My name is Larry Cragg. I toured with Neil for 35 years, taking care of his guitars, amps and keyboards. Over the years I got to play banjo, baritone sax, keys, 12 string, pedal steel, broom and percussion, and was a photographer and actor.

It all started in 1972 when I got a phone call from Randy Smith, my partner at Prune Music in Mill Valley, California, where he worked on amps and I worked on guitars. Randy was out on the road with Neil, trying to eliminate ground loops from a wall of tweed amps (lots of them). He called because Neil couldn’t get Old Black in tune, and asked if I had any suggestions. I told him how to straighten the bent tune-o-matic bridge and adjust the intonation. Randy had been going down to Neil’s Ranch near Woodside, California to work on Neil’s amplifiers. He started taking me with him so I could work on the guitars.

The first time I encountered Old Black in person, he had the original P-90 neck pickup with a cover made of silver. The bridge pickup, instead of a P-90, was a Gretch-De Armond “Dynasonic” with adjustable magnets.

The original P-90 was missing because the guitar had been left at a guitar store that was trusted to install custom binding, etc. When Neil came back to reclaim his guitar the store was gone, along with the guitar. Old Black was eventually tracked down, but it had no bridge pickup so the Dynasonic was installed. At the time, Black was strung up (as well as his other electrics) with GTR strings, gauges .010-.038, but .038 on the low E is just too limp and won’t stay in tune, so from ‘73 on I changed brands and put a regular set of 10s (.010-.046) on all his electrics. Neil told me that he traded one of his guitars for Old Black, with Buffalo Springfield bandmate Richie Furay, because Furay said he could never get it in tune.
I set up Black the way I normally do, with a totally straight neck, low action, etc. In 1973 I installed a Gibson Firebird pickup in Old Black’s bridge position.

It is a unique design, a humbucking with 2 coils and a bar magnet in the center of each coil (lots of high end).

This particular pickup is microphonic (you can yell into it and hear it through the amp.) I believe this contributes to a part of Neil’s sound. He uses it about 95% of the time. I have it adjusted as close to the strings as possible. (The strings barely clear it). Old Black is a 1953 Goldtop as are all of the Bigsby-equipped Les Pauls Neil has played. They have all been modified from the original trapeze bridge, with a tune-o-matic bridge and a B7 Bigsby vibrato.

The reason they have to be ‘53s is because in 1954 Gibson changed the neck angle, tipping it back more causing the bridge to be much higher. This increases the downward string angle behind the bridge to the Bigsby roller, making it so it doesn’t come back in tune when the vibrato is used. The original bridge that all ‘52s and ‘53s came with is a terrible design, with the strings coming from the underside of the bridge because of the shallow neck angle.

The four Bigsby-equipped Les Pauls Neil has played are named Old Black, Larry Gold,

Neil Gold, (Has Firebird pickup)

and Old Gold

.

To help keep the guitars tune, with Neil’s regular use of the Bigsby, I made their bridges so they “rock” and I lube the Bigsby and the nut grooves regularly. I would usually have Black tuned normal (EADGBE) low to high and the gold guitar to what Neil calls D modal (DADGBD for “Cinamon Girl, etc.) Other modifications I made over the years: For one tour I taped a button to Black’s lower bout, with a wire running from it to a transmitter located in a pocket in Neil’s strap. When the button was pushed, a wireless signal was sent to the original version of the “whizzer” (made by Sal Trentino) which then physically turned the volume knob up or down on his Tweed Deluxe. Later on, to overcome signal loss—an issue with all guitars, the loss of tone and volume as the signal passes through the knobs, even when turned up to 10—I replaced the non-functioning mini-switch in the middle of Black’s knobs with a mini-switch that, allowed Neil to shunt the bridge pickup directly to the output jack, bypassing the tone and volume sapping controls. When Neil tried it, he said, “Old Black goes to 11 now.”