For more than 10 years, master luthier Roger Giffin and vintage gear rental specialist Brett Allen have been sitting on a secret that could have landed both of them serious jail time.
The story goes back to Giffin’s time as head of the Gibson Custom Shop operations in Los Angeles. The renowned British guitar maker, who famously built Johnny Marr’s Telecaster knock-off, arrived in LA in 1988 with the task of building a Custom Shop facility. He was left largely to his own devices, working on repairs and warranty issues. In walked Allen.
They immediately hit it off. Giffin played the role of teacher, talking Allen through the builds he had hanging on the wall. Allen fired question after question at him and Giffin answered. They were similarly curious about guitar design, about what could be done – if not what should be done.
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“Literally the moment him and I started talking, we got on like a house on fire,” Allen tells Guitar World. “He would show me bits and pieces of what he wanted to put together as a guitar, like he’d take a Gibson neck that shouldn’t be on this body and put it on that body, and try and find out what it’s going to sound like, right? That really intrigued me.”
It got Allen thinking: if there was one Gibson guitar that Giffin would love to design but the company would never make it, what would that be?
“Without hesitation, within a second, he said, ‘Yeah, a hollowbody Les Paul,’” says Allen.
They kept talking. Giffin had all this worked out, how to construct a Les Paul as you would do a hollowbody Gretsch guitar. Allen asked if he would build him one, and there it began, an illicit collaboration that all started with a hollowbodied Les Paul, complete with f-holes, and once it was finished they were sitting on a consignment of 16 wholly unauthorized acoustic, bass and electric guitars, all bearing the Gibson name on the headstock, all made from parts purloined from company stock.
“If they found out, we’d be in jail. Or I would be. I was the instigator. I was the one that came up with it,” says Allen.
“I would go back to Nashville every few months,” says Giffin. “I’d spend a few days there. I’d wander around in the wood mill, and take a trolley thing on wheels, and just say, ‘Can I have that and that and that?’ And they’d say, ‘Yeah, yeah, just take it.’ I would take all this stuff on the trolley and wheel it back to the other end of the shop there, and they would just crate it up and ship it to me in LA.”
Giffin amassed a stockpile of premium tonewoods and spent his nights and weekends working on designs that he knew deep down would not ever go into production at Gibson. And, he says, the company saw some of these. He would send some of the builds back to Nashville for finishing. Giffin describes them as “kind of official Gibsons” but prototypes.
“Whatever they saw, they obviously didn’t disapprove of it, so it just kind of spiraled,” he says.
Allen had more suggestions, and this clandestine project continued, off-the-books, on the hush-hush. Some of the designs were Giffin’s from the ground up, such as the hollowbody design and his baritone Les Paul.
“The hollowbodies didn’t exist,” says Giffin. “Those were built from scratch. I probably used Gibson necks on some of them, but not all of them, especially not the baritones, because there were no baritone necks.”
Allen says these guitars have been sitting under his bed all this time but some of them had been rented out to artists to use in the studio. Allen wanted to build his rental business – he also wanted to know what these guitars would sound like in a pro’s hands. Jerry Cantrell of Alice in Chains made a beeline for that baritone Les Paul.
“Jerry Cantrell was the very first person to ever play either one of the baritones,” says Allen. “He played the one with P-90s in it – it’s got ’54 cream top P-90s. They sound amazing. Jerry played it for about a minute and a half. He looked at me and he said, ‘Brett, this is the most evil-sounding guitar I’ve ever played in my life. This is pure fucking evil, and I want it.’”
Allen told him it wasn’t for sale. But Cantrell was determined, and was willing to put down some serious money for it. He went as far as thirty grand. Allen said no. None of these instruments were for sale.
Until now. And this is why Allen and Giffin have broken cover. They waited 10 years until the statute of limitations had passed, and now these guitars are going up for auction at ANALOGr as ‘The Giffin Gibson Outlaw Guitar Collection.’
What he wanted to do at the time was piss Henry Juszkiewicz off. We used to call him ‘Henry just a twit’
Brett Allen
All of them were made using Gibson woods. That hollowbody Les Paul really started something; they made a 12-string variant, equipped with cream-covered P-90 pickups, and a 12-string Gold Top Les Paul. And what about a truly ostentatious (and Gretsch-inspired) gold sparkle Les Paul with a trio of P-90s?
Allen says all of these are one-offs, all built on this hypothetical premise of what a Gibson guitar could be – or mostly. Some were made to upset then Gibson-CEO Henry Juszkiewicz, such as a fully hollow Les Paul with a cats-eye soundhole just like a Gretsch. That one was all Giffin’s idea.
“What he wanted to do at the time was piss Henry off. Henry Juszkiewicz,” says Allen. “We used to call him ‘Henry just a twit’. Henry was getting on his case all the fucking time, from the time he started with with Gibson. So he built that for me.”
These guitars go under the hammer on October 24 via ANALOGr. Allen has waited a long time for this day. They had been close to being caught on a couple of occasions. Now he says it’s over.
“All of those guitars, literally, were underneath my bed in Hollywood for over 10 years,” he says. “The statute of limitations is seven years. I wanted to wait 10 years to make sure that, absolutely, that’s it, you can’t touch me. You can’t do anything.”
Giffin left Gibson in 1992. It got “nasty” towards the end. Gibson sent in “the hatchet squad”. He said he would never work for an American corporation again and formed Giffin Guitars.
You can find out more about the auction and these one-of-one guitars at ANALOGr.
