I wonder how many Gold-Lp's they even made each year?
According to Bacon & Day, 920 goldtops were shipped in 1956. They have figures for all years (except, as usual, for several models during the Norlin years -- it's pretty much hit and miss, but that era didn't begin until 1969). Here's a link to a website, but it's not broken down to strictly LPs, and some of the information is a little ambiguous unless you have other data:
http://www.provide.net/~cfh/shippin4.html
The "
LpStd", for example, refers to the goldtop through 1957, but from 1958 lumps them in with sunburst.
The design of the LP came from three sources: the need for a purely electric instrument (as opposed to amplified acoustic), which was addressed by several builders, including Leo Fender, Rickenbacker, Paul Bigsby, O W Appleton, and others; Les Paul's own experiments with solid instruments, culminating in the "Log", a 4X4 with a Gibson neck attached (he performed with it and the audience response was very negative, so he went home and attached the cut-off sides of an Epiphone archtop with angle iron onto the plank, and that made everybody happy); and Ted McCarty, who, alarmed at Fender's growing market share, put together a team to design what became the actual LP.
Les Paul has taken credit for much of the work of the Gibson guys, but I personally believe that, when they showed it to him, he felt it was his own concept brought to life, and thought himself responsible for it. There are a couple of reasons I think so. First, Paul's woodworking chops (judging from the Log, at least) were pretty minimal. Second, the LP was clearly based upon and ornamented like a Gibson acoustic archtop. Paul says Maurice Berlin wanted the carved top; McCarty says he added it to the design knowing that Fender couldn't afford the tooling to copy it. Paul also says he picked out the gold color, while McCarty says the prototype was already painted gold when Paul first saw it. As it happens, Gibson had the finishing materials on hand because they had done an archtop in gold at Paul's request to present to a terminal patient in a hospital (who died before he received it).
But the main reason I credit McCarty is that Paul insisted the first generation use a combination trapeze tail piece/bridge that he had developed. When installed on the LP guitar, the strings had to be wrapped underneath, precluding string muting. I firmly believe that if Paul had designed the LP, he would have worked out the problem with the tail piece/bridge (on his side, Paul said "Gibson got it wrong"). Les Paul was a tireless tinkerer, much like Leo Fender, and I'm pretty sure he would have noticed something wrong if he'd been working on the prototype.
The Fender bass was certainly the work of a single man, Leo Fender, and he contrived solutions to the problem of amplified bass that have colored practically every electric bass made to the present. Sure, the early ones were primitive (I have a '51 Reissue that's built like a wooden rowboat, and about as ornamental) but he had the sense to keep at it, and to hire Freddie Tavares, who, unlike Fender, actually had some aesthetic sense. The second generation Precisions (and the Jazz) are much more attractive than Fender's own designs (by analogy, you can apply the same to the Stratocaster viz a viz the Telecaster).
