Are you bored with typical Sun and Tobacco Burst Les Pauls? Joe Perry sure was by the ‘90s, which is why he hooked up with Gibson’s Custom Shop around the release of Aerosmith‘s Get a Grip, and created what would be dubbed the “Black Burst.”
The result was a guitar with a neck and weight that felt like a ‘50s Les Paul, but with a body featuring no binding and a slick finish inspired by a rare breed of horse. Beyond that, the curio had a battery-powered onboard wah effect triggered via a push/pull and pickups wound to Perry’s spec.
This led to a partnership with Gibson in 1996 and ’97, during which the Black Burst received a wide release as Perry’s first signature guitar. Since then, Perry has teamed up with Gibson a few more times, but the model remains one of the more distinct Gibsons in the Aerosmith man’s enviable collection. Dig in while Joe tells GW about the guitar.
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A guitar you played a lot around the Get a Grip and Nine Lives eras – but that doesn’t get talked about much these days – is your Black Burst, which started out as a Custom Shop build and later inspired your first signature guitar.
That’s right. After I’d had the guitar, Gibson approached me to do a signature since there were a fair amount of pictures of me playing a black Les Paul.
I had some horses at a farm in Vermont, and I fell in love with this breed called a Friesian, which are solid black, from Holland. They’re pretty rare. I’d go to horse shows, and I managed to find a farm that had one or two, but what stood out about them was that they have long manes, and the manes are curly and just look beautiful. I wanted to kind of get that look on a guitar, which called for a really good maple top and a relatively light burst.
What’s noteworthy about your signature Les Paul is that it felt classic but looked very modern, complete with some interesting onboard effects.
Jimmy Page had put out a signature Les Paul, and he had it wired up with some different wiring, and I figured, “What’s the point of putting out just another plain old Les Paul?”
I came across this company called Chandler Guitars in San Francisco; they were known for collecting linoleum, oyster shells from Europe, and even tortoise shells with amazing colors and patterns.
This stuff was incredible. But another thing they’d perfected was a push/pull knob for the tone control, where you’d be able to put on a wah effect when it was popped out. You could set it and hold the note, and then bend up and pop that thing on and get the wah-wah effect when it was time to cut a solo. It was just another taste, really.
Were there challenges in making that work?
I told Gibson I wanted one of those on my signature model, and they said, “Okay, we’ll look at the one Chandler has, and then we’ll reverse-engineer it and put our version on it.” But a couple of months later, they came back and said, “We really can’t get it right,” though I’m not sure they put enough time into it.
But who knows? They said, “We really can’t reproduce it the way Chandler does,” so they went to Chandler and bought all of the ones they had in stock, which I’ve heard was anywhere from 100 to 250.
So the first run of those guitars have that in it. If you can get one that has that, which they call the Tonex, the push/pull knob for the wah, that’s gold.
- This article first appeared in Guitar World. Subscribe and save.
