A Century-Old Guitar Brand Files for Bankruptcy Protection: Why Has the Instrument That Carried an Era's Soul Lost Its Shine?

Rock, guitar heroes, and the soil that grew them are all unrecognizable now.

Gibson, the 124-year-old American guitar brand, filed for bankruptcy recently. In the music world, that counts as big news.

The numbers show plainly where Gibson stands in the guitar business: the company sells more than 170,000 electric guitars a year in over 80 countries, more than a fifth of all electric guitars sold worldwide — the dominant player in the trade.

If numbers don't quite land, the bonds between Gibson and the great musicians make its standing easier to feel. Blues master B.B. King fondly named his Gibson "Lucille" and wrote a song explaining why. Rock pioneer Chuck Berry, who died in March last year, was buried with his Gibson. Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page, Guns N' Roses' Slash, Eric Clapton — guitarists whose names are written into history — were all faithful Gibson devotees.

Gibson's bankruptcy filing puts its debts at between $100 million and $500 million. That doesn't mean the company is finished: this is a business restructuring, and Gibson will now concentrate on its core instrument business and cut loose its electronics accessories division. But the guitar's decline is a fact no one can dodge. Gibson isn't alone. Fender, the second-largest American guitar brand, is also in debt, and the third-largest, PRS Guitars, has laid off staff and shifted toward cheaper guitars. Guitar Center, the biggest guitar retailer in the US, carries $1.6 billion in debt and has been rated junk by S&P.

More striking than the industry's own troubles is the rise and fall of what the guitar stands for. The guitar was never only about music; to some degree it was an instrument that laid bare the core of a society and its era. It rose with folk and rock in the 1960s, and together with the ideas and movements sweeping through those years it helped make the decade what it was. Like every other piece of that period, it seeped into every corner of popular culture.

But as the music industry and the way people live changed, the guitar stopped being decisive. It is still alive, but it is no longer shorthand for the power to overturn and shape a trend, the way it was decades ago. Sample-based hip-hop has passed rock — the genre tied to the guitar — as the most popular kind of music, and the rise of electronic music has left the guitar with a harsher fact to face: its hold on young people has loosened.

"Before Jimi [Hendrix], and just after he came along, the electric guitar was brand new — it was hugely glamorous and exciting," the Beatles' Paul McCartney told The Washington Post. "So a lot of great people started imitating people like B.B. King and Buddy Guy, and that produced generation after generation. Now it's more electronic music, and kids listen to different things. They don't have guitar heroes in their heads the way you and I did."

Rock, Guitar Heroes, and the Soil That Grew Them

Guitar heroes existed long before rock took hold, but it was with rock that they gained influence on a scale never seen before.

Blues had no shortage of fine guitar players, including the two masters McCartney named. But blues is a reserved music, and those masters moved listeners mainly through notes and melody. Rock was extroverted, even showy, and it pushed performers to put the tension of a performance on display. Going wild with a guitar in your hands was one natural way to show that passion.

So the guitar holds a place in many of rock's defining moments and images. Sometimes that was a stance of the body — Chuck Berry doing his duck walk with a guitar slung across him. More often it was the tricks played on the guitar itself; the solos history has kept are the proof.

The times welcomed that showiness. The anti-war movement, civil rights, the hippies, sexual liberation — all of it gave rock ground to draw its turbulence from. After the Second World War, the spread of television through American homes made a nationwide popular culture possible, and rock was one of its faces. If festivals like Woodstock offered an explosive stage for showing that culture off, television's role was to give this music a lasting way to reach the whole country. Before Buddy Holly played The Ed Sullivan Show in 1957, many viewers probably had no idea what an electric guitar paired with rock even looked like.

The US-Soviet space race and other efforts to lay claim to the future left the young people who grew up in that era eager to overturn tradition and full of speculation about what was coming. The guitar fit their forward-looking demands better than any other instrument. On one side it delivered breakthroughs in technology and design; on the other it fused with a culture of the future, turning up on the posters of science-fiction films and on magazine covers.

In 1952, one of Gibson's landmark products, the Les Paul, appeared. It was invented by Gibson's team with the help of the American musician Les Paul (born Lester William Polsfuss). What made it a breakthrough was that it was a solid-body electric guitar whose tone was distinctive yet suited to every kind of music. Players in rock, country, pop, soul, blues, reggae, and heavy metal all took to it.

