A Really "Lite" Les Paul

This super guitar is one of the earliest Les Paul Custom Lites. Just 1 3/8 inches deep (5/8 of an inch thinner than a Les Paul Custom!), featuring a contoured back, it weighs just 8.40 lbs. and has a nice, fat nut width of 1 11/16 inches and a standard Gibson scale length of 24 3/4 inches. Solid mahogany body with carved maple top, mahogany neck, and ebony fretboard with 22 frets and inlaid pearl block position markers. Inlaid pearl "Gibson" headstock logo and five-piece pearl split-diamond inlay. "Les Paul Custom" on truss-rod cover. Individual Grover Roto-Matic tuners with half-moon metal buttons. Two PAF-style humbucking pickups with black plastic surrounds and outputs of 9.94k and 8.59k. Five-layer (black/white/black/white/black) plastic pickguard. Three controls (two volume, one master tone) plus three-way selector switch and two-way coil-tapping switch. Black plastic "Top Hat" knobs. New Tune-O-Matic bridge and separate bar tailpiece. All hardware gold-plated. A few small and insignificant marks on the back are all that prevent this super lightweight Les Paul from being in mint condition. Housed in its original Gibson black hardshell case with gray plush lining (8.50). This rare guitar was previously owned by the guitarist of The Dickies (Stan Lee?) and has a multitude of colored "Dickies" stickers on the case.

"Another attempt to deal with the Les Paul weight problem came in the form of a new model called the Custom Lite, introduced in 1987. It had a contoured back that was pure Fender in style. The timber lost in this sculpting cut the weight and made the guitar more comfortable. At first it was priced higher than the normal Custom, presumably as a result of extra production costs -- in 1987 the basic models were pitched at $1170 for the Custom and $1249 for the Custom Lite -- but was gone from the line by 1989. A year earlier Gibson introduced a similarly contoured version of its Les Paul Studio model, the Studio Lite, with an '88 list showing the Studio at $909 and the Studio Lite at $974" (Tony Bacon, 50 Years of the Gibson Les Paul, p. 92).