Welcome back, my friends, to the flamboyance that never ends, as Fabulously Flamboyant Friday proudly presents yet another march of the Muscle Marys up the salubrious passage of contemporary culture. Tonight, dear reader, we shall consider some of the most famous guitars in rock history and the equally famous musicians who gave them a damn good spanking – Not Arf!
I freely admit, an electric guitar is an improbable candidate for celebrity. It cannot sign an autograph; it cannot trash a hotel room. Nor can it fall out with the drummer, shag the singer’s wife, vomit in the back of the tour bus or go on a five-day cocaine and Buckfast bender.
And yet here we are, pondering a select few highly recognisable and staggeringly expensive guitars: instruments many can recognise, even without the presence of the musician who would normally wield them. Guitars that have earned their reputations through the music they helped create, their backstories, mishaps and even tales of derring-do (well, downright stupidity, to be brutally honest).
Some were assembled from spare parts, rescued from thieves, modified beyond recognition and, in one instance, rescued from a burning building. Some became trusted companions; others passed between great players and accumulated several careers’ worth of fretsome fingerprints. And to kick things off for this evening, I think we’ll start with a parts-bin special and some seriously Friday-appropriate, over-the-top, poodle rockers.
Frankenstrat and Eddie Van Halen
A clear idea lay behind the creation of Eddie’s Frankenstrat: on-stage simplicity, Gibson muscle, Fender flexibility. In an early interview, Eddie explained why he built the guitar the way he did: “There is only one volume knob – that’s all there is to it”. He used a $50 Strat body (bought as a flawed B-grade product), a neck from a parts supplier, a Gibson PAF humbucker to supply the thicker sound he needed and a hammer and chisel to make the necessary brutal modifications to the body.
His home-brew creation subsequently became one of the most instantly recognisable guitars of the MTV generation – and provides an excellent antidote to the belief that fine musical instruments require pristine workshops and the skilled hands of a lavishly talented luthier. Young Eddie knew the end result he wanted and he didn’t worry about a spot of rough trade along the way.
An early black-and-white finish preceded the red finish seen in the video above (the version also familiar from countless 1980s bedroom walls) and its changing appearance over the years mirrored its ever-changing hardware: this was an experiment that remained in motion throughout Eddie’s career.
However, listen to Van Halen’s debut album and the instrument’s importance becomes obvious. Eddie’s touch, tone, fluidity and startling rhythmic confidence are all surprisingly impressive, even to this day. He was clearly very comfortable on his budget-build, parts-bin guitar and his outrageous plank-spanking on the subsequent Van Halen albums certainly bore that out.
As the band’s profile soared, the iconic nature of Frankenstrat – and of course Eddie’s deeply impressive guitar gymnastics – helped to kick-start the ensuing appetite for humbucker-equipped, Strat-style instruments (a.k.a. the 1980s superstrat) and, in no small measure, helped to change the nature of the global guitar industry.
When Eddie left us in 2020, Frankenstrat went on display in the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. It’s not there now. The Smithsonian’s current Frankenstein is a meticulously fashioned Fender replica, played by Eddie on the 2007–08 Van Halen tour. The original home-made instrument now resides with his son, Wolfgang Van Halen, and I’m happy to say it’s still very much in use.
Bernie & The Beast
Whitesnake – Fool for Your Loving
Bernie Marsden’s 1959 Gibson Les Paul Standard is called The Beast because of its fearsome ability to rip its way through a mix and make its howling presence known. The Beast does not hide in the background.
Marsden recalled borrowing the instrument for an encore and wanting it immediately afterwards. The price was the “princely sum of about 600 pounds”, which he couldn’t afford. He ultimately secured it by trading a mixture of cash and guitars.
Cozy Powell gave the guitar its name – simply because it howled and screamed like a beast whenever Marsden gave it a damn good spanking, and it became the defining instrument of Marsden’s career. It was with him throughout his Whitesnake years, appearing in videos and supplying the voice of much of his recorded work with the band.
When played at volume, The Beast has a thick, sustaining lead sound and a fearsomely aggressive power-chord attack. But it can respond warmly at modest volume, with great clarity and articulation, as Marsden ably demonstrated on his later blues work.
Over the years, other players managed to get their hands on this legendary guitar. Prior to Marsden’s ownership, the guitar was reportedly in the possession of Eric Clapton, before Clapton allegedly sold it to Paul Kossoff (all unconfirmed). Marsden remembered Jeff Beck playing ‘Scatterbrain’ on it and named Steve Lukather and Joe Bonamassa among its other distinguished players.
