I intended to follow up on last month's column -- the first humbucking pickup in an archtop -- by checking the daily shipping ledgers for any mention of humbuckers on solidbody electrics. Unfortunately, the book that covers most of 1957 is missing.

I double-checked all the file drawers for the missing ledger, and then, for no other reason than I was out of drawers to open, I pulled open the top drawer of a cabinet of dead files from Entertainment Relations. A few months back, a shift in our ER offices left two file cabinets without a home, so they ended up among the archives. I hadn't had a chance to look at them yet.

The top drawer started with the R files, which included a folder for the Rolling Stones. They just played in Nashville, so I pulled the file. Right behind it was a separate file labeled "Rolling Stones, Ron Wood." Altogther, the two files held only three pieces, but that was enough to keep me from doing any more real work for the rest of the day.

The first piece was a photo from the early '70s with no caption and no credit. Keith Richards is working out on an ES-300 from the '60s (or early '70s). Mick Taylor, who was a Rolling Stone from 1969-74, is playing an SG Standard from the early '70s, with the top-mounted Bigsby vibrola. Mick Jagger is strutting in a sleeveless T-shirt -- the same style (though probably not the same shirt) that he would wear onstage in Nashville 25 years later.

Does the existence of this photo mean that Gibson had a relationship with the Stones as far back as the early '70s? Probably not. The next photo is actually four photos on one 8x10 piece. The Gibson-Stones relationship is official by this time, as indicated by a photo of Ron Wood with a Gibson S-1 (more on that in a minute). One of the shots is copied from the first photo, but it's cropped down to include only Keith with his ES-300 (and the head of drummer Charlie Watts).

It's likely that the first photo wasn't acquired until the event that prompted the second photo set, which appears to have been a visit to the Gibson factory by Keith and Ron some time between 1975 and 1978. The guitar Keith is holding still has tags on it, and it's pretty easy to identify. The "Les Paul" signature is on the peghead, and the fingerboard is bound and has dot inlay. That makes it a Les Paul Special, except for the fact that Gibson didn't make a single-cutaway LP Special in the '70s. What Gibson did make was a Les Paul 55, which was in every way a Special except that it said "Model" instead of "Special" under the signature. The word on the headstock of Keith's guitar is unclear, even with a magnifying glass, but it does appear to have five letters rather than seven -- confirming it as a Les Paul 55.

Although Ron would end up with an endorsement agreement on the S-1, he was photographed in the factory with a an L-6S. Once again, it took a magnifying glass to figure it out, but the dot inlay, single-cutaway body and pole-less pickups leave no other possibility. Since the L-6S had block inlays before 1975, 1975 is the earliest date for the photo. The model was last shipped in 1979 in such small numbers that it was probably last made in 1978, so 1975-78 is the range of the photo.

Gibson took advantage of the opportunity to extend the Gibson-Stones connection back to the '60s, thanks to an early shot of the group with Brian Jones on guitar. Brian left the group in June 1969 and died a month later. The performance shot, probably from a TV taping, shows him with an original reverse-body Firebird VII of 1963-65 vintage. His more familiar white Vox Phantom guitar with the teardrop body shape is leaning on a box or something behind him. Keith's guitar is blurry but it looks like a sunburst Les Paul with Bigsby and maybe some other alteration.

The third piece from the files clears up some confusion about a later Rolling Stones guitar. The document is a copy of Gibson's invoice of 10/16/89 in the amount of $0.00 for "Commemorative guitar for presentation to Ron Wood." It's specified as "L-5S solidbody."e; It appears that on Ron's factory tour, the L-6S, which was essentially a flat-top version of the more expensive L-5S, made a more lasting impression than the S-1. He was playing this custom L-5S, with black finish and a single humbucker, at the Stones' Nashville show last week. But in the book Gibson Guitars: 100 Years of an American Icon, there's a picture of Keith with the same guitar. A query to Gypsy Carnes, who worked in Entertainment Relations at the time, revealed that Gibson actually made two identical L-5S guitars for the Stones. That sent me back to the files looking for a Keith Richards file, but none could be found.

The photo of Ron Wood with the S-1 sent me to the catalog files in search of more Stones pictures. On the endpapers of the 1978 catalog, I found the same image of Ron plus an image of Keith -- in the same shirt and hat he wore on the factory tour -- playing a Gibson Marauder (another short-lived '70s model). Wood turned up again with the S-1 in a series of ads from the late '70s that included Carlos Santana endorsing the L-6S. John Sebastian with the Mark acousitc, and Peter Cetera on the G-3 bass.

That's all the Rolling Stones connection from the archives, but that wasn't the end of my search, of course. I started reading the text on the S-1 ad. After a rather lukewarm start -- "The S-1 gives Ron more than just the sound he's looking for. It gives him several sounds." -- the ad proceeded into some of the most imaginative descriptions in recent Gibson history. For example, the S-1 had three single-coil pickups but it featured humbucking sounds from pickup patterns that were "wider than ever." It had a "bypass" switch that turned on an "entirely new lead sound at a moment's notice." And it boasted the extra-powerful "humbuck and a half" sound.

"Several sounds" sounded like quite an understatement. I went to our schematic file in our Customer Relations department to find out how it got all these incredible sounds. The schematic revealed that the "wider than ever" humbucking pattern was simply two of the pickups selected together. The new lead sound was the bridge pickup alone. And the "humbuck and a half" was all three pickups.

I also came across a schematic for the "S-1, Second Series," made in 1978 and after. I was talking with Customer Relations head Wayne Green about it when a voice behind me said, "I drew that schematic." The voice came from Pat Murphy, who recently rejoined Gibson after working here from 1975-78 in final assembly and quality control. According to Pat, the S-1 was supposed to be Gibson's version of the Fender Stratocaster, but the original design didn't let the player select "the Hendrix sound" -- the neck pickup alone. Pat was the one who rewired the S-1 to fix that problem, but he couldn't save the model from extinction in 1980.

Speaking of schematics, the S-1 schematics mark the debut of our new online schematics file (vintage as well as current), accessible through our Customer Relations page.

Some of the background info for this column came from these websites:

The Rolling Stones home page

The Brian Jones Fan Club home page

The Mick Taylor home page