Yeah, there's this total obsession with everything having to sound exactly like a '59 Les Paul or a '57 Strat.
When I first got interested in the guitar (over 25 years ago, am I really that old?! :( ) they used to go on about Clapton's Les Paul on the "Beano" album, or Paul Kossoff's '59 - but those guitars were only 10 years old when those recordings were made, they weren't like the Holy Grail! I've got guitars twice that old but no-one would expect them to have mystical properties.
I think it all started in the 70s when Gibsons and Fenders were generally rubbish, and guitarists started harking back to the glory days of the late 50s. Somehow, it became absolutely set in stone that basically those were the ONLY really good guitars ever made.
We've all grown up reading that stuff as a sort of Article of Faith (and passing it on to successive generations!). 30 years later, in our heads we're still frozen in that time warp. By now, many of those old guitars must be falling to bits but they're still what we're all supposed to aspire to (and I must admit, my ultimate dream guitar would be a '58 korina Flying V!).
It's almost like a bizarre fundamentalist religion.
