![Kirk Hammett plays his Mummy ESP signature guitar [left]; Neal Schon plays a Les Paul on a stage lit up in purple.](https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/zLwrLewdapgJA4vxYgYjSK-1920-80.jpg.webp)
Kirk Hammett makes no secret that he is a collector. He can’t help himself. He’ll buy guitars, he’ll trade them. If there’s something about an electric guitar that speaks to him then he’s an easy mark. It’s in the blood.
But he has an eye for this stuff. Hammett has acquired of the rarest vintage guitars around, such as the Bigbsy-equipped 1959 Gibson Les Paul Standard that left the factory with a black finish. He had Joe Bonamassa to thank for that one, giving him a heads up text after he spotted it in Carter Vintage Guitars. There is only three of them in existence – with rumours that a fourth is out there somewhere, like Bigfoot.
Hammett also owns one of the most famous Les Pauls of all time, Greeny, the ’59 Les Paul Standard once owned by Peter Green then Gary Moore. It has quite literally become his signature guitar, with Gibson and Epiphone both releasing replicas of it.
But speaking in Dublin at one of his The Collection in-person events, sandwiched between Metallica’s performances on the latest leg of their stadium-packing M72 Tour, Hammett introduced one guitar of special significance, a Les Paul previously owned by one of his heroes, and is another super-rare Factory Black unicorn.
So why then did Hammett have mixed feelings about owning it?
“This guitar used to belong to one of my all-time star heroes, a huge source of inspiration, Neal Schon,” says Hammett. “And I got this in an auction, and I don’t know what was up, but I got this for, like, half the price that it was worth!”
Many players would be happy. It is not often you can get a bargain on the vintage market, doubly so if the guitar has an association with a platinum-selling artist. Hammett adores Schon’s playing. He loves Schon. None of this sat easy with him.
“I felt kind of bad about it because I should have paid a fair price,” says Hammett. “But I paid a price that was lower than it should have been.”
Who can say what was going on in Schon’s mind at the time. This was 2021, the Covid era. The auction was a big deal in the press. This was a huge consignment of guitars, some 112 in total, with some of the rarest – and most valuable – vintage guitars being auctioned off.
This was the auction in which Schon’s Grainger 'Burst 1959 Les Paul Standard sold for $350,000. His 1977 Don’t Stop Believin’ Les Paul went for $250,000. And there were some bona-fide vintage curios, too, such as his ’87 Superstrat prototypes that had a body like an upside-down Jackson Soloist. There was even a super-weird 1967 Coral Sitar Vincent Bell.
Hammett Schon’s P-90 loaded 1957 Les Paul Standard was unusual. It had left the Gibson factory with a custom black finish rather than its regular Goldtop. A unicorn, and at $87,500 from Heritage Auctions, a bargain. But it wasn’t the only unicorn to sell for what many believed was way under the estimate.
In his Guitarist column, Dave Davidson of Well Strung Guitars in NYC highlighted a 1960 Les Paul Custom in a Cherry finish, supposedly the last surviving instrument in a consignment of six that were custom-finished for Hägstrom.
He said Schon got really unlucky and “missed the boat” on the vintage guitar market boom. Schon should have waited until the pandemic was over.
“It turned out to be the worst time to do an auction because his guitars really undersold,” said Davidson. “I remember having a conversation with Joe Bonamassa afterwards, and he felt Schon should have waited. I was amazed he didn’t just get a storage place and put it off for a year or two, but nobody knew where the market was going to go at the time. It was a brutal auction to watch.”
All this was bothering Hammett, so he thought he’d do the decent thing. He’d call Schon up. If the Journey guitarist had been sweating over the auction, he didn’t show it. He was totally cool.
“Neal Schon, he’s such a cool, cool guy... he’s an amazing guitar player. He’s amazing
“So, I actually called Neal,” recalls Hammett. “I said, ‘Neal, do you want the guitar back?’ And he said, ‘No, man, you keep it. You buy it; you keep it.’”
This, says Hammett, is typical Schon. There were no hard feelings. A year later, Hammett joined Schon onstage to play Wheel In The Sky. He left the ’57 Les Paul behind though, taking Greeny along for the night.
“Neal Schon, he’s such a cool, cool guy,” says Hammett. “If you guys ever, like, really get to know Neal Schon, I mean, he’s an amazing guitar player. He’s amazing. He lives and breathes music. And to me, he’s just such a inspiration, ‘cos I see him, and I see how he conducts his life, and how he plays, and his commitment and dedication to music, and I was just like, ‘Yeah! That’s what I want to do, too.’ So I’m doing it.”
And he is. You can catch Metallica in London this weekend (July 3/5) before they head back to the US in for their residency at the Sphere, in Las Vegas, opening night October 3. See Metallica for ticket details. And you can watch the conversation about his collection in full above or at Kirk Hammett's YouTube channel.
Gibson The Collection: Kirk Hammett, written and edited by MusicRadar alumnus Chris Vinnicombe is available now via Gibson.
