Just like Lennon’s Rickenbacker, the viola bass is Paul McCartney’s instrument par excellence, so much that he still plays it. And yet it has to be said that he chose it for several reasons, not all of whom concerning music.
The story of this guitar is one of those when an instrument is so linked to a musician to become almost an icon of him. Ric 325 is to Lennon what Fender Stratocaster is to Jimi Hendrix, or Gibson SG is to Angus Young.
Lennon bought this guitar in Hamburg in 1961, after weeks and weeks spent saving money. It was a natural finish model with golden pickguard and “short arm” (the neck was shorter). It was a perfect instrument for rock n’ roll: its hollow body (without f-holes) but most of all the three “toaster” pickups (called so cause resembling to a toaster) produced a gingly, acute sound which probably has never been reproduced again by any instrument.
Beside the Rickenbacker 325, the Epiphone Casino is for everyone John Lennon’s Guitar par excellence. From 1968 to his early soloist years it was almost his one and only instrument: it’s the guitar which makes the main sound on the “White Album”, the one played during the rooftoop concert in the “Let it Be” movie, not to forget the sessions for the album “Imagine”.
Lennon actually owned the Casino back in the 1966 and used it widely in those years. Not everyone notices it due to the fact that this instrument at that time had still its original paint: when all of it was pulled off, the myth of Lennon’s “white guitar” was born.
