When it comes to Ace's guitars there are few things more enigmatic and hard to figure out than this Les Paul Deluxe that appears all of a sudden in mid-October 1974. The things we can say for sure are that it is indeed a Les Paul Deluxe, the trapezoid inlays on the fretboard and the lack of an inlay on the headstock tells us that much, and we can say that it's been routed for full-size humbuckers. Lastly, whatever color paint job it had—and we generally call it black even though the headstock manages to look "blacker"—it had not been well applied. All the available photos from October 17 show a guitar that looks like it was finished by a 5-year old. We generally assume that the black-ish Les Paul with creme pickup rings that can be seen standing on Ace's side of the stage the next night in Hammond, Indiana is the same instrument.
And then that guitar disappears and a natural wood Les Paul Deluxe shows up in its stead. It's a little hard to say exactly when this happens. We obviously don't have photos from all the shows and even the ones we do don't necessarily show the side of the stage where backups were sometimes placed. The best we have in the latter half of October is the Bob Gruen photo below. There's no way anyone can confidently state that the apparition I’ve circled here is a anything specific, it’s just a guitar with a Les Paul-ish shape. The guitar is light enough to show in this poor, dark photo so it obviously had a light finish and this could be the first sighting of the natural Deluxe but we can't say for sure.
But we can confidently say that a natural Les Paul shows up in early November. Actually, we can't really see enough of it to say that it's a Deluxe but based on later photos we assume that it is. John Tate of AceFrehleyLesPaul.com has a theory that this natural Deluxe is actually the same as the poorly finished Deluxe from October. If it was the same guitar then the poorly applied finish had to have been sanded down and the creme details changed to black (which is what the natural Deluxe had). There is about a week between the last time we see the black-ish mystery Deluxe and the possible first appearance of the natural Deluxe so there might have been enough time for the modifications to get done. And if we think about it, what are the odds of finding two Deluxes routed for full-size humbuckers in such a short span of time?
I’m going to make a sweeping declaration here and say that even though I don’t have any really good photos of the blonde/natural Deluxe I think that the top looks a little too good to suggest that Ace or any of the road crew were the one who sanded it down. Any decently applied guitar finish will take some work to remove and even if Ace was prone to take matters into his own hands it seems unlikely that the crew carried the necessary tools. That said, considering the craptacular look of the black-ish Deluxe in Comstock Park on October 17, 1974, that finish was obviously not original and it could be that the streaky and indescribable finish was Ace’s first attempt at applying a new finish. He could have picked up a Deluxe that had already been stripped to a natural wood finish and then tried to finish it black to better suit the image of the band. (Up until this time the Deluxe was only available in gold top or cherry sunburst.) We really don't know. The natural Deluxe shows up at Ace's side of the stage several times in early November.
The natural Deluxe then stays on Ace's side of the stage during December and in early January it shows up backstage. We have no photos that show it getting used during this time but we can deduce that it actually ended up in Ace's hands at least once. As you can see in the South Bend, Indiana the natural Deluxe was standing ”at the ready” on Ace’s side of the stage. There is a second photo from that show where the tobacco sunburst 1973 Les Paul Deluxe is standing on the side of the stage which—even though the photo doesn't really show what guitar Ace is playing—suggests that Ace is almost certainly playing the natural Deluxe.
In January 1975 Ace suddenly took a new liking to the natural Deluxe and it made it on stage for a number of shows. I'm not sure if fans have noticed but he pulls it out for Let Me Go, Rock n' Roll in the bootleg video from Winterland. These photos allow us to see that the gold reflector knobs on the black-ish Deluxe have been replaced by black knobs of indeterminate style.
The blonde/natural story then ends here, on February 20, 1975 in St. Louis, Missouri. This photo of the guitar standing on Ace’s side of the stage is the last I’m aware of, after this we only see other guitars on the side of the stage or, if John Tate's theory holds, the modified version of this guitar (which is the three-pickup Les Paul Deluxe seen on the cover of Alive!).
Here are the basics of the John Tate theory. Poorly finished black Deluxe gets sanded down to blonde/natural and then gets re-finished black (again, poorly) and a third pickup is added. From a timeline perspective this looks reasonable. The black-ish Deluxe and the natural Deluxe are never seen at the same time, they don’t seem to overlap at all. Same for the natural Deluxe and the black 3-pickup Deluxe. The latter also appears after a long hiatus which coincides with Paul having his Firebird I re-finished black (and fitted with a full-size humbucker). The timeline works and knowing what we know about Ace, if he liked a guitar he was prone to keep it.
