‘59 “Keith Burst” - a Les Paul’s Les Paul 🥇

 

Keith Richards pictured with a ‘59 Les Paul that he sold to Mick Taylor when Taylor was playing with John Mayall. The guitar rejoined the Stones with Taylor in 1969.

According to information provided by high-end guitar brokerage Richard Henry, the “Keith Burst” is a ’59 Les Paul that first arrived at Farmers Music Store in Luton, England, in ’61, and was played for a time by John Bowen of Mike Dean & The Kingsmen. Bowen had a Bigsby added to the guitar at Selmer’s Music in London, before trading it in there in late ’62. A young Keith Richards, who purchased the Les Paul with Bigsby, occasionally visited a regular haunt of musicians on the booming London scene of the day, Selmer’s. (It’s worth noting that both Peter Green of Fleetwood Mac and Jeff Beck of The Yardbirds also acquired used ’59 Les Pauls at Selmer’s, and several other acquisitions logged in the history of rock also took place in this popular west-end shop.)

Throughout the early days of the Stones, the Les Paul was one of Richards’s most prominent guitars. The Best-known photos of the era show him playing it on a Ready Steady Go! TV-show performance in Britain in ’64, and he also played it on a tour of the US that same year, when it popped up during the Stones’s performance on The Ed Sullivan Show.

Early Rolling Stones hits purportedly recorded with the Les Paul include “Satisfaction,” “Get Off My Cloud,” “Let’s Spend the Night Together,” and “Little Red Rooster.” As seen in color photos from the time, just five years after it left the factory it was already faded to a deep amber burst with a little iced-tea shading around the body edges. While still in Richards’s possession, the Bigsby ’Burst was also purportedly loaned to Jimmy Page for some studio sessions, and was then loaned to Eric Clapton for use with Cream at the ’66 Windsor Jazz & Blues Festival. - Gibson