Bonamassa has described Marsden treating his iconic instrument with a working musician’s casual indifference – including entrusting it to a hotel concierge while heading for breakfast. Bonamassa was considerably less relaxed about this arrangement – one guitarist seeing a functional tool of the trade, another seeing an irreplaceable treasure about to be left with the luggage and the laundry bags.
In a 2020 Guitar.com interview, Bonamassa (who owns a few ’59 Les Pauls of his own) described the guitar as “exceptional”, adding: “I don’t know why – it’s the same wood, the same pickups, maybe even built by the same person. But the cumulative effect of the magic tree or whatever it is – who knows, it can even be the same billet of wood – means that there are some that are just exceptional, and have the extra 10 or 15 percent that other ones don’t. Bernie’s guitar happens to be exceptional. And I really don’t know why”.
Not long before his death, Bernie put The Beast up for sale for a cool $1.3 million. He later withdrew his guitar and decided to keep it. Following his death in 2023, The Beast remains with Bernie’s family.
Brian May’s Red Special
Brian May’s Red Special (and no, your eyes were not deceiving you if you’ve watched the band line-up in the video above) is perhaps rock ‘n’ roll’s most crushingly persuasive argument for owning a shed. Brian built Red with his father, Harold, during the early 1960s. It incorporates an old mahogany fireplace, bits of a table, wormholes filled with matchsticks, and even has some old automotive springs in its vibrato mechanism.
May has described his guitar as a collection of strange objects and pieces of junk. On Desert Island Discs he recalled a vibrato arm fashioned from part of a bicycle’s saddle support, capped with a piece of knitting needle. And after raiding his mum’s knitting needles, May turned to her button box for the guitar’s fingerboard dot inlays.
The end result was a very distinctive guitar designed around May’s particular musical wishes, including his fascination with sustain and controlled feedback. Its unusual pickup switching offers combinations that can produce markedly different tonal colours, and when cranked through his usual Vox amplification, Brian’s Red Special becomes the defining tone of Queen’s musical landscape. It only takes a few notes and you just know – no ifs, no buts, no maybes – that you’re listening to Brian May and Red.
Steve Vai has played the original and his recollection provides a welcome reality check for anyone expecting borrowed genius to arrive through a famous jack socket – he found May’s instrument surprisingly difficult to handle, particularly its somewhat substantial neck.
Nevertheless, fat neck or not – how many home-made guitars get their own autobiography? To celebrate the guitar’s 50th birthday, a book about its construction and its history was published. Brian May’s Red Special: The Story of the Home-Made Guitar that Rocked Queen and the World was written by May along with Simon Bradley – and sold surprisingly well for such a nerd-tastic tome. And despite being able to afford any damn guitar he wants, Red remains, to this day, Brian May’s No.1 guitar.
Blackie and Eric Clapton
Eric Clapton’s Blackie shares Frankenstrat’s mixed ancestry, though its black body and maple neck suggest a rather more restrained dress code. The ingredients came from a bunch of Stratocasters Clapton bought in Nashville in 1970.
Clapton apparently gave three of the guitars away – one each to George Harrison, Steve Winwood and Pete Townshend, then used parts from the guitars he retained to construct Blackie. He must have been pleased with his efforts as he used his partscaster creation almost exclusively on stage and in the studio, from 1974 to 1985.
Blackie features on recordings such as “Cocaine”, “I Shot The Sheriff”, “Wonderful Tonight”, “Further On Up the Road”, “Lay Down Sally” and various live versions of “Layla”. The guitar also features on several album covers and numerous videos. Clapton has said of Blackie, “I developed a lot of trust and security with that instrument”.
Sadly, life on the road eventually took its toll on Blackie. Clapton withdrew it from front-line service in 1985, though it did enjoy a few high-profile outings in later years (including the video linked above). Clapton sold Blackie in 2004 for $959,500 at a Christie’s auction to support the Crossroads Centre (a drug and alcohol addiction rehabilitation centre founded by Clapton). At the time, Blackie’s sale set the record for the most expensive electric guitar in the world.
Gibson EDS-1275 and Jimmy Page
Jimmy Page’s cherry-red Gibson double-neck is very much a live performance instrument and belongs to a select category of musical equipment that can be identified from the back row, even before the lights come up. Its association with ‘Stairway to Heaven’ is so strong that it is easy to muddle the studio and stage stories surrounding this iconic instrument.
Page originally recorded the song using separate guitars, including electric and acoustic twelve-strings. He subsequently needed a practical way to perform the song on stage and decided a double-neck instrument was the way to go. ‘The song demanded the guitar,’ he explained in an old interview. The double-neck was an answer to an arrangement already created, rather than the object that inspired the original recording. The twelve-string neck could supply breadth and shimmer; the six-string could handle the more forceful passages and, of course, that iconic solo.
