A HOLLOW-BODY ELECTRIC GUITAR, ES-175 N

Mark Knopfler received this guitar as a gift from friend and music store owner Rudy Pensa in late December 1985. Mark appears delighted with his new ES-175 in a rare personal photograph of the jolly occasion at Rudy’s Music Stop on New York’s West 48th Street, fingering a tune as his pal Rudy enjoys a festive tipple. Knopfler told us: 'I spent a lot of time with a lot of these guitars. For instance, there’s a beautiful Gibson 175, a sunburst one. I was living in New York half of the time, and I sat with that guitar because I was determined that I was going to up my game… because I regarded myself as this little strummer from England, and I’d been catapulted into another world, and finding myself playing in the studio with some really good people. So, I was just tossed in the deep end and I figured out that if I just sat and grafted at it for a while, I’d get a little bit better… And of course, the 175 is so playable, and it’s such a beautiful thing. And then I had a little love affair with the Gibson cello guitars. From that, I spotted a blonde 175 - which are like hen’s teeth - and it was love.'

GIBSON GUITARS
For over three hundred years traditional guitar construction was based on a method of fabricating the instrument’s sound box, commonly referred to as the body, from thin plates of wood for the top, sides and back. These would be braced internally so as to withstand the pressures exerted by the tension of the strings. Instead of following this formula, a shoe salesman in Kalamazoo, Michigan, by the name of Orville Gibson, looked to the violin for inspiration. The tops and backs of violins are carved from thick stocks of wood, resulting in an arched form. This arch is self-sustaining and, like those found in architecture, able to withstand both downward and inward pressures. Applying this thinking to guitar construction created what we know now as the archtop guitar. These instruments were louder and more durable than comparable works of the time and were immediately successful with musicians. As such, the demand for Gibson’s instruments quickly exceeded his ability to produce them. Without the capital to expand, Gibson sold his name and operation to a group of Kalamazoo businessmen and with this, The Gibson Mandolin-Guitar Manufacturing Company was born.

Innovations in guitar design did not end with Orville Gibson’s departure in 1903 from the company he founded. When we examine the history of Gibson as a company, we find they were relentless in pursuing new ideas. In 1921, Thaddeus McHugh, a woodworker at the Kalamazoo factory, invented and put into production both the adjustable truss rod and adjustable bridge. These advances made it possible to set and maintain the string height to perfectly fit the player’s needs. A year later, in 1922, the musician and Gibson acoustical engineer Lloyd Loar, expanded on the original ideas of Orville Gibson by adding the violin-style ‘f’ holes on the tops of guitars and mandolins. The first guitar of this design, named the L-5 (see lot 22), would prove itself a superior rhythm instrument when incorporated into the jazz bands of the 1920s.

The Jazz era produced an insatiable desire for guitars that could produce the loudest volume, due to the growing size of both the performance venues and ensembles that played in them. In 1935, Gibson introduced the ‘Advanced’ L-5 to fill this need for greater sound. By enlarging the width to 17 inches, the air volume and vibrating surfaces were increased, resulting in a louder guitar. The pinnacle of archtop design was reached this same year with Gibson’s introduction of the Super 400. Measuring a full 18 inches in width, it was the largest, loudest and most expensive guitar Gibson had yet produced.

Building on the momentum of these innovations, two years later Gibson achieved the ultimate solution in maximising the volume a guitar could produce. In 1936, Gibson introduced the ‘Electric Spanish’ guitar. The ES-150 was featured in the new 1937 catalogue and cost $150, which included a matching amplifier. This guitar was essentially a standard Gibson archtop fitted with a single magnetic pickup. When the young jazz guitar virtuoso Charlie Christian first ‘plugged in’ with Benny Goodman’s orchestra, it marked the moment when the guitar moved from the traditional rhythm section to a solo and lead instrument. It would be twenty years before the significance of this moment could fulfil its true potential, which burst forth in the form of the rock and roll guitar.

The ES-175, produced from 1949 onwards and priced at $175, would become one of Gibson's most popular models of electric archtop guitar. Designed with a single Florentine cutaway and initially one single-coil P-90 pickup positioned near the neck, from 1957 it was the first of Gibson's electric Spanish archtops to be offered with either one or two of their new PAF humbucker pickups. In 1958, Gibson completed and shipped only 66 of the single pickup ES-175N guitars. The single pickup version was discontinued in 1971.