Joe Perry shows how Jimmy Page shaped the Black Burst Les Paul
joe perry traced the Black Burst Les Paul Standard to Jimmy Page and a different wiring idea, then pushed Gibson’s Custom Shop toward something less ordinary. The result became Perry’s first signature guitar, given a wide release in 1996 and 1997.
Jimmy Page and Gibson’s wiring
Perry said Gibson approached him after there were a fair amount of pictures of him playing a black Les Paul. He answered with a question that still sounds like a design brief: "What’s the point of putting out just another plain old Les Paul?"
That led him to Jimmy Page’s signature Les Paul, which used different wiring, and to a push/pull tone-control setup Perry wanted on his own model. Chandler Guitars in San Francisco had perfected the mechanism, and Perry described the payoff this way: "You could set it and hold the note, and then bend up and pop that thing on and get the wah-wah effect when it was time to cut a solo."
Friesians on a black Les Paul
Perry tied the finish to horses he kept at a farm in Vermont. He said he fell in love with a breed called a Friesian, solid black and from Holland, and added that their long, curly manes looked beautiful. "I wanted to kind of get that look on a guitar, which called for a really good maple top and a relatively light burst," he said.
The guitar also carried a neck and weight that felt like a 50s Les Paul, no body binding, and pickups wound to Perry’s spec. Those choices made the Black Burst a custom shop build with a sharper identity than a stock Les Paul, which is exactly what he wanted.
Why Chandler mattered
Gibson said it would look at the Chandler version and reverse-engineer it, then put its own version on the model. Perry said the company came back and told him, "We really can’t get it right," and later, "We really can’t reproduce it the way Chandler does."
That limitation left the Black Burst with a feature that was part design, part workaround, and part signature. For readers tracking the guitar’s place in Perry’s collection, the point is simple: the Black Burst was not built as a plain Les Paul, and Gibson never quite matched the wah effect that made it distinctive.