By the time Page decided he needed an EDS-1275, Gibson had decided to cease production. Undaunted, Page ordered a custom-made edition in the now-iconic cherry red and, in addition to “Stairway to Heaven”, Page went on to use the double-neck for live performances of “Celebration Day”, “Tangerine”, “The Song Remains the Same”, “The Rain Song” and “Sick Again”. In the studio, the guitar was only played and recorded on “Carouselambra”.
Page’s double-neck became part of Led Zeppelin’s theatre, a visual partner to the sweep of the music. Rock occasionally (and quite rightly) gets accused of excess, and twin neck guitars certainly do not help the defence (and let’s not at this point mention Steve Vai’s infamous triple-necked guitar). Yet here the spectacle has purpose: the guitarist needed access to two different voices within one song and the iconic double-neck was the answer.
David Gilmour’s Black Strat
David Gilmour’s Black Strat is definitely the quieter-looking cousin of the more flamboyant instruments on display this evening. Gilmour bought the guitar in New York in 1970 and spent years changing it to suit the job.
Necks, pickups and hardware all came and went. A shorter vibrato arm here, an altered switching circuit there were among the many changes that made it more useful to him. Gilmour called it “a real workhorse for me over the years”, which is a bit of an understatement. His Black Strat performed on “Dark Side of the Moon”, “Wish You Were Here”, “Animals” and “The Wall”, and was the guitar used for the legendary “Comfortably Numb” solos.
The Black Strat was retired in 1986 and put on display at the Hard Rock Cafe in Dallas, Texas. It was returned to Gilmour in 1997 – apparently in horrible condition – and needed substantial restoration. It did eventually return to active duty. However, due to Gilmour’s constant modifications and extensive restorations, the only original parts on the guitar are believed to be the body and (possibly) the bridge plate. Trigger’s broom springs to mind.
Nevertheless, its later financial career was spectacular. At Christie’s in June 2019, Gilmour included his Black Strat in a collection of guitars he put up for sale for charitable causes. The Black Strat alone fetched an eye-watering $3,975,000. A guitar treated as a functional working tool had managed to become an object regarded with museum-level awe.
Stevie Ray Vaughan’s No. 1
Stevie Ray Vaughan’s Number One looked as though it had survived a small war and a seriously vicious domestic argument when it eventually managed to return home. Its battered, scarred sunburst body, upside-down tremolo and conspicuous SRV lettering became a visual shorthand for Texas blues played with immense physical conviction. This was a guitar that looked seriously, seriously battered because it was seriously, seriously battered – night after night after night.
Asked about his Strat in a 1984 interview, Vaughan replied, “That’s my first wife”. It’s often called a 1959 Strat because Vaughan identified that date on its pickups. However, it is yet another partscaster, with Stevie’s guitar tech confirming it was built with a 1963 body, a 1962 neck, and 1959 pickups.
Then there was the left-handed vibrato unit on a right-handed guitar. Vaughan claimed seeing Otis Rush and Jimi Hendrix use a whammy bar above the strings influenced the change – and it certainly looked cool. Unfortunately, its position meant it would often catch his clothing when performing live.
Vaughan was a truly sensational player. Many would say he was unmatched in his genre. He’s certainly the finest Texas blues guitarist I’ve ever clapped eyes on. For me, no one has ever come close. But he was also a hugely aggressive player and his guitar bore the scars of that aggression.
He once claimed his beloved No. 1 had been “rebuilt more times than a custom Chevy”. But its tone remained unique. Fender examined Stevie’s No.1, measured every piece, recorded every parameter, reproduced authentic parts and meticulously re-created 100 Master Built copies of the original. These copies regularly change hands for over $50,000 each, yet usually sound nothing like SRV’s iconic No.1. The tone, as they say, is in the hands.
Lucille and B.B. King
B.B. King – When Love Comes To Town
B.B. King’s Lucille carries a wonderful name and a somewhat alarming origin story. B.B. King recalled playing in an Arkansas venue when a fight broke out and upset a container of burning fuel that was being used to heat the room. The wooden building was quickly engulfed in flames and King wisely ‘ad it on ‘is toes, along with everyone else of sound mind, before remembering his beloved guitar was still inside. He bravely, if somewhat foolishly, rushed back into the burning building to retrieve his guitar and was lucky to escape unscathed.
He later learnt the men had been fighting over a woman called Lucille. He never met Lucille, but used her name for the instrument as a warning to himself, a reminder to never again to do anything as dumb-arsedly stupid as running into a burning building or risking his life over a woman.
