Vintage Icons
The pinnacle of Gibson’s craft in a mysterious custom colour finish
"This is not a regular Gibson custom colour. It’s actually an unknown colour – ablue that’s faded to green.There are a couple of small chips where you can see the blue. It’s kind of a Foam Green now. That has a lot to do with the clear lacquer yellowing with age. It’s got two initials on the bass bout written in old calligraphy style: ‘E.M.’ There’s a backstory to that. It belonged to a Bahamian guy who was considered to be the ‘Mozart of the Bahamas’. He played many instruments, and this was one of them.
“It’s a cool piece, a very one-off kind of guitar. It’s stereo and has a Varitone, so in that sense it’s a Super 400CES-SV. It’s from 1964 and has a solid spruce top with maple back and sides. Structurally, it’s what you would expect from this era. And it has the standard issue gold hardware with the engraved tailpiece, reflector cap knobs and celluloid pickguard. But rather than a natural or sunburst finish it’s been painted a unique colour. The neck profile is rather full. It plays very, very well. It’s not a slim taper neck like a 60/’61; it’s more of the fullsize neck. The neck has also been painted blue. In fact, the whole thing is blue, aside from the holly [headstock] veneer and the [ebony] fingerboard, obviously.
“One thing I love about these higher-end archtops is that it appears only the best craftspeople were working on them. Years ago, during a conversation with [ex-Gibson employee] Mike McGuire, he told me that Gibson had only their best people working on these. The binding work was one of the most difficult parts of the process. They’ve got to do the front and back of the body, and it’s multiple ply around the fretboard and headstock, so it was a very labour-intensive process. There’s also considerably more pearl work involved because of the [fivepiece split diamond] headstock inlays and the large split-block fingerboard inlays.
“This is such an interesting colour – Ithink of it as ‘Bahamian Blue’. I don’t have a match for it using the paint charts and there is no record of the actual colour they used. It just says, ‘Super 400 Varitone special’, in the ledger. There are times when Gibson put no tint in the [clearcoat] lacquer, so it would have appeared clear. But it’s cellulose, so just like old celluloid tape and old celluloid photo albums can turn yellow with age, so too does the clearcoat on old guitars. However, on some colours, the clear was actually tinted to begin with in order to change the appearance of the basecoat. Inverness Green, for example, is really Pelham Blue with a [yellow-] tinted lacquer. It was certainly cheaper for Gibson to do it that way, rather than usin
