys were a serious piece of work - cocaine was involved, and to this day you shouldn't come near me if you're on that garbage, I WILL go Medieval) and walked out of practice, never to return. That wasn't the bad part; the bad part was when I took my guitar off and chucked it to the floor on my way out the door in a huff. When I went back to the rehearsal studio the next day to retrieve my equipment, I was devastated to find that when I dropped it, I had broken the neck yet again, and in a different place! My favorite guitar, and my main instrument for two years, was out of commission because I couldn't just leave without throwing a hissy. Lesson learned for sure, but what a price to pay! The guitar spent some time hanging on the cigar-store indian that watched over Cleveland's premier punk rock club, the Euclid Tavern (R.I.P.), but remained unplayable. I pulled out the electronics and installed them into a Telecaster body I had lying around, but it wasn't the same.

2004 - my best friend from high school has gone into luthiery (sp?), hand-carving archtop acoustics. He's decided to go into business with it for real, and agreed to fix up the Les Paul in exchange for me designing him a logo, business cards and a website. He fixed the neck (which had previously been declared unfixable), recontoured the fingerboard and installed new frets, and stripped off the icky blue paint, whereupon we discovered that it had originally been a 1971 GOLDTOP! Why in the name of heaven the previous owner had messed so seriously with such a precious thing, I can't even begin to fathom. We refinished it with that reddish stain they use for ES-335s, and one pair of Seymour Duncan Old '59 (PAF-replica) pickups later, it's back in business. It sounds like what god would want a guitar to sound like, it plays like a champ and I'm recording with it next weekend. YESSSSS!!!