{"id":2100,"date":"2008-02-15T07:00:18","date_gmt":"2008-02-15T12:00:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=2100"},"modified":"2008-04-02T08:30:01","modified_gmt":"2008-04-02T13:30:01","slug":"hot-gear-friday","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=2100","title":{"rendered":"Hot Gear Friday"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tracy and the Anti-Strib gang<\/a> have the market cornered on “Hot Chick Friday<\/a>” – where they take a moment to post pictures of gorgeous women that I’ve nailed<\/strike> – so it’d be unseemly to horn in on their act.<\/p>\n

And I love being unseemly.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

It’s a ’57 Gibson Les Paul Standard, one of perhaps the three most sought-after electric guitars in the business. I recall reading that they went for $279, brand new out of the Gibson catalog, during Ike’s second term. When I first started playing guitar during the Carter administration – before <\/em>the guitar collectors market went insane – they were already going for a stellar $3,000; thirty years later, some of them fetch mid-to-high five figures.<\/p>\n

The tiger-stripe lacquer finish and the brick-heavy body create an afternoon’s worth of sustain. The action, like most Gibsons, is nice and low; your fingers just race<\/em>, which is disconcerting to a Fender player like me. Even thirty years ago, the whole assembly – aged nicely even then – yielded a sweet, round, weathered tone that was the tonal equivalent of James Earl Jones’ voice; it had credibility just because of how it sounded.<\/p>\n

I played a ’57 once – not a tiger-stripe, but a Gold-Top, its first cousin – that a friend of the bass player in my very first band had picked up ten years earlier for maybe $100, before the collectors value became established. I’d been playing guitar for maybe two years; I had a long way to go. And yet strapping that bad boy on was like sitting in an F1 Lotus after learning how to drive a combine; it’s hard not to feel like a guitar hero playing a ’57.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tracy and the Anti-Strib gang have the market cornered on “Hot Chick Friday” – where they take a moment to post pictures of gorgeous women that I’ve nailed – so it’d be unseemly to horn in on their act. And I love being unseemly. It’s a ’57 Gibson Les Paul Standard, one of perhaps the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2100","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hot-gear-friday","category-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2100","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2100"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2100\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2100"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2100"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2100"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}