Most of us can agree that it is not the instrument but the player that is the main ingredient in guitar tone. It’s how we play, not what we play, and that especially holds true for the greats.
We could play through Jimmy Page’s rig but who could phrase those notes with the same cavalier panache? Conversely, he could pick up any old piece of firewood with a pickup in it and make it sound godly.
Vast sums of money have been spent reassembling the myriad components of Eddie Van Halen’s rig, with night classes in home electronics enjoying an economic boom from curious players trying to fathom the magical properties of the variac to turn their sound Brown, and yet without EVH’s buccaneering virtuosity writ large on the fingerboard, that sound will always be just out of reach.
But that’s not to say that we shouldn’t try, and nor does that prove that the electric guitar doesn’t have a say in all this.
Some guitars really do have something in them, something kind of mythical, and ZZ Top frontman, Billy F Gibbons, owns one of them.
She goes by the name of Pearly Gates, and while Gibbons said he agreed with Brian May and similarly subscribed to the tone-is-in-the-hands maxim, the bewhiskered raconteur argues that no matter who picks it up this legendary 1959 Gibson Les Paul Standard, they’ll feel something.
And it's something magic, as though the Lady of the Lake herself has just opened up the guitar case for you and out popped this Excalibur comprising mahogany, maple, hide glue, nitro lacquer and wire.
“I’ll tend to agree with Brian’s assessment. Although in the case of ZZ Top, we count largely on the dramatic performance from our famous 1959 sunburst Les Paul – the one we call Pearly Gates,” says Gibbons. “Even today, that instrument is fascinating. It came together on one of those lucky days when it was the right combination of wood, the right amount of glue, the right amount of paint – it’s kind of crazy.
“I’ve passed it around and players of all sorts have all come to the same conclusion – there is something magic in that instrument.”
Maybe it as the air it was being exposed to at the time when Gibbons first acquired the guitar in 1968. There was a lot of magic going around. Gibbons tasted some of it as he toured with Jimi Hendrix with the Moving Sidewalks, before forming ZZ Top in ’69.
“It was a wonderful time, largely due to the unexpected invitation to join The Jimi Hendrix Experience tour back in 1968,” says Gibbons. “Rock ’n’ roll was becoming more cerebral. Bands were beginning to experiment with expansion of consciousness. It genuinely was a period of great experimentation.”
Things were swinging back to a bluesier influence, particularly from bands from the UK. It’s no secret that the British revived the art form in no small terms
This unbridled musical curiosity could manifest itself in various ways. With the Moving Sidewalks, it was psych-rock. This was an era when rock’s primordial gloop was producing bands like Cream and Pink Floyd, mind expansion you could own on vinyl and experience live in concert. But it wasn’t all pure cosmic experimentation. Gibbons’ curiosity was piqued by blues guitar, what was happening with the British Invasion, and going back to the source.
“We touched upon The Moving Sidewalks and the psychedelic surroundings of that excursion, but at the same time things were swinging back to a bluesier influence, particularly from bands from the UK,” he says. “It’s no secret that the British revived the art form in no small terms. We were rediscovering that which had been left by the wayside – all thanks to The Rolling Stones and Eric Burdon and The Animals and The Pretty Things, so many influential arrivals on these shores, allowing us to get back into the blues thing.”
With Dusty Hill on the bass guitar and Frank Beard behind the drum set, he had chanced upon a groove unit that had already played together and hit its straps – and it just so happened their interests aligned perfectly with Gibbons’.
I shared quite a number of the same influences that struck both Dusty Hill and Frank Beard, so it was quite natural to take the ball and run with it
“I shared quite a number of the same influences that struck both Dusty Hill and Frank Beard, so it was quite natural to take the ball and run with it,” says Gibbons. “I inherited such a great rhythm section. Dusty and Frank had been in a band together for years before I even met them. So I stepped on to this ready-made platform to take it straight ahead.”
There was no better instrument to do that with than Pearly Gates. This would become the holiest of holies, the guitar whose voice has been heard on every ZZ Top recording. Gibbons lucked out when he got it. Nearly everyone who owns a ’59 Les Paul gives it a name. Most reading here can talk about their favourite ‘Bursts even though we will never hope to own one; there’s the Keith Burst, the Skinner Burst, Lazarus…
And let’s not forget the Beano Burst, which belonged to Eric Clapton until it was stolen from a practice space in 1966, never to be seen again. That Beano Burst gave Gibbons the idea that he should get one of his own in the first place.
That Gibbons’ is named Pearly Gates is all to do with a car of almost divine providence. Gibbons and friends owned a 1939 Packard and had lent it to an aspiring actress friend to drive down from Texas to Hollywood for an audition.
