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.
Article comments
1 - tim gueguen
Reading the early Guitar Worlds can be quite amusing because of how hard they tried to slag Guitar Player and portray themselves as oh so hip. It was almost like they were trying to start a fistfight given the tone of some of the comments.