Six years later Gibson released the Flying V under the banner of "futurism." With its aggressive lines and radical shape, the guitar became a favorite of many masters, and even the way they built and used it stood apart. Jimi Hendrix, voted the greatest guitarist of all time by Rolling Stone, owned at least three Flying Vs, one of them inlaid with a pearl logo. Leslie West, the leader of the rock band Mountain, often played a Flying V fitted with only a bridge pickup, using the cavity meant for the neck pickup as an ashtray.

When the Flying V first reached the shelves, it sold badly. Some retailers simply put it in the window as a display piece to pull customers in. More than a decade later, with help from the masters who played it, the Flying V finally caught on and became a classic design.

By the 1980s and 1990s the guitar was everywhere in popular culture, and it left its mark on the rising force of MTV as well. If anything, MTV demanded even more visual impact than television.

At the 1992 MTV awards, while Nirvana played "Lithium," bassist Krist Novoselic threw his bass into the air, only for it to come down on his head; as he staggered, frontman Kurt Cobain launched into a guitar-smashing routine of his own. At the 1995 MTV awards, during Michael Jackson's performance, Guns N' Roses guitarist Slash played a solo so close to deranged that it stole the show from the King of Pop.

Rock's weapon of choice was also cheap, which meant children could start imitating the guitar heroes in their heads at a young age.

Elvis Presley, born in 1935, was given a guitar for his 11th birthday. He had asked his parents for a bicycle; his mother chose the cheaper guitar instead. Jerry Lee Lewis, a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame member born the same year as Elvis, grew up poor in a small Southern town; to buy him a piano, his father mortgaged the family farm.

Advertisements from the time show that $30 bought a guitar. A piano, by comparison, sold for nearly $600. (A guitar's $24.95 then is about $217 in 2015 money; a piano's $595 is about $5,920.)

In China, the Guitar Became a Symbol Alongside Folk Music

China has its own guitar story. It came later than America's, and its form and reach were gentler: campus folk music.

But the soil that fed both was much the same. Recalling the mood on university campuses in the 1990s, the folk singer Lao Lang reached for two words: "romantic" and "impractical." "A wall protected the university, so campuses back then were like ivory towers, without much contact with society," Lao Lang said. On campus in those years, poets and singers were admired most, then athletes; the students who merely got good grades came last.

Folk music, which had taken off in Taiwan, spread to the mainland and found its footing on university campuses. At Peking University and Tsinghua University, students sat in circles on the lawn playing harmonicas or guitars, and trading music became routine.

Lao Lang, Gao Xiaosong, and others formed the mainland's first campus band, Bronze Ware, and together they later pushed campus folk to a national peak. In 1994 Dadi Records, then an unknown label, released Campus Folk Songs 1, 11 tracks including "My Deskmate," "The Brother Sleeping in the Bunk Above Me," and "Youth"; Campus Folk Songs 2 and Campus Folk Songs 3 followed. These became the tunes a whole generation remembers.

As one of folk music's signature instruments, the guitar carried a streak of rebellion and subversion. "When we were kids the guitar was a hoodlum's instrument, right in there with bell-bottoms, big sunglasses, a perm — it was one whole package. The moment you picked up a guitar people assumed you had on foot-wide bell-bottoms, big frog-eye shades and a permed head of curls; it was pretty much all the same thing. So nobody was going to let you learn guitar as a child," Gao Xiaosong said.

In the autumn of 1983, Xu Xiaoping, just out of music conservatory, arrived at Peking University to teach in the arts teaching office. He founded a guitar association there and brought in a classmate from the conservatory to run training classes, which drew more than 200 sign-ups at once. The 1985 film Roadside Guitar Band (《路边吉他队》) showed the guitar craze from a wider angle: by counts at the time, about 30 million people across China played guitar, and enthusiasts turned up in every layer of society — students, workers, farmers, soldiers, sent-down youth, even the jobless.

The Decline of an Instrument That Once Voiced a Society's Soul

The technological seeds of rock's and the guitar's decline were planted at their height. New tools challenged the guitar's authority and cleared a path for new kinds of music.

In 1979, Tascam launched the Portastudio 144. The first standard four-track tape recorder in history, it let musicians record at home without going out the door. Bruce Springsteen's 1982 album Nebraska was made on a Portastudio 144.

