Epiphone Casinos are electric guitars, but where most electrics are totally solid or have a solid centre block, the Casino is truly hollow like an acoustic guitar. The Casino has P90 pickups which are more edgy sounding than the humbuckers your see on most archtops, so although the sound is refined it also has a certain bite and mojo.
Epiphone Casinos have been prominent in some of the greatest music ever created and are especially synonymous with the Beatles. Paul McCartney was the first Beatle to own a Casino. It had a bigsby trem and, given McCartney was left handed, was played upside down. Although he was technically the bassist, the Beatles could, and did, swap roles regularly. It’s Paul McCartney playing Casino leads on songs like Drive my car, Taxman and Paperback writer.
IMO the guitar tone on these records is amazing, being in that utlra-cool, hard to find place between clean and over driven. It’s not surprising McCartney said his Casino was his favourite lead guitar.
George Harrison owned lots of guitars and pioneered the use of many like the Rickenbacker 360 12 string and the Gibson SG, though he did play a Casino on some of the greatest Beatles albums such as Revolver, Sergeant Pepper, Magical Mystery Tour and Abbey Road.
However, of all the Beatles the Casino was most used by John Lennon who after 1965 played little else. Originally it was sunburst but he later stripped the varnish for the pale yellow colour seen in loads of late Beatles footage. Maybe because the guitar could also be used as a hollow body acoustic, he found himself writing and practising with it in his hotel and living rooms all the time. So he became wedded to it, even though remarkably his Epiphone was a relatively cheap guitar and he could have owned anything.
Other sixties musicians loved their Casinos, notably Dave Davis and Keith Richards.
During the seventies strats, les pauls and expensive Gibson archtops become more popular with famous musicians. Though Epiphones made a comeback with the indie and Britpop scenes being a guitar that was free of associations with cheesy grin twiddlers and blues bores. It also wasn't a punk guitar, being way too elegant to be abused and spat at.
The 12 string version of the Casino (the Epiphone Riviera 12-string) creates the wonderful guitar backdrops to Lush's greatest records
And of course Epiphones are all over early Oasis (and NoWaySis) records...
Sally btw was a Manchester promoter - she even got our old band gigs sometimes.
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