ROCKET SCIENCE

GIBSON’S FUTURISTIC FLYING V WAS ON A DOWNWARD TRAJECTORY UNTIL A FEW INVENTIVE GUITARISTS PROPELLED IT TO ASTRONOMICAL SUCCESS — AND VALUE. WE EXAMINE A HIGHLY DESIRABLE 1969 EXAMPLE.

- ROD BRAKES

WHEN THE FLYING V’s original patent appeared in 1957 alongside the Futura/Explorer and Moderne, it might have been argued that Ted McCarty’s heady 1950s sci-fi-style brainstorming sessions in the Gibson boardroom were a little too far out in the modernist field. As it turned out, these guitars were way ahead of their time and took many years to catch on. The Flying V stuttered, stalled and got off to a few false starts before it really began to fly. Fender’s Stratocaster and Telecaster models consistently captured the guitar-buying public’s imagination by embodying the modernist design principle that “form follows function.” But for the Flying V, function appeared to follow its form, as it eventually took off and found its wings as an archetypal hard-rock statement.

“It’s very much a rock guitar,” says Mike Long, proprietor of ATB Guitars (atbguitars.com) in Cheltenham, England, where the 1969 Flying V shown here was taking up temporary residence. “And that’s probably dictated by its shape as much as anything else. It evokes a certain kind of playing style. You can’t exactly sit down and play folk music on it. You’re more likely to strap it on, stand up and rock out with it. The pickups are very raunchy-sounding mid-’60s humbuckers with lots of bite and sustain. You won’t see many of these being played through clean Fender amps, but they really come into their own through something like a Marshall stack.”