It's an affliction that guitarists are all too familiar with - the more guitars you have, the more you've got to have. Jimmy Vivino, staff guitarist on "Late Night With Conan O'Brien," is a classic case. Night after night, he plays one great guitar after another. "I'm trying to control my guitar disease," he says, "but they keep coming out with good stuff."

It's noon - early in Vivino's workday. He's in his New York office, where he's writing and arranging the musical parts for the daily afternoon taping of Conan. Already, his "disease" - actually it's more like a dream come true for a guitarist - is making its presence known.

"I'm using three Les Pauls today," he says. He's in a Les Paul mood because he's been hanging out in a recording studio with legendary rocker Al Kooper, who's remixing the classic 1968 Super Session album. The album was a jam session, with Mike Bloomfield on one side (back when albums had two sides) and Stephen Stills on the other. At the time, Bloomfield was already an influential force on guitarists and also on the vintage guitar market, having been the first rock guitarist to figure out that electric guitars of the '50s sounded better than new models. Stills was an up-and-comer, best known as the lead singer and writer of Buffalo Springfield's hit "For What It's Worth," still a year away from superstar status with his friends David Crosby and Graham Nash. Both guitarists played Gibson Les Pauls on Super Session.

"I've been grooving on that," Vivino says. "I gotta use the Les Pauls tonight. Tonight I"ll use a '59 burst - that's a real '59 - and a '53 goldtop and a '68 reissue."

In one breath he's covered a big chunk of guitar history and guitar tone. The '59 burst is, of course, a 1959 Gibson Les Paul Standard with cherry sunburst finish, the Holy Grail for guitar players. The goldtop from 1953 is an earlier version, with single-coil "soapbar" P-90 pickups instead of the burst's "Patent Applied For" double-coil humbucking pickups. The 1968 reissue is a black Les Paul Custom with two humbuckers and nickel-plated parts (the Custom is traditionally gold-plated). It's a Custom Authentic model from Gibson's Custom Shop, so it looks like a vintage 1968 model. And just in case those three LPs don't suit his fancy, he has a pair of '58 Reissues, one of which has been "Murphy'd" (his description of the aging treatment applied by the Custom Shop's Tom Murphy), waiting in the wings.

On another night, Vivino might be in a Firebird mood. "I have a Firebird I that's a reissue that's really beautiful," he says. "It's orange. And then I have a Firebird III that I got from Gibson. It's robin's egg blue, already turning green. That's really great. I have my own Firebird V, a '64, and I have a new copper-colored Firebird VII. Those are all great. I bring the real one (the 1964) up to compare sometimes. That blue is just as good as my '64. I rewired the VII. When they're wired authentically, they're unplayable. I have it wired like an ES-5, where I have one tone control and three volumes. Put the switch in the middle you can dial up any pickup."

Vivino will fit the music for the show around the guitars, or vice versa. "A lot of it depends on what music we're playing," he said. "There are times I have to pull out my Fender or my Gretsch. I like to be authentic. It depends on what period. Take the Beatles. If we're doing something early, I try to use my Rick (John Lennon played a Rickenbacker 325) or my Gretsch (George Harrison played a Gretsch Country Gentleman), but if we get into a period where I know George was using an SG, I'll take my SG.

"If it's blues," he added, "I'll take the Gibson. Gibson is the blues guitar. All the really great blues tunes are on Gibsons. There's not too many on Fender. Not until later did people start playing them on Fender - that was a country guitar. When I was growing up you could get Fenders for 50 bucks, those were '50s Fenders for 50 bucks. Gibson prices never came down. You couldn't get a cheap Les Paul. Everybody was trying to sell their Gretsch and Fenders to get a Les Paul. For a while I would see a burst in a window on 48th Street for six grand, and I'd be thinking you could buy a car for that.

"My favorite guitar right now is a brand new '57 TV reissue that I've been playing up here for about three weeks straight, that is so good."

He goes on about the Les Paul Jr. with the "TV" yellow finish. And about other guitars, from his 1957 humbucking equipped ES-350T to his Byrdland that Ted Nugent set up as a Weapon of Mass Destruction (Nugent's term). Ironically, though, for all the guitars and the guitar talk, Vivino says it's not really about the guitars at all. The Super Session album is a perfect example. "One side is Mike Bloomfield, playing his burst through a Super Reverb," he explains. "It's a chunky gritty sound. On the other side is Stills. He's got a '68. It came fresh out of the box to the session that day. The guitar arrived and a brand new Marshall arrived - two 4x12 cabinets and a 100-watt head. He plugged it in and he played it, and it sounded like a Gretsch White Falcon because of his touch.

"So we're always chasing these tones, when it's not about the guitar and amp at all. It's how he plays it."

Vivino grew up in Glen Rock, NJ, and got his start in showbiz tap dancing with his brothers at the 1964 World's Fair in New York. He soon took up trumpet and then guitar, playing with a variety of bands and artists, gravitating toward blues. He was still a few months away from is 30th birthday when he became musical director of the Broadway show Leader of the Pack. His resume now stretches from New York to Hollywood, where he was musical director and vocal coach for Whoopi Goldberg in the film Sister Act.

He was in San Francisco in 1993 when he got a call from drummer Max Weinberg (of Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band). Weinberg had finagled an audition for Conan O'Brien, who was replacing Dave Letterman in the late night spot on NBC, but Weinberg didn't actually have a band for the audition. He quickly put together the Max Weinberg 7 with Vivino handling lead guitar, arranging and some of the lead vocal duties.

For Vivino, Conan is an eight-hour-a-day job. "I usually get here around 11 o'clock," he says. "I just start writing. If I don't have an assignment from the writers, I just start writing out 'bumpers' for the band, stuff that I like. Or when Max is here he'll say 'I've got a couple of songs, let's put them together.' We're constantly learning new material so we don't get stale. The good thing here is, nobody's ever saying 'Don't play that.'"

Vivino doesn't have a chance of getting stale. In addition to his job with Conan, he performs with Al Kooper's band, the Rekooperators, in a jug band with John Sebastian, in a Howlin' Wolf tribute band with Hubert Sumlin (Wolf's guitarist), David Johansen (aka Buster Poindexter) and Levon Helm (former drummer with The Band), and he also plays with Johnny Johnson (Chuck Berry's piano player). The mention of Chuck Berry provokes another attack of Vivino's guitar disease.

"I take out either my 355 or the 350T for the Chuck stuff, I found out later that Chuck played a lot of the classic stuff on a 54 Les Paul.

"There's a new Steve Howe that I've had for a while. I keep lending it back to Gibson for photo shoots. That's a real exceptional one.

"We have an Epiphone up here, a Texan , that was made in Korea. We had Gibson stick a Fishman pickup in it. It's the best sounding acoustic guitar we have

"I have an SG, a '65, that I'm having the vibrola put back on. I have a white one I got from Gibson. I have my 'Clapton' SG, painted just like Eric's, and a Hendrix Flying V that I had painted perfectly

This is the kind of "disease" every guitar player should have.