Last month, Gibson released 150 Murphy Lab replicas of a special 1958 Les Paul Custom. Although Gibson has given Eric Clapton’s name to the run, the guitar has belonged to Albert Lee since 1979. In a new video for Gibson, Lee reveals the guitar’s full history, and Clapton isn’t even the guitar’s most famous player.
The story begins with a young Albert Lee’s obsession with Selmer, a guitar shop on London’s Charing Cross Road.
“Every Saturday I'd come up on the train see what was in in Selmer's,” begins Lee. “So he opened up this guitar case, and there's a brand new Les Paul Custom with a Bigsby on it. I thought, ‘Yeah, I’ll join your band!’” he laughs.
“I played that guitar throughout the early ’60s. This guy persuaded me to sell it to him. He pestered me and pestered me,” Lee continues. “I let it go, and I regretted it for a long, long time.”
In 1978, Lee joined Eric Clapton’s touring band, and the subject of his old Les Paul came up.
“I remember the first day, chatting with Eric,” he recalls. “For some reason I had a picture of my old guitar with me, you know, and I showed it to him. I told him how much I missed that guitar. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I've got one of those at home somewhere.’”
“I didn't think any more of it,” Lee remarks. “The next day at rehearsals, you know, the roadie, he walked in with this big case and opened it up, and it's Eric's Les Paul Custom for me to play.
“I guess it was mine. From there on, I used it on the whole tour. Eric never asked for the guitar back. He was happy that I was enjoying it and using it on stage.”
Lee had no idea of the guitar's full history when it came into his possession.
“I found that out later on,” he admits. “I thought maybe it was Cream and maybe Delaney and Bonnie.”
Lee was correct in those assumptions, but it had a much longer history, as he now recounts:
“From Paul Kossoff to Eric and John Lennon and George Harrison playing it. I’d no idea Eric used it with Derek and the Dominos. Great bit of history there.”
The guitar had in fact been used to record Cream’s Disraeli Gears, where Clapton first used ‘woman tone,’ the sound of the bridge pickup with the tone control all the way off.
After that the guitar turned up in the hands of Free’s Paul Kossoff, although Clapton doesn’t remember what he did with it after Disraeli Gears. Still, the guitar was in Kossoff’s possession from ’67–’69, a period that includes the recording of Free’s debut, Tons of Sobs.
Clapton’s memory of the period is fragmentary, but he remembers, “We [Free and Blind Faith] were touring together,” adding that the two jammed together “quite a lot.”
After regaining the guitar, Clapton was pictured with it in The Sunday Times Magazine, at which point the guitar had uncovered humbuckers; the covers are now back in place.
In 1969 Eric Clapton joined John Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band to perform at the Toronto Rock n’ Roll Revival. Footage from that concert shows Clapton with the Les Paul Custom.
From there, Clapton played the guitar on tour with Delaney and Bonnie, alongside George Harrison.
Michael Doyle, who researched the guitar for Gibson’s replica, says photos exist of George Harrison playing the guitar onstage while Clapton plays Harrison’s Strat. We couldn't find that, but we did find a widely circulated picture that appears to show Harrison playing the guitar while hanging out with Clapton and Bonnie Bramlett. Here's footage of Clapton playing the Les Paul with Harrison:
Michael Doyle also says that a photo of Derek & The Dominos shows Eric using the Les Paul Custom for slide work, “which makes sense,” Doyle contends.
“One of the reasons why he gave it away was because the frets were so skinny. If you can't get on with a guitar because the frets aren't right for you, what do you do? Well, set it up for slide.”
In other Albert Lee news, Steve Lukather recently spilled the beans on his secret supergroup with Lee, Eddie Van Halen, and Steve Morse. Meanwhile, Dunlop issued an Eric Clapton Crybaby in recognition that Clapton was one of the wah's earliest champions.
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