“I was getting calls from George Harrison and Eric Clapton’s group. They were working together. And what were they interested in? The J-180 and J-185”: Inside Gibson's Century Collection acoustics – and the role the Rolling Stones and Beatles played

Gibson Century Collection L-00.

It’s hard to imagine a world without the Gibson flat-top. But as senior product development manager, Robi Johns, reminds us, you have to wind back the dials of the time machine a full century to find the Michigan luthier on the brink of arguably its most exciting quantum leap (at least, until the electric revolution of the ’50s).

“It’s amazing to think that it’s 2026 now,” considers Johns, “and although they’d existed before that, for those in the know, the first time a flat-top appeared in a Gibson catalogue was 1926. I don’t attribute the death of the banjo and the rise of the guitar so much to the crash of the US economy. I think it was influenced highly by the development of the radio in 1919. Most people didn’t know the guitar prior to that.”