There is, however, an essential distinction to be made here from all the other guitars in this evening’s missive: Lucille is not just one electric guitar, but a whole string of them. King bestowed the name on successive instruments over his long and illustrious career, and his accounts of guitars being lost, damaged, utterly destroyed or stolen make the succession entirely understandable.
King was a wonderfully economical musician. His singing and guitar playing often sounded like a dialogue: two participants taking turns in a conversation. A short response from Lucille could finish the thought more persuasively than a prolonged solo. His hollow-body Gibson instruments were at the heart of this partnership, so the name travelled between guitars and the partnership remained.
Nevertheless, no matter which version of Lucille was being played, the voice remained unmistakably B.B. King. And his economy of playing reminds us of just how much personality and identity a truly gifted artist can bring to just a few carefully chosen, well-placed notes.
Rory Gallagher’s 1961 Stratocaster
Time for another battered sunburst Strat: this time, Rory Gallagher’s 1961 Stratocaster. It was battered beyond polite description, indispensable to its owner and infinitely more interesting than any pristine replacement could possibly have been.
Rory bought his guitar on credit from Crowley’s in Cork in 1963. It had previously belonged to a pretty well-known Irish showband guitarist called Jim Conlon. Gallagher’s sunburst instrument gradually acquired its famously road-worn appearance through years of constant use. The bare wood eventually becoming part of his image, alongside his famous checked shirts.
Rory is generally regarded as “Ireland’s first rock star” and was often referred to as “the greatest guitarist you’ve never heard of”. He first gained international recognition in the late 1960s as the frontman and lead guitarist of the blues-rock trio Taste. He launched his solo career in 1970, played over 2,000 concerts throughout his career and achieved global record sales exceeding 30 million units. And – as anyone who saw him perform will attest – he was a powerhouse of a performer and his beloved Stratocaster was integral to that performance.
Rory’s Strat had a brush with disaster when it was stolen in Dublin and eventually turned up in a sodden ditch. Happily, it survived, because Gallagher’s attachment to the guitar was profound. Speaking to his biographer, Marcus Connaughton, he described it as “a walking memory bank of your life, right there in your arms”.
Sadly, Rory had his demons and lived life in the fast lane. As a result, his health began to deteriorate and he underwent a liver transplant in 1995. Following the operation, he contracted MRSA and died soon after at the age of just 47. Rory’s guitar was later sold at auction for £889,400 and was immediately donated to the National Museum of Ireland, where it remains.
Gary Moore and Greeny
Greeny’s story certainly involves a few famous names. The 1959 Gibson Les Paul became celebrated with Peter Green in John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers and then with the original Fleetwood Mac. From Peter Green it then passed to Gary Moore and eventually on to Metallica’s Kirk Hammett. Few instruments can claim three such distinctive musical lives.
For Moore, ownership began with admiration and friendship. Green offered him the guitar in the early 1970s and Moore’s recollection stresses Green’s remarkable generosity. Peter Green sold the guitar to him for a very low price (reportedly around £114, what Green had originally paid for the instrument).
This was one heck of a bargain because the guitar was already famous for its much-admired, distinctly hollow, “out-of-phase” sound in the middle twin-pickup position. This apparently happened accidentally when the neck pickup was flipped around during a prior repair, but this account is disputed. Whatever the cause, the resultant tone of the instrument is utterly magnificent – check out the video above if you doubt my assertion.
Moore used Greeny extensively in his solo work and during his time with Thin Lizzy, eventually paying tribute to Peter Green with his rather splendid 1995 album Blues for Greeny. Sadly, due to financial difficulties, Moore was forced to sell his iconic guitar in 2006. It eventually passed through several collectors’ hands before being acquired by Metallica guitarist Kirk Hammett in 2014. Happily, Hammett has not treated Greeny as a museum piece or an investment, but plays it, gigs it and records it – just as it should be.
Anyway, I think that’s probably quite enough of my plank-spanking nonsense for tonight. So what have we learned? Well, a cheering lesson, I think, for anyone whose guitar is a modest and unassuming beast. Great music can indeed emerge from expensive and lavishly equipped instruments. However, it can also emerge from unfashionable guitars, home-made guitars, battered second-hand guitars, even parts-bin assemblies with fireplace components and woodworm holes filled with matchsticks – they can all make great music. The necessary ingredient is simply someone determined to discover what the instrument can do. Preferably without running into any burning buildings.
So TTFN, Puffins – may all your passages be salubrious and your puddles well jumped.
Good night, and may your Frog go with you. Not ‘arf.
Featured Image: Eden, Janine and Jim from New York City, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Hat tip to Rolling Stone, Guitar World and Wikipedia for all the information in this article.
© Ivory Cutlery 2026
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