Drum machines matured too, moving from playing factory presets to recording patterns the user programmed. In 1978 the CompuRhythm CR-78 arrived, the first drum machine on the market that let users write, save, and play back rhythms freely. It had a second identity: forerunner of the legendary TR-808. That machine, whose sound is like a heartbeat, is considered an invention that changed the course of hip-hop. Pioneers such as Afrika Bambaataa, Run-DMC, and Public Enemy all used the 808 in their work. Kanye West simply put it in an album title in 2008. And trap, which rose later, is unthinkable without the 808's rhythm.

For rock, though, a crisis more fatal than technology may have been that the soil feeding it changed flavor. By the 1980s commerce was absorbing rock: the record giants bought the independent labels that had encouraged invention; lawyers and accountants replaced musicians at the controls of companies; MTV's stress on the visual turned the music itself into something close to an appendage of the video; and the once-raucous baby boomers put down their guitars and grew from rebellious young people into orderly members of the middle class.

Young people today still have ways of being restless, but they no longer go to rock for it. They have found their means of self-expression in hip-hop. Amid the tide of consumerism, blunt rap fits the party better. And with the rise of artists like Kendrick Lamar, who care about polishing their words and carrying deeper meaning, rap's artistry and invention have won attention and recognition too. Hip-hop looks likely to consolidate its position further. Meanwhile electronic music, and independent work of other kinds, leans on the guitar less and less.

According to the music magazine The Music Trades, 2.633 million guitars were sold in the US in 2017, down 5% from 2008. Electric guitars fell from 1.5 million a year to 1 million.

"Our customers keep getting older, and before long they'll be gone," Richard Ash, CEO of the American musical instrument chain Sam Ash, told The Washington Post. Sam Ash is the largest family-owned music retail chain in the US.

Seen this way, there is not much the guitar companies can do. Take Gibson: it did make some management mistakes, but those mistakes were not necessarily the biggest factor in its decline.

Gibson's current CEO, Henry Juszkiewicz, bought the company in 1986 for just $5 million. He is known for doing everything himself and for a wayward temperament. Hiring, internal reshuffles, pay adjustments — Juszkiewicz weighs in on all of it. His most wayward "legend" is probably the day he took company executives to a shooting range to fire at Stratocasters, the guitars made by rival Fender. Introduced in 1954, the Stratocaster ranks as the most popular electric guitar there is; Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, George Harrison, and John Lennon were all devotees.

In 2014, Gibson bought Philips' audio and home entertainment business for $135 million. "That had nothing to do with the guitar business," said Brian Majeski, editor of the music magazine The Music Trades. "They were buying consumer electronics." Under the bankruptcy filing, Gibson will close that division.

The guitar is of course nowhere near the end. Mainstream music still has artists who play guitar and command large followings, and Taylor Swift and Ed Sheeran are plainly among them. Their pull on young people is exactly what the guitar industry wants to see.

In 2010, acoustic guitar sales passed electric guitar sales for the first time, and many people read that as Swift's doing. Phillip McKnight, a 42-year-old guitarist, founded the McKnight Music Academy. From 2012 on he noticed more and more girls choosing guitar lessons, until they outnumbered the boys in his classes. When he asked his students why, the answer was still Swift.

"One big driver of guitar demand is having pop bands play the guitar," said Chris Martin IV, CEO of C.F. Martin & Co., the acoustic guitar brand founded in 1833. Ed Sheeran plays that company's instruments.

The guitar brands are looking for ways to win young people over, too.

Fender plans to launch a subscription service that teaches guitar lessons through online tools. Its focus is on getting beginners to keep going — people picking up an instrument for the first time tend to give up within a year. The Florida-based company The Music Experience has brought the three big guitar makers, Gibson, Fender, and PRS, together in the hope that booths at music festivals will put guitars in festival-goers' hands.

Still, whether it is Taylor Swift or Ed Sheeran, the fitting title for them may be "guitar players," and that is not the same thing as the hardcore "guitar heroes" who came before. The guitar brands are free to go all out for young consumers, but in those consumers' eyes the guitar will probably hold little that is sacred. That glow exists only in the eyes of their parents' generation.

Images in this article come from Wiki Commons, pxhere, pexels, and Flickr; cover image by Junior Pereira on Unsplash, and Coco.