Having 1957 tobacco sunburst Les Paul Junior was special enough for Billy Idol, who got the guitar as a gift from his musical partner Steve Stevens during the early 80s
But meeting Les Paul and getting him to sign it in 1985 — and the circumstances around it — make the guitar even sweeter.
“I bought Steve Stevens a Les Paul when we first got together (in 1981), so I think he kind of returned the favor when he found one in a guitar store he used to work at,” says Idol, a nominee this year for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. “It was $250, which wasn’t that expensive back then. It was still early, I suppose; people hadn’t gotten crazy about collecting. But I loved that guitar.”
Idol used the Junior during recording sessions and while touring in support of his 1983 album Rebel Yell. “It was my favorite guitar,” he says, “and I’d put all these stickers all over it — very punk rock.”
When Idol’s mother came to visit him in New York during 1985, he wanted to show her a good time. A chance to see Les Paul, “one of her heroes,” perform at Fat Tuesday’s seemed to be the right ticket. The guitarist played every Monday at the East Village club situated on Third Avenue in the basement of Tuesday’s restaurant.
“She loved Les Paul, and she loved jazz music,” Idol recalls. “So I took her to Fat Tuesday’s and I took my Les Paul Junior with me and got him to sign it.”
Idol acknowledges that he was “a little bit drug addicted at the time,” and that Paul — a hero to him and Stevens as well “because he came up with the modern way of recording” — didn’t know what to make of the stickers that adorned the instrument.
“I’m sure he was thinking, Oh my God, this guy’s out of his mind!” Idol remembers with a laugh. ”But I think he dug it that I loved this guitar. He could see I played it to death ‘cause it had marks from wearing all my studded wristbands. It looked like it had been played. So it was a fantastic night, a lively night with my mum.“
Paul signed the guitar ‘To Billy, from Les Paul,” and Idol subsequently “got it covered with some varnish or something so it will never come off. Eventually I had to retire it from the road, ‘cause it’s now worth too much money.” With a chuckle, he adds, “Maybe eventually it’ll be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, if I get in.”
Having his mom as part of the Junior’s story is particularly meaningful for the English-born Idol. While he says both of his parents were “concerned” about his decision to pursue a career in music, his mother was more understanding because of her own background.
“She’s Irish,” he explains, “and in Ireland they’d had a very small hotel where they put on entertainment on Saturday nights. She was a singer, my grandad was a drummer, and I think my uncles played saxophone. And my grandmother could play 15 instruments; she could play, like, accordion, piano, the viola. She was very musically talented. So my mum understood it a lot more.
“She loved jazz, so I grew up listening to Count Basie and Duke Ellington and Sarah Vaughan, Dina Washington and Ella Fitzgerald. So I grew up listening to a lot of that music, although I had some Tex Ritter 78s where he sang a lot of country music — ‘The Story of Billy the Kid’ or ‘The Streets of Laredo’ — and funnily enough I liked that. I had both worlds going on, the jazz world and this country and country and western world, before I got into punk rock.”
Idol has been mining some of those early memories for an upcoming documentary he hopes will be out this year, which also provided source material for his autobiographical new album Dream Into It — his first full-length since 2014 — which comes out April 18 and features guest appearances from Joan Jett, Avril Lavigne and Alison Mosshart of the Kills and the Dead Weather. Jett, who duets on the track “Wildside,” will be supporting Idol on tour, beginning April 30 in Phoenix.
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