Gretsch | G6199 Billy-Bo Jupiter Thunderbird

One of the great things about being a guitar hero, and there are many, is the ability to have major guitar makers build custom guitars for you – and one of the things that set founding father of Rock and Roll, Bo Diddley, apart from the rest (aside from the Bo Diddley Beat), is the custom guitars that he designed in 1959 for his band. That’s how the Jupiter Thunderbird came into being. It was one of those three custom-made electric guitars that Gretsch built for the man who was there at the beginning of rock and roll. (Some claim that it was Bo Diddley who actually invented Rock.) The original Jupiter Thunderbird was given as a gift to ZZ Top guitar player, Billy F Gibbons, by Bo himself. For the new version, Billy and Gretsch flipped the design upside down, which makes the headstock backward…!