“We didn’t think the car would make it past El Paso,” said Gibbons, speaking to Guitar Player in 2020. “But it brought her all the way to Hollywood, and she got the part. We figured the car must have divine connections, so we named it Pearly Gates.”
The actress asked what she should do with the car now she had made it there? Gibbons and friends told her to sell it. She wired the money back, and Gibbons had a $250 war chest to find his Les Paul, and he had a lead.
A pal by the name of John Wilson, who played in the Houston-based garage-psych band The Magic Ring (also known as the Hobbits, and they were pretty good), had heard of a rancher who was rumoured to have one hidden under his bed. Gibbons told Guitar Player that this rancher had swapped country music for cattle and this thing was up for grabs. The bold Billy drove on out there and met with a guy who looked like Big Jake himself.
“The guy was big,” said Gibbons. “He was like a John Wayne guy. I had $250 in my pocket. And when he pulled out that ’59 ‘burst, the deal went down.”
Inside the case was a love letter and a spare set of flatwounds and Gibbons maintains he still has both. Nothing has changed over the years besides the wear and tear.
But what makes Pearly Gates so special – where is the magic? You could argue it was all factory made. The story behind it – Hollywood, a vintage car, the rancher who looked like ‘The Duke – gives it a certain mojo. But you could argue the magic was factory made.
Nineteen-fifty-nine was Gibson’s annus mirabilis. The best figure for how many Les Paul Standards were made by Gibson in 1959 is 643, though the log books are missing and experts, such as Joe Bonamassa, have said the figure shipped was 536 or 539. By most player’s estimation, Gibson never managed to top it, and it is reflected in the prices they command in the vintage guitar market.
The ‘59s had Seth Lover’s ‘Patent Applied For’ PAF humbuckers. They had the Honduran mahogany bodies with carved maple tops and that Cherry sunburst finish that fades just right over time. They had the long neck tenon, the single-ply binding, the Tune-O-Matic bridge, the nickel hardware, and they were, in Bonamassa’s opinion, “perfect”. And he should know. He owns eight of them.
“It’s a perfect combination of build quality, wood, electronics, contours,” he said, in a video segment for the BBC. “The greatest thing about a ’59 Les Paul – because of its association with rock music – is that when these were built, they were built to play jazz, and they were built to play more pop music, so when I grew up listening to Eric Clapton, the Jeff Beck Group, Free, Led Zeppelin – wonderful musicians who could play any plank of wood with a pickup strapped to it – they chose these for a reason, because of the sound, the clarity, the ability to create these wonderful dynamics in music, where we go very clean, and then with just a simple twist of a knob you’re in rocket mode.”
Gibson has tried to recreate the magic. In 2009, it launched a Custom Shop VOS Pearly Gates Les Paul Standard alongside a super-limited run of replicas aged by Tom Murphy, with a further 50 aged and then played and signed by Gibbons himself. Those replicas have become some of the most sought-after Les Pauls on the vintage market in their own right.
But even if they are beyond most players’ budgets, we could always retrofit our own Les Paul with a little bit of the Pearl Gates secret sauce – the eponymous Seymour Duncan humbucker set that was co-developed with Gibbons to replicate the PAFs in the original.
This $278 tonal power-up might not fully explain why Pearly Gates sounds the way it does but it does offer some clues.
The Californian electric guitar pickup manufacturer discovered that the neck humbucker on Pearly Gates had more midrange than other PAFs. “The result is a neck pickup that cuts through with stronger tailored mids, but still has the open and airy treble attack of the Alnico II bar magnet,” says Seymour Duncan. “Combined with a warm, spongy low-end, this pickup is great for both rhythm and lead playing.”
For the record DCR rating on Seymour Duncan’s Pearly Gates neck humbucker is 7.3k. At 8.2k, the bridge runs a little hotter than its contemporaries. That extra heat counted when Gibbons was playing it through his 1968 Marshall Super Lead. Again, Seymour Duncan used an Alnico II bar magnet to recreate the original, wax-potting both pickups to put the nix on squeal.
For an extra touch of authenticity, it wound them Seymour Duncan’s original Leesona winding machine that he got from the Gibson factory in Kalamazoo, Michigan. In lieu of another Gibson Custom Shop run, that might be our best bet for nailing Gibbons tone.
But then the rest is in the fingers, in those super-light .07s electric guitar strings he switched to on BB King’s advice, and maybe also in the romance of Pearly Gates’ origin story, too. We can’t discount the power of legend. It’s the kind of thing that would never happen again.
Good luck saddling up at a Texan ranch to buy the world’s most sought-after electric guitar with nothing but $250 bucks in your pocket and a glint in your eye. That trick’s already been done.
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