“I would really love to see Billy Gibbons’
Moderne in person. He is strangely secretive
about that guitar, which makes me wonder.
He did an article in Guitar World magazine
in 1982 and they photographed it. The rarest
guitar in the world, and all you see is a
sideways photo in the front seat of a car? He
didn’t even include it in his own book! My
guess is that his guitar might have vintage-correct
parts, but that doesn’t make it real. Not
even the most ‘guru’ of vintage guitar experts
has ever had the opportunity to inspect it. Billy
gets any guitar custom made for him—why
not a vintage-correct Moderne?”
Wood believes a genuine Moderne would
have surfaced by now, but there’s always
the possibility it hasn’t: “I used to think one
would have appeared by now, but I started
talking to some fellows on the mylespaul.com
forum a while back, and one of them told me
his grandma had some ‘old guitars that say
Gibson on them’ up in her attic. She had no
idea what they were, but they were old, perhaps
from the ‘50s. It’s highly possible that
someone has a Moderne and might not have
a clue as to its worth. I remember a couple
years ago, some guy bought a ’79 Flying V
from Goodwill for $25!”
Wood says he would like to see Gibson reissue
the Moderne again: “I’ve sent many
letters to them asking for another reissue. I
doubt they will make it again. The guitar was
ridiculed in 1957, and only sold 183 or so in
the early ‘80s. One guy I interviewed for the
book said he was a member of the Gibson
Custom Club, meaning that if you have
enough money, they’ll pretty much make you
anything you want, as long as it was based
on a legitimate Gibson model. He asked for a
Moderne and they couldn’t make him one.”
Can We Get Some Forensics on this Thing?
Deciding to go to the experts, I contacted
George Gruhn of Gruhn Guitars, Stan Jay of
Mandolin Brothers, and Buzzy Levine of
Lark Street Music.
George Gruhn commented, “I have never
encountered any original Moderne guitar
made prior to their so-called reissue in
the early 1980s, nor have I ever had a
conversation with anyone who claimed [to
me] to have seen one. I have significant
doubts that they were ever made.”
Stan Jay said, “The common wisdom
is that Gibson had a patent on the
Moderne. I see it as a fantasy-based
instrument from the 1950s space age.
It just didn’t take off. The Moderne is
like the Sasquatch of the vintage guitar
industry, or those fuzzy pictures you
see of UFOs. You can’t really tell what
they are. I think it’s a wonderful thing
to have some mystery. Every industry
needs a mystery, and the Moderne is
our mystery, our Sasquatch. The real story of
the Moderne is the myth itself.”
Buzzy Levine remarked, “The only myth I
know is that Billy Gibbons supposedly has
one, but why hasn’t he shown it to anyone?
Who wouldn’t want to make it public that he
owned the rarest electric guitar ever made? If
there were Modernes out there, they should
have surfaced by now. I suppose there could
have been one or two made.”
I Want to Believe
As someone who has done his own Moderne
research and generally enjoys the “thrill of the
hunt,” I would be remiss in not expressing my
own opinion. I believe Billy Gibbons’ guitar is a
copy, an Asian lookalike—maybe a prototype
that got into this country, a custom guitar he
had built, or perhaps a mongrel that contains
some original Gibson parts. The headstock is
the standard Les Paul or SG-style “open book,”
not the “paddlestock” of the original design. It
would not be unlike Gibbons, a secretive man,
to keep the guitar a mystery to perpetuate the
myth, mystery and mojo of the Moderne.
Although I would like to believe there’s
an original Moderne under a farmer’s bed
somewhere in rural USA, I honestly think one
would have surfaced by now, given the vast
common knowledge about rare guitars that
exists today. Even pawnshop owners regularly
refer to vintage guitar price guides, and I
personally know several antique dealers in my
area who are savvy about old guitars.
A verified, original Moderne would easily fetch
seven figures. If I found one, it would most
certainly go up on the block for sale. Finally,
while I believe the Moderne did exist in prototype
form, it seems most likely that all original
examples were destroyed in the Gibson
morgue by the early ‘60s. At best, some of the
parts may have been stolen out of the factory
and reassembled into quasi-Modernes.
The bottom line: an original Moderne exists
only in the minds of those who believe the
myth, but admittedly, it’s fun to believe otherwise
and continue the hunt for the vintage
guitar world’s Holy Grail.
For information on Glen Miller’s Moderne,
Explorer and Flying V replicas, visit:
wronashouseofviolins.com.
For additional information on Ron Wood’s
book, Moderne: The Holy Grail of Vintage
Guitars, go to:
centerstream-usa.com.