It couldn’t be any simpler – yet, in truth, it couldn’t be any better. The Les Paul Junior, which was launched in the same year as Fender’s Stratocaster, was in some ways the antithesis of Fender’s svelte three-pickup rocketship.
Made for lowly students, not cutting-edge professional artists, it had but a single pickup in the old-fashioned ‘dog-ear’ shape, while its slab body was functional, rather than futuristic, and its glued-in neck evoked an earlier era of lutherie. Yet, somehow, it always was more than the sparse sum of its parts.
