Under the bed vintage Les Paul

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goldtop0
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Re: Under the bed vintage Les Paul

Post by goldtop0 »

Slowy wrote:From the same guy with the Manfred Mann Pickup story:

He was talking to Lou Walmsley from The Underdogs (look them up, kiddies) about past gear and Lou mentioned his Les Paul from the early days of the band. Here's a picture of it from 1966.

Think about that for a moment.....
20190920_193435.jpg
What you're looking at is a 1959 Burst, plugged into a Jansen amp, gigging in a Kiwi pub.



The story behind this '59 is that Lou(Rawnsley) and his band The Underdogs had a gig at a nightclub in ChCh around '67 after 'Sittin' In The Rain' was released. He and the band went to setup in the afternoon at the venue and he saw this brown(Gibson)case sitting in the corner by the stage. He went and asked the barman what it was and could he have a look, barman said okay, so Lou opened it up to see this '59. He asked whose it was and was told that it belonged to an American serviceman who was keen to sell it before heading back to the USA. Lou had a LP Custom at the time that had had the middle pup removed and said to the barman that he'd like to swap that for the '59.Lou gave the barman his address and phone number in Auckland saying that if the serviceman should want the LP back he'd duly return it to him, and apparently he never heard from him.
A couple of years later around '69/70 The Underdogs disbanded and Lou took the '59 to Harborne and Arthur in High St and sold it to them. He said he saw it around Auckland maybe a couple of times after that in the '70s and told me that it had been monkeyed around with, modified........and it hasn't been seen since.
Doin' that scrapyard thing.

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Re: Under the bed vintage Les Paul

Post by Dharmajester »

goldtop0 wrote:..and it hasn't been seen since.
Maybe it's made it's way into Dirk Ziff's temperature controlled vault like many of it's brothers.
“The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench - a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side."
Hunter S. Thompson

goldtop0
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Re: Under the bed vintage Les Paul

Post by goldtop0 »

Yes well he's got a good cache of them 150+ apparently '58s-60s....... some may be suspect........but not many I don't think.
Last pic I saw of them(some years ago now) they were all hanging on the wall. I expect the place where he keeps them would be a bit like Fort Knox.
Other guys I know in the US that have a handful or more(traders/players/collectors) are very secretive and have them secured well away from their businesses and homes..........that's the way they do it.
Doin' that scrapyard thing.

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