Epiphone Jared James Nichols “Gold Glory”: The Guitar Born From a Borrowed Les Paul

The spreadsheet’s player list for this one — Page, Slash, Allman, Perry, Moore — is the same generic Les Paul lineup that gets recycled across dozens of unrelated models in this catalog. None of it is relevant to this specific signature guitar. This is a signature model, and the rule for signature guitars is simple: center the story on the artist whose name is on the headstock, not on a copy-pasted list of famous Les Paul owners who have nothing to do with this particular build.

Except one name on that generic list does belong in this story, for a reason the spreadsheet couldn’t have known: Joe Perry. Not as a player of this guitar, but as the reason it exists at all.

The Loan That Started Everything

In 2012, Jared James Nichols was an unknown, broke guitarist working out of Swing House studios in Los Angeles. Joe Perry of Aerosmith happened to hear him playing through the wall and was impressed enough to lend Nichols a vintage 1950s Les Paul Custom that had been stripped down to a single pickup. That loan became the conceptual blueprint for everything that followed: Nichols’ first signature model, “Old Glory” (2019, finished in black), followed by “Gold Glory” (2021, a gold-top version — the guitar covered here), and later “Blues Power” (2023, featuring a custom Seymour Duncan JJN P90 Silencer pickup). Perry never plays this guitar. He’s the reason it was built.

Epiphone Jared James Nichols “Gold Glory” Les Paul Custom — Full Specifications

One Pickup, One Philosophy

The most striking spec on this guitar is what’s missing: a neck pickup. The Gold Glory carries a single Seymour Duncan P-90 Dogear in the bridge position and nothing else — an unusually stripped-down configuration for a Les Paul Custom, which traditionally ships with two humbuckers. That single-pickup layout is a direct echo of the vintage Les Paul Custom Perry loaned Nichols in 2012, which had also been reduced to one pickup. It’s a design choice that forces simplicity: no pickup selector, no tonal compromises from blending two positions, just one voice dialed in as precisely as possible.

The result is a guitar built entirely around a single, focused tone — raw, midrange-forward P-90 grit, shaped by a player whose entire technique is built to squeeze maximum expression out of minimal gear.

The Player: Jared James Nichols and the Pickless Technique

Jared James Nichols was born in 1989 in East Troy, Wisconsin — notably close to Waukesha, the birthplace of Les Paul himself, a coincidence Nichols has leaned into as part of his artistic identity. What sets Nichols apart from most modern blues-rock guitarists is his technique: he plays entirely without a pick, using his thumb for downstrokes and three fingers for upstrokes. He developed this style largely self-taught, after a guitar shop employee once insisted he switch to playing right-handed, forcing him to rebuild his technique from scratch.

Nichols cites Hubert Sumlin as his single greatest influence, alongside Mark Knopfler and Derek Trucks — a