I wont ask you guys to guess this one since its fairly obscure. Honestly, it took me a while to find one of these
Anyone ever heard of a '58 Gibson Futura? How about a '58 Moderne? Im guessing most of you have not. And for good reason. Although they own the patents for the design, there is a lot of speculation that neither guitar was ever built by Gibson.
I have a buddy that swears he knows a guy in Texas that owns a Futura. There have been various claims about original Moderne's from collectors as well as Billy F. Gibbons, but to date,
AFAIK, no reported '58 Futura or a '58 Moderne has ever been authenticated or seen in person. The only evidence that either these guitars ever existed even conceptually is in the US patent drawings that Gibson submitted in 1957 before the NAMM show where the now legendary '58 Flying V and Explorer were first seen.
Im a huge fan of the replica '58 Gibson guitars because the real ones are unobtainable. Gibson's shipping records indicate that less that (50) Explorers and less than (100) Flying V's were ever built. If they exist, the Futura and the Moderne are the rarest of the rare '58 Gibson guitars.
In the late '90's a Japanese company named Bacchus deservedly earned a reputation for manufacturing the most accurate copies of the '50s Gibson guitars that can be bought. Its hard to copy something accurately when a template doesn't exist and the real thing has never been authenticated or even seen in person, but Bacchus decided to copy the Futura anyway.
I've owned a lot of the Japanese clones, and the Bacchus guitars I've had were really good. Here are some pics of my latest Japanese '58 Gibson clone, a Bacchus Futura.
...and here's an '80s Gibson reissue of the other 'guitar that never was', the Moderne.
