“They only made 20 of them at the time. I used that one on ‘Memphis’ and I still use it today.” So mentioned Lonnie Mack in 1968, 5 years after his Prime 5 US hit with that nice monitor, which helped outline the extremely distinctive guitar trademarked by Gibson on January 6, 1958: the Flying V.
One other estimate says that 98 have been made initially, however both manner, these 1958-59 originals are actually valued at between $200,000 and $250,000. Indiana bluesman Mack was one of many early adopters of an instrument that continues to be one of the putting wanting axes on the earth of guitars.
Lonnie named his guitar Seven, as a result of he was instructed it was seventh off the manufacturing line. His fellow blues practitioner Albert King was one other who began utilizing a Flying V quickly after they got here into that restricted circulation, and he known as his Lucy, in reply to B.B. King’s Lucille.
The primary of the guitars have been made not of mahogany, however of limba, a lighter wooden, and the look, designed by Gibson president Ted McCarty, was intentionally futuristic. But it surely didn’t show fashionable at first, and it was the milestone ‘Memphis,’ and different Mack recordings, that helped the brand new technology of rock guitarists take an curiosity within the Flying V.
Dave Davies of the Kinks, Arthur Lee of Love, and Jimi Hendrix have been amongst these to understand that the guitar had each audible and visual attraction. Gibson weren’t sluggish to recognise the brand new curiosity, and relaunched the guitar, this time with a mahogany physique, in 1967. That 12 months, King recorded “Born Under A Bad Sign” along with his Lucy and future stars like Stevie Ray Vaughan have been spellbound. Albert even minimize a music that will have gave the impression to be named after a preferred TV sequence, however was actually a love letter to his Flying V, “(I Love) Lucy.”
Andy Powell of Wishbone Ash was one other fan of the V. “I [used to go] up to the music shops in London on the train and [look] in the windows,” he instructed Guitar Participant in 1974. “And I used to build up these fantasies about owning a Flying V. At one time it was a Les Paul, but then it changed. Mine is lust a fairly basic mid-60s V. I recently acquired another one in mint condition, which is really nice.”
The guitar additionally fitted completely with the glam-rock look and sound of the extrovert rock bands of the early and mid-Seventies. Marc Bolan was intently related to it, as was Paul Stanley of Kiss; Ronnie Montrose of Montrose and Low-cost Trick’s Rick Nielsen each acquired 1958 fashions within the Seventies.
Tom Petty favored the guitar a lot that for years, the Heartbreakers’ brand was a Flying V piercing a coronary heart. “I always thought the Flying V was great ever since I saw Dave Davies playing one in the Kinks on television in Gainesville,” Petty instructed Q journal in 1989. “I thought, ‘Yeah, that looks cool,’ so the first one I could afford, I bought.”
Petty was much less eager when the V grew to become related to the following “hair” steel bands, corresponding to Quiet Riot. Scorpions additionally favoured one within the Nineteen Eighties, as did fashionable rockers Hüsker Dü, and Lenny Kravitz gave the instrument a Hendrix-style endorsement within the Nineteen Nineties. He poses with it on the quilt of 2004’s Baptism album, seen on the prime of the story.
The Flying V2 model of the guitar arrived within the late Seventies, and there have been later variations such because the Reverse Flying V and the bass model of the guitar, the V Bass. But it surely’s the design of the unique 1958 guitar that’s in fashionable manufacturing at each Gibson and Epiphone.
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