His electric archtops represented an abrupt departure from Epi’s past four of the five new models were thin-bodied, a style Gibson had offered since ’55, but Epi had never done. McCarty drew up a new line of Epiphone guitars and debuted them in 1958. The company floundered after World War II due in large part to the death of founder Epi Stathopoulo in ’43, and it was virtually dead when Gibson’s parent company, Chicago Musical Instrument Company (CMI), acquired it in ’57.Īlthough the reason for the acquisition was to give CMI/Gibson the capability of producing acoustic basses, Gibson president Ted McCarty recognized an opportunity to create and exploit what was essentially a second Gibson brand. In the minds of younger guitarists of the late ’50s, however, Epi barely existed. In the minds of older guitarists, Epiphone was a traditional New York-based company, with roots in 19th-century Greece, that came into prominence with tenor banjos in the Jazz Age and challenged Gibson in the archtop and electric market of the 1930s. The Epiphone Riviera helped reinvent Epiphone in the 1960s as a modern guitar company whose instruments sported such contemporary features as thinline, semi-hollow, double-cutaway bodies and humbucking pickups.
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