Ever since the mid-1950s, when Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Elvis and Buddy Holly were creating a new genre called rock and roll, the electric guitar has been its dominant instrument. The electric guitar's roots go back to the 1920s and '30s, when jazzmen such as Charlie Christian were playing them with Big Bands, but it was Les Paul's invention of a guitar with a solid body that set the stage for rock and roll. Les's idea was a guitar with reduced feedback--and the every increasing volumes that rock reached would need it. Leo Fender picked up the idea and ran with it in the very early '50s with the Telecaster, the first mass-produced solidbody electric guitar, and pretty soon, to keep pace, Gibson came a knocking to Les's door to mass produce their own solidbody guitar, based on a combination of their great engineering work, and Les's pioneering ideas.

Add to that Leo Fender's electric Precision Bass, and the tools that dominated rock music were in place by about 1953. It just took Chuck, Buddy, and later, Jimi, Jimmy, James and Eric to show the world what could be done with them.

Of course, few people got that good a look at those instruments. As rock grew in popularity, it began to fill first clubs, then concert halls, then sports arenas and then giant outdoor stadiums-and each step put the fans further away from their heroes. And while plenty of photographs were taken of rock's stars, few concentrated on their equipment.

The Guitar As Centerfold

Guitar World magazine tried to change that. They launched in the early 1980s as an east coast competitor to the Northern California-based Guitar Player magazine, which had been around since the mid-1960s. At the time, Guitar Player had plenty of rock stars on their cover, but you got the feeling that their first loves were jazz and classical, because it dominated their feature articles and technique columns.

In contrast, Guitar World had a much rougher, less polished feel. Guitar Player wanted you to play extended and diminished chords on your Gibson hollowbody. And while Guitar World had their share of jazz-oriented articles, deep down inside, you got the feeling that all the writers wanted to do was turn up their Marshall stacks and kick out the jams!

One way Guitar World showed how different they were from their cross-country rival was by having a monthly pullout centerfold. No, there weren't nude pictures of Joan Jett and Lita Ford. Instead, unusual and celebrity axes--and unusual celebrity axes were featured, and often lovingly photographed.

The instruments featured in Guitars That Shook the World, a large format, 128-page Hal Leonard publication, were for the most part photographed for these centerfolds and date from the early 1980s to the mid-1990s. It's fascinating to see so many historic instruments photographed with such detail; for one thing, you can see how beat up many instruments get when taken out on the road year after year. Looking at the rough condition of Roy Buchanan's 1953 Telecaster or then even rougher looking 1954 Fender Esquire of Jeff Beck's, it's obvious that while we guitarists will longer argue the merits of our favorite instruments, its our brains and fingers that do most of the real work, not the instrument itself. (As Roger Waters once said, you can't give a Les Paul guitar to a 12-year kid and expect him to sound immediately like Eric Clapton.) Similarly, Jimmy Page's No. 1, his 1959/58 Les Paul (the serial number's long been rubbed out, and the jury's still out as to which year it actually is) looks much more pristine in photos depicting its owner pounding the floorboards of Madison Square Garden than the guitar looks close-up. And yet this guitar is easily worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.