Jake Kiszka has looked back on his love affair with The Beloved – the 1961 Gibson Les Paul SG that has been at the core of everything he’s done with Greta Van Fleet.
Kiszka, who also stuck to the electric guitar in question for his recent collaborative project with Chris Turpin, Mirador, is synonymous with the cherry red SG, which itself is a vintage example lifted from the design’s earliest era when it still bore the ‘Les Paul’ name.
But Kiska’s attachment to the SG stretches far beyond the material. It’s more than just A Good Guitar. As he explains in an interview with MusicRadar, there was an intangible, sentimental connection to the SG that he simply could not ignore.
Article continues belowThe only problem was, when he first crossed paths with the guitar at the Chicago Music Exchange Vault, he couldn’t afford it. Enter CME CEO Andrew Yonke, who took a hell of a gamble on the promising young guitarist.
As the tale goes, when Greta Van Fleet were first finding their feet, Kiszka was browsing for new gear at Chicago Music Exchange. The band’s manager was a friend of Yonke’s, and so a private testing of the most desirable vintage equipment from the retailer’s famed archive was arranged.
“I was looking through all these guitars, and we were trying to pick up some gear if we could – some serious, good gear,” Kiska remembers. “I wasn’t really that familiar with the early ’60s SGs. I didn’t know much about them.
“I stumbled upon this one. I was just immediately mesmerised. The visual element of it, the weight of it, the slimness of the neck. And it was like, ‘I’d really like to play this and maybe see if I could take it with me.’
“And so the owner said, ‘Let’s walk back to my apartment. We’ll plug it in. I’ve got a Plexi JTM, early Marshall.’ So we did, we went back, and I plugged it in.”
It was love at first strum. Kiszka reckons it could have been divine intervention. There was no way he was walking out the store without it. There was one hitch: the $25,000 price tag.
“It was like a lightning bolt just hit me from above,” he adds. “I really did feel like this was sort of a divine intervention for me. It was everything that I was looking for in terms of the sound of something. I’d been searching for that my whole life up to this point.
“There was no question I yearned to take it on the road with me,” he says with a laugh. “The caveat was it was a $25,000 guitar. So of course I wasn’t gonna be able to afford that being a poor kid coming out of Michigan, you know?”
“Thankfully and gratefully I’m humbled that the owner perhaps saw something in me, and, and us as a band, and allowed me to take it on the road,” he says. “He said, ‘Do you know what? Just pay me back for it later, when you can afford it.’ And I did.”
It proved to be a good gamble from the owner. Kiszka and the 1961 model have been inseparable ever since. It’s been on every Greta Van Fleet album, starred on Mirador’s record, and toured the world many times over.
It was also recently reissued as Kiska’s first Gibson signature guitar. Speaking to Guitar World about the guitar’s creation, Kiszka expanded on his affection for the SG, and explained how he manages the baggage that comes with such an iconic instrument.
