This October, guitar collectors will get a chance to become part of a genuinely outlaw rock-and-roll story — without worrying that the police will come knocking at their door.
ANALOGr is launching an auction of 16 guitars from the Outlaw Custom Shop Guitar Collection, a group of one-of-a-kind Gibson-inspired instruments created in the late 1980s by master luthier Roger Giffin and vintage-gear expert Brett Allen. The guitars were conceived and built while Giffin was running Gibson’s West Coast Custom Shop in Los Angeles.
But they weren’t part of Gibson’s official lineup. In fact, they were never supposed to exist at all.
Now, for the first time, guitar collectors will get the chance to own one of these rogue Gibson creations.
Giffin is famous as the guitar maker to the stars, having created custom instruments for Eddie Van Halen, Jimmy Page, Eric Clapton, David Gilmour, Keith Richards and many others. But his work on the Outlaw collection could have earned him a very different kind of reputation — as the guitar maker behind bars.
The story began in 1988, when Giffin took over Gibson’s West Coast Custom Shop in Los Angeles and met Allen, a vintage-gear expert who had served as AC/DC’s guitar tech and owned Brett Allen Studio Rental. The two bonded over a shared obsession with guitar tone, a taste for rebellion and a desire to see what Giffin could create without Gibson’s usual design restrictions, as dictated by then-Gibson CEO Henry Juszkiewicz.
“What Roger wanted to do at the time was piss Henry off,” Allen recently told Guitar World. “We used to call him ‘Henry Just-a-twit.’ Henry was getting on his case from the time he started.”
The duo’s outlaw guitar making started innocently enough. Allen wanted to know what kind of guitar Giffin would build if he were free from Gibson’s rules. The answer was a Les Paul with a Gretsch-style hollowbody construction.
The pair went on to create 16 one-of-a-kind electric guitars, basses and acoustics. Giffin would visit Gibson’s Nashville headquarters and “borrow” parts for the instruments, which were then shipped back to Los Angeles.
“I’d wander around in the wood mill and just say, ‘Can I have that and that and that?’” Giffin recalled. “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. They’d just crate it up and ship it to me in LA.”
The guitars they built from those parts were anything but standard Gibson fare. Giffin experimented with sparkle finishes, hollowbody constructions and what he describes as the only two Les Paul baritones ever made. He even made a Goldtop 12-string Les Paul and a gold-sparkle model with three P-90s. Both guitars are among those going on the auction block.
The baritones are particularly unusual. Giffin had to build them without the benefit of existing Gibson baritone necks.
“The hollowbodies didn’t exist,” he said. “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.”
One of those baritones would eventually find an admirer in Alice in Chains guitarist Jerry Cantrell. After playing the guitar, Cantrell described it as “the most evil guitar” he had ever played and offered Allen $30,000 for it.
Allen turned him down.
“He played the one with P-90s in it — it’s got ’54 cream-top P-90s. They sound amazing,” Allen said. “Jerry played it for about a minute and a half. He looked at me and he said, ‘This is pure fucking evil, and I want it.’”
For all the audacity that went into creating the guitars, there was a very real reason to keep them out of sight. Giffin had built the 16 instruments without Gibson’s official approval. Allen ultimately stored the collection under his bed, where it remained for roughly 30 years.
“If they found out, we’d be in jail,” Allen said. “Or I would be. I was the instigator.”
Now the guitars are finally coming out of hiding. All 16 Outlaw Custom Shop Guitar Collection guitars will go to auction through ANALOGr beginning October 20, giving collectors a chance to own a remarkable — and genuinely unauthorized — chapter of Gibson-inspired guitar history.
Four decades after Giffin and Allen first decided to see what might happen if they stopped playing by the rules, the Outlaw Custom Shop Guitar Collection is ready for its next owners.
Visit ANALOGr.com for more details and to bid.
