by Saiichi Sugiyama.

My first electric guitar was a 1961 Les Paul SG Junior. It was sold to finance a refinished 1968 Les Paul Custom in Tokyo after a couple of years. However, I got back to playing old SGs in the mid-'90s – first a 1961 Standard with a sideway tremolo and then a 1965 SG, which I loved the tone of. The 1961 SG was the more expensive of the two with the PAF pickups, etc., but I found that I preferred the tone of the 1965 that I picked up cheaply in Tokyo a lot more – maybe this was because of the way the strings were attached to the body via the Maestro tremolo unit. Alas, I don’t have either of those guitars any more (and didn’t I sell them so cheap….) but the 1965 SG is much missed for its very open sound. That guitar was acoustically quite loud, a real livewire. Someone told me that Carlos Santana played "Samba Pa Ti" on his early '60s SG Special. The harmonics on my SG sounded, to my ears, not dissimilar despite the obvious P-90 coloring of that tone. Eric Clapton said, when we were doing the research for the Christie's 2004 catalog, that the March, 1968, "Crossroads" on Wheels of Fire was played on his cherry-red 335 - but, to be honest, I am not convinced. To my ears, it sounds like a mahogany guitar – his Firebird or more likely the painted SG known as The Fool.

I loved my SG and used it for my live work frequently. It was the main guitar for the Cream covers that I recorded with Pete Brown and Malcolm Bruce in 2002 for Jeff’s Music label in Japan (these were originally released in Japan in a compilation album entitled Sunshine Of Your Love and can also be heard on a 2005 UK compilation album SAIICHI – they are available for download from iTunes. Our engineer, Ben Matthews who is also the guitarist with the British rock band, Thunder, just loved the sound. The solo on "White Room" was the SG through a 1968 Marshall Super Tremolo head and mid-60s pinstriped 100W Marshall cabs, whereas, the solo on "Politician" was the SG through a 1966 JTM-45 combo (aka a Bluesbreaker combo).

The only thing about my SG, though, was that it did not sustain very much. Pete Brown had this idea of recreating for the studio version of "White Room" the improvised Latin coda that we had burst into on stage one night. When we were recording it in the studio, I was trying to play the lead part with long notes imagining how Carlos would have played it, but the guitar just did not have the sustain. I got so desperate that I risked my hearing and went into the amp room to play so that I could get the maximum feedback from the 100w stack for the sustain - but it didn't give it to me even then.

It looked like my SG had a neck break in the butt (very common with the original-construction SGs with a shallow joint) and this may have been the cause. It might also have been the cause for the "rubber neck" intonation problem that I talked about in the Strat Collector News interview although my guitar tech, Mark Willmott, thought it was the thin construction of the guitar itself that's the root cause of that problem.

Mark suggested that I look for an SG from the period with a straight-grained neck - but they were getting harder to find and more and more expensive every day so that I really couldn't see myself being in a position to have a choice - at least not in my position as a musician struggling to make it. So, I moved on from my beat-up SG to another mid-'60s Gibson that I could not argue with. I will tell you about it in the next article.