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Lot Essay
According to The Edge, This guitar has been in my collection for 22 years. I am always on the lookout for these limited edition Gibson Explorer guitars. They are not as rare as the original 1958 edition but still very hard to find. Dallas found this one in Cincinnati and it became one of the backup instruments for my main 1976 reissue Explorer during the 1987 Joshua Tree world tour and many U2 tours since. This guitar has the sound that gives U2's early albums their unique timbre. Combined with a Memory Man Deluxe and a Vox AC30 most of the sounds of the Boy, October, and War albums are achievable...
The Edge's history with the Gibson Explorer is legendary, along with Eric Clapton, James Hetfield, Dave Grohl and Gary Moore, who all became synonymous with the guitar. The Edge was just a teenager when he acquired his first Gibson Explorer on a family trip to New York in 1978. He used that guitar for U2's debut album recorded in 1980 when The Edge was just 19 years old, and it became an integral part of U2's recording output for years to come. After a few years of use, his original and first Explorer became well worn and sustained some damage, so was retired at some time in the mid-1980s. The Edge's guitar technician, Dallas Schoo recalled in an interview with Music Radar in 2009: It's such an important guitar for recording that I finally convinced him to leave it home. Nothing serious ever happened to it, but it's spent years in the sun, getting rained on - outdoor shows do that. I wanted to nip things in the bud while I could. Schoo recalled that he managed to track down three replacement Explorers around that time but that finding a replacement was hard: The right ones are hard to find because Gibson had two different Explorers in production that year. The ones that were produced from June through December had a thin neck, but the models that were produced during the first part of that year had a thick baseball bat neck. Those are the ones Edge prefers. Gibson didn't make many of them, only about 1800 of them or so, and people hang on to them...
Over the years, he would acquire as many 1976 Explorers as he could, with this particular guitar used as a back up to his original and first Explorer used on many occasions in the studio and on tour from around 1987 onwards. This appears to be his Number 3 back-up Explorer.
In an interview with Joe Bosso for Guitar World Magazine in 2005, The Edge talks about his love of the guitar and how, in 1980, it was an unusual instrument to play: It was the only guitar I had. You should've seen in the studio when we recorded Boy, Steve Lillywhite was aghast when I took the Explorer out of the case. He just looked at me and said, Uh, what else you got? and I put my finger up and said, I got one guitar and you're looking at it... In Bosso's words I don't think anybody's made a sonic statement with that guitar the way The Edge has. Honestly, he's the only guitar player that I think has made a real oral statement with the Explorer. The other guitar players just seem to sort of bathe it in distortion so you can't really tell how the guitar sounds, per se, it could be any guitar they're playing, really. The Edge is the only one that I really think has explored what that piece of wood sounds like...'
The Edge's history with the Gibson Explorer is legendary, along with Eric Clapton, James Hetfield, Dave Grohl and Gary Moore, who all became synonymous with the guitar. The Edge was just a teenager when he acquired his first Gibson Explorer on a family trip to New York in 1978. He used that guitar for U2's debut album recorded in 1980 when The Edge was just 19 years old, and it became an integral part of U2's recording output for years to come. After a few years of use, his original and first Explorer became well worn and sustained some damage, so was retired at some time in the mid-1980s. The Edge's guitar technician, Dallas Schoo recalled in an interview with Music Radar in 2009: It's such an important guitar for recording that I finally convinced him to leave it home. Nothing serious ever happened to it, but it's spent years in the sun, getting rained on - outdoor shows do that. I wanted to nip things in the bud while I could. Schoo recalled that he managed to track down three replacement Explorers around that time but that finding a replacement was hard: The right ones are hard to find because Gibson had two different Explorers in production that year. The ones that were produced from June through December had a thin neck, but the models that were produced during the first part of that year had a thick baseball bat neck. Those are the ones Edge prefers. Gibson didn't make many of them, only about 1800 of them or so, and people hang on to them...
Over the years, he would acquire as many 1976 Explorers as he could, with this particular guitar used as a back up to his original and first Explorer used on many occasions in the studio and on tour from around 1987 onwards. This appears to be his Number 3 back-up Explorer.
In an interview with Joe Bosso for Guitar World Magazine in 2005, The Edge talks about his love of the guitar and how, in 1980, it was an unusual instrument to play: It was the only guitar I had. You should've seen in the studio when we recorded Boy, Steve Lillywhite was aghast when I took the Explorer out of the case. He just looked at me and said, Uh, what else you got? and I put my finger up and said, I got one guitar and you're looking at it... In Bosso's words I don't think anybody's made a sonic statement with that guitar the way The Edge has. Honestly, he's the only guitar player that I think has made a real oral statement with the Explorer. The other guitar players just seem to sort of bathe it in distortion so you can't really tell how the guitar sounds, per se, it could be any guitar they're playing, really. The Edge is the only one that I really think has explored what that piece of wood sounds like...'