The Black Beauty – (den svarta skönheten) (leader from MM # 12/2003)
by Gunnar E Olsson
In the unnecessarily initiated circles that constantly chase DV news, Sony’s DVCAM camera, the DSR-PD150, goes by the name The Black Beauty. For me, however, that name is forever associated with a certain Les Paul guitar that appeared at the junction between the 50s and 60s. It was a Custom variant with three pickups and a jet black and very sober appearance. In the hands of the greats of the time like Jimmy Page and Jörgen Ingmann, she performed – because she was of course a feminine creature – absolutely wonderful music.
A young Page, who was making a living as a session musician at the time, had posed for a Melody Maker Q&A with his black beauty in his arms and I was already sold. Young Jimmy told me how he replaced his thin E string with a banjo string, threw away the thick E string and moved the rest of the strings up a notch. This gave him an A string as the sixth string, the D string as the fifth and so on. All this to be able to bend the notes and get a “bluesier sound”. The first white string bender was born.
Melody Maker was a really good magazine at the time. It presented all sorts of interesting tips for young musicians. And, funnily enough, it had the same initials as a very well-initiated music magazine in this country today.
I come from a poor working-class family – I’ve probably mentioned that. My father worked as a gardener and my mother had to make ends meet with whatever extra money she could get. Sometimes she was a switchboard operator at the local telephone exchange, sometimes she worked at what is now called a nursery school – back then I think it was still called a nursery, or even “kindergarten”. Of course, she didn’t know it was extra money – extra money hadn’t been invented yet. In any case, it wasn’t much to carry a family with four children around on.
And yet… yet I finally got that light blue Kent guitar in a grey vinyl case that I had dreamed of for so long. It cost 495 kronor – half a fortune at the time. The only electric guitars I had previously seen up close were a Burns Split Sonic that the local pop band’s guitarist was showing off and a red Klira that a friend had. The Klira was a German secret with a string pitch that required a strongman to master. It even had a DIN connector, not a tele jack – it was German after all!
After the light blue Kent, there was a twelve-string Bjärton, a Hagström Viking and that’s exactly where we are when this story begins.
I had managed to convince my mother that she should help me with a loan to finance the purchase of a “real” guitar. This guitar was a used black Les Paul Custom – exactly the kind Page had had – and it had been in the window of the music store I trudged past every day on my way to the technical high school where I was miserable waiting for my big breakthrough. The Les Paul had been sitting there looking like it was going to be a hard sell for several months and the price tag said 850 kronor. This was, as you probably understand, before Clapton and Green had stepped forward and destroyed the second-hand value of these guitars.
Now I never got my Black Beauty in the 60s. The same week I managed to scrape together the 850 kronor, it had been sold to a dance band in Hjortkvarn. And we who were supposed to have done so much beautiful work together …
So now it wasn’t us. Instead, it was a farmhand with rough hands who didn’t know how to caress her strings in a gentle and tender way – not like me, at least, I’m absolutely convinced of that.
Instead of a Les Paul, it was a white Telecaster, which was eventually replaced by a Gibson 345 that served me well during some lean but happy blues years in the late 60s. She retired in 1970 after an accident from which she never really recovered – she fell and broke her “neck”. But she is still often in my thoughts, just like my mother, who always supported me in my endeavor to create music, even though it often required great sacrifices on her part – I have understood that in retrospect.
Now my mother is no longer with us, but at this time of year her presence is often felt very tangible. If you still have your mother – give her a warm Christmas hug for all the support she has given you – and give her one from me too!
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