Keith Richards — at home in upstate New York in 1978 — with a Mesa Boogie Mark I amp and a custom guitar built by Ted Newman Jones of Newman Guitars in Austin
MICHAEL PUTLAND/GETTY IMAGES“IT WAS THE best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.”
The preceding quote is the introduction to Charles Dickens’ immortal classic A Tale of Two Cities, set in Paris and London around the time of the French Revolution, but it’s also a pretty damn accurate description of the state of the guitar industry during the Seventies. That decade is commonly disparaged as a depressing era when the industry’s leading manufacturers produced some of their worst guitar models, which is not entirely untrue, but it also was an auspicious period when exciting new guitar companies emerged and amp and effect technology rapidly advanced.
The decline of America’s biggest guitar companies during the Seventies was essentially a hangover from the overambitious reaction to the Beatlemania-inspired guitar boom of the Sixties. Hoping to cash in on the phenomenon, major corporations purchased America’s biggest guitar companies, with CBS buying Fender, Norlin purchasing Gibson and Baldwin taking over Gretsch. Although the electric guitar remained massively popular during the Seventies, sales dropped rather steeply from the staggering heights of the Sixties peak. In typical corporate fashion, management typically believed that the accounting department’s cost-cutting measures were a more effective means of maximizing profits than investments in better materials, tools and craftsmanship, and quality took a hit as a result.
That isn’t to say that the instruments Fender, Gibson, Gretsch and others were making during the Seventies were actually bad. Many players who own Seventies guitars from these companies can attest that the majority are decent, playable instruments. The problem was that distinctly superior instruments from the Fifties and Sixties preceded them by only a few years, so the quality drop-off was much more dramatic and noticeable in comparison. The much higher cost of a new instrument during the Seventies (even when adjusted for inflation) further increased musicians’
