Well, so about the Norlin years.
You've probably read that they were using up old parts on the Challengers, but I don't know if I really believe that. I might have, before yesterday, but you usually hear that they were using up old Marauder/S-1 bodies, but I can now verify that those were not the same bodies at all. The bridges on the Challengers and such were those Schaller wraparounds, and those are the same as the "harmonica" made bridges that dominated the 70's.
I can also tell you that the "harmonica" bridge as well as this wraparound bridge (both made by Schaller) are light years better than the fucking Nashville hunk of shit that Gibson went to after the Norlin years and still use today. That's the worst bridge they've ever made that I'm aware of. Garbage pot metal cheaply produced in Asia loosely propped up on even cheaper components.
So it's not like Gibson was using cheap stuff. They were actually concerned with making a good product. And while the Challenger III might have been using the same single coil pickups that were on the earlier S-1*, they were very good pickups so why not? It's not like Fender hasn't been using the same Alnico 5 pickups over and over also, and why should they not? There's really only so many good pickup designs possible and that's a great one.
But anyway, some years ago I got my hands on a Norlin era Les Paul Deluxe and was just blown away by it. Then I got my hands on some other Norlin stuff and was also blown away by that. There's a playablity to the Norlin years that totally works for me, and I had no idea. Basically, they went heavily with Gibson's earlier "fretless wonder" design, with broad and low frets, and a fairly narrow neck carve. Fairly different from what Gibson had been doing, and different from the "return to classic quality" of the Juskiewicz years. I like them all, but shit, Norlins play great.
And yeah, Gibson was definitely trying to peel people away from Fender, the Marauder was a great attempt to compete with the Telecaster Deluxe or whatever it was, and the S-1 was an attempt to out-compete the Stratocaster. But they didn't just rip those guitars off, they came up with entire new designs to be their own thing and yet be "better".
This was kind of natural at the time, and here's my favorite thing about some Norlins: their pickup designers wanted to have guitars with more high end sparkle and clarity, like what you find with Fender. They were moving away from the PAF sound- and this was a terrible time to be doing that- and since I don't really love the creamy, mid-range, compressed PAF sound this is right up my alley.
And Gibson also decided to "improve" on the classic designs and that's probably what fucked them. For some reason, they thought that they were an innovative company capable of producing guitars that would be classics along the lines of their 60's models and no one wanted that. To make matters worse, they changed their classic designs a whole lot, which people really resisted.
Gibson added a neck volute for extra strength in order to reduce headstock breakage, for instance. You'd never know it was there, but people hated it.
They made a lot of changes that don't really make a lot of sense, either. I've been looking at a 70's Les Paul Deluxe for some time, and you find tons of them having been routed out for humbuckers.
"Silly 70's people," I thought. But the fact is, Gibson barely made Les Paul Standards then, so for a lot of people, if you wanted a Les Paul with humbuckers routing out a Deluxe for humbuckers was what you had to do.
So Gibson was turning out original models that didn't really out-compete what they were supposed to be competing against, and weren't all that well received, and they were also turning out versions of their classic guitars that were sharply different (if not really worse) than the guitars that had come before that everyone still wanted.
Oh, they also did some insane shit. So, the Sonex that you might have read about? That wasn't a guitar model- that was a whole line. Kind of. The original ones read "Sonex by Gibson" and there were Custom and Deluxe models, and there were supposed to be more, and that was the entry line.
And then there was a middle lineup, the Firebrand, which was slightly less expensive models of the Gibson family (those are great guitars), and then Gibson was the flagship. Epiphone was chugging along in Japan. But the point of the Sonex and Firebrand was also to get Gibson products into music stores that weren't Gibson dealers. There was to be a guitar at every price point and branded as such for upward brand mobility.
But they never actually did that, well, kind of, for one year, maybe, or maybe not, then they immediately reversed course, deciding everything was a Gibson more or less, re-branding all this stuff, no one in the music store had any idea what was supposed to be going on with this or why there were so many weird models out there and why were none of them what Eric Clapton played and was that one fucking some kind of plastic?
Long story short, they tanked.
But, good for me, because the Juskiewicz era Gibson was happy to say that the used guitars from the Norlin era were garbage, and why not? Their new guitars were competing most heavily against used Gibson guitars then same as now. And plenty of other people said so, also. I was raised to think that Norlin era Gibsons were garbage my whole life and I only found out about how good they are recently. I feel like an idiot for not snapping then up in the 90's when they were super cheap.
But I know now, so I'm going to get them. They're wonderful. My Marauder really was the proof of concept there, original pickups that appear on no other guitar, it has it's own sound. Great hardware on it, super playable necks. What's not to like?
Every time I see an article talking about how bad Norlins are I get a little happier.
*Actually the S-1 had the pickups all sealed up in epoxy, which was a Bill Lawrence trademark, as well as had a straight bar across so that you didn't lose note volume if you bent the string in between the pole pieces. The Challenger III and such were just normal single coil pickups, I misspoke there.
If you want to know more about the Norlin era,
check out Scott Grove videos. I know, I know. But he knows his shit with these guitars, even better, he's a country player so he tends to play clean, which is where these guitars shine. Listen to that S-1 and tell me that's not a good sounding guitar.