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"The Vertigo is coming out, at long last!" crows Zakk Wyle. The guitar superstar is excited, to say the least, that the Gibson Les Paul bearing the Vertigo motif - modeled after the graphics from Alfred Hitchcock's 1958 thriller - is finally seeing the light of day in 2012.

The model is significant in guitar circles because it's in keeping with what Wylde imagined more than 20 years ago when he first joined Ozzy Osbourne's band. "I was just this kid from New Jersey," Wylde says. "The Vertigo was something I had in my head."

It was the late '80s, and Wylde was set to shoot one of his first guitar magazine covers. The multi-media world was still pre-Internet. "People couldn't click on Facebook or Twitter," says Wylde. "Being on a magazine was a really big deal. People were seeing me for the very first time.

"I had this amazing Les Paul, but I felt like I needed to do something to establish some sort of identity. Yeah, I had the long hair and all that, but what about the guitar? You had Eddie with the stripes all over his guitars, and Randy had the polka dots, so I thought, All right, what am I about? I have to do something."

While watching the SciFi channel, Wylde was struck by a commercial for Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, so he asked a friend of his if he could copy the graphics and logo on his cream-colored Les Paul. "Max was down on Sunset Boulevard, and painted guitars – he had just done some stuff for Slash," says Wylde. "I told him about the Vertigo logo, and I kind of sketched out on a piece of paper what I wanted, and he said, 'Sure, no problem.'"

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