09/06/2024
Because you can't tell this story enough:
NEAL SMITH’S TOTAL RESTORATION OF
GLEN BUXTON'S 1968-1972 GIBSON LES PAUL SG CUSTOM
by Neal Smith
In 2012 I found and acquired my bandmate, friend and brother, Glen Buxton's original white Les Paul Custom SG guitar body.
It is the guitar that Glen is holding on the back cover of our first Alice Cooper hit album Love It To Death. Glen played that guitar on stage and recorded with it, in the “Love It To Death,” “Killer,” “School's Out” era of the early 1970’s.
In 2012 I was contacted by a person living in Stamford Connecticut. Stamford is, the town right next door to Greenwich where all five members of the Alice Cooper Group lived in the early 1970’s at the Galesi Estate, AKA The Cooper Mansion. This fellow had a telecaster guitar that he wanted to sell and he knew I was looking for one.
I met with him at his home in Stamford sometime later and bought the Fender telecaster guitar. At same that time he had a friend of his with him, who wanted to show me some items that he thought might be of interest to me from back in the day. He said that Glen Buxton had given him these items in the late 70's early 80's when he visited Glen at his house in Greenwich. Well into the conversation, this fellow of questionable character told me he used to sell pot to Glen and that's how he acquired these items, then it all began to make sense to me.
I recognized most of the items that he had brought with him immediately from the Galesi estate. One was a fake life size elephant’s foot/umbrella holder that Alice used to keep in his room. There were also a couple of collages, like the ones we used to make in college. I could clearly tell that Glen had made these. The guy wanted to sell these items, but wanted way too much money for these Glen Buxton/Alice Cooper artifacts and besides there was nothing that was of interest to me.
Then he showed me the last item he had in his box of goodies. It was a banged up, smashed up, stripped down body of a cream white Gibson Custom SG guitar, missing its neck, pickups and all hardware. It was an almost unrecognizable, brutalized, naked, neck-less, wooden guitar body.
But there was one identifying characteristic of the guitar. It had a single glow in the dark star that Glen had put on the guitar near the right horn tip.
I was holding what was left of Glens cream white Les Paul SG Custom Guitar. I bought the guitar relic on the spot. After I acquired the body of what was left of Glen’s custom SG, I began researching to see if it was at all possible to rebuild a complete guitar from just this body. The way the guitars neck had snapped and broken off the guitar, made restoration almost impossible. Everyone I approached with the project passed on it. I even approached Gibson Guitars and they also reluctantly declined on the restoration project. In 2016, I contacted a friend of mine and Guitar aficionado Rick Tedesco, to help me locate someone to totally restore the guitar if possible. I thought Rick, who also owns a guitar store called “The Guitar Hangar,” in Brookfield Connecticut would be the perfect person to find someone to do the job. Finally after almost four years of looking fruitlessly on my own, Rick found a guitar builder in California name Pat Wilkins, to take on the project. In late August of 2016 the neck-less body of the guitar was shipped off to Pat on the west coast.
After nine long months, in May 2017, Glen’s guitar was shipped back to me in Connecticut totally restored and looking beautiful. It came out fu***ng great and plays awesome. Pat Wilkins’s renovation with a new neck is master craftsmanship of the highest quality. All of the new vintage Gibson custom hardware was supplied by Todd Money from Gibson Guitars. This project would have never happened without the professional help of both Pat and Todd. Thanks a billion! Neal Smith
No alterations were made to the finish. It’s all original. The nicks, cuts, scratches and burns in the guitar’s body stayed as Glen made them and left them forty years ago.
As a footnote, Dennis Dunaway has the severed neck as well as the original Gibson vibrato bar from this guitar. The break on the neck matched up perfectly to the break where it broke off the guitar body. That original neck could have never been restored because (a) it is missing the headstock and (b) reattaching the neck the way it had broken off could have never been reattached properly to make it strong enough to be a fully functional, playable guitar.
