Les Paul was the sun god of the guitar, the top-of-the-range axe that not only meant business but miraculously transformed the hammest-fisted, butter-fingerest strummer into a heavyweight contender. Strap on one of these babies, plug it into a skyscraper Marshall stack, and you could be Page or Townshend or Clapton or Kossoff or Neil Young, Peter Green, Duane Allman...
That was the fantasy of a 14-year-old rock freak in the early ‘70s who not only didn't own a guitar but wouldn't know where to start if he did. And a good thing too. By never once arching my pork sausage fingers into an awkward chord shape or glissing down to the cutaway for a sustained blueswail I was able to sustain my waking dream of guitar superheroism through nothing more than minute study of inky pics in NME, MM and Sounds and a showy faux-familiarity with such terms as whammy-bar, humbucker and, indeed, cutaway.
And I sustain it still, unsullied by Guitar Hero or any such simulator--a Jeremy Clarkson of the electric guitar, but one who can't (and won't) even drive. And these are the coolest, grooviest, rockingest electric guitars I have never played...
12. Mosrite Mark II: After you've outgrown your Startrites, you teen up to your Mosrite--right? A sorta-Strat from the wrong side of the tracks, this is the axe to channel teenage rage, hormonal noise and a hoodlum sneer. The Ventures wiped out, The MC5's Wayne Kramer leered and Johnny Ramone hand-shandied down the Mosrite fretboard in an onanistic blur you gotta love because mom and pop certainly won't.
That was the fantasy of a 14-year-old rock freak in the early ‘70s who not only didn't own a guitar but wouldn't know where to start if he did. And a good thing too. By never once arching my pork sausage fingers into an awkward chord shape or glissing down to the cutaway for a sustained blueswail I was able to sustain my waking dream of guitar superheroism through nothing more than minute study of inky pics in NME, MM and Sounds and a showy faux-familiarity with such terms as whammy-bar, humbucker and, indeed, cutaway.
And I sustain it still, unsullied by Guitar Hero or any such simulator--a Jeremy Clarkson of the electric guitar, but one who can't (and won't) even drive. And these are the coolest, grooviest, rockingest electric guitars I have never played...
12. Mosrite Mark II: After you've outgrown your Startrites, you teen up to your Mosrite--right? A sorta-Strat from the wrong side of the tracks, this is the axe to channel teenage rage, hormonal noise and a hoodlum sneer. The Ventures wiped out, The MC5's Wayne Kramer leered and Johnny Ramone hand-shandied down the Mosrite fretboard in an onanistic blur you gotta love because mom and pop certainly won't.
