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On the first night, Frampton’s Gibson ES-335 was plagued by feedback. After the Pie’s set on the second night, a fan named Mark Mariana approached him and said he’d noticed that the guitarist was having some trouble. He offered to bring along a Les Paul the next day that Frampton could play for the third show, if he liked it. The following morning, Mariana met the guitarist in a hotel coffee shop and opened a new Gibson case to reveal a 1954 Les Paul Custom “Black Beauty,” fresh from a factory refinish, its original single-coil pickups replaced with three PAF humbuckers. “As soon as he asked me if I wanted to try it, I said, ‘Yeah, please!’” Frampton told Steve Rosen for Gibson.com in 2008. “And of course, my feet didn’t touch the ground the whole night. It was the most beautiful sound I’d ever heard.”

Gibson dubbed Lover’s new creation the “humbucker” for its ability to “buck” electrical hum and, aware that it was a unique device in the fledgling industry, applied for a U.S. patent to protect the design. The first variations of the unit appeared in the form of a triple-coil humbucker, used on Gibson lap-steel guitars in 1956. When double-coil humbuckers first appeared on the goldtop Les Paul Model and black Les Paul Custom in 1957, they carried stickers that read “Patent Applied For,” to warn off would-be copyist’s while the company awaited the patent. Pickups of the era, therefore, are given the nickname “PAF,” which applies to any pickup carrying the “Patent Applied For” sticker that all Gibson humbuckers wore between late 1956/early ’57 and late 1962. In fact, a U.S. patent was granted in July of 1959, but Gibson continued to apply these stickers for another two years. One theory is that the company still didn’t want potential copyists to have access to the design, which they could easily have found by searching for the patent number at the U.S. Patent Office. (When the patent number stickers finally appeared on humbuckers late in 1962, the number was in fact for a bridge patent—a simple mistake, or a further deterrent to the competition?) The second theory is that Gibson was just using up the many “Patent Applied For” stickers it had already printed up, and perhaps had already even applied to a stock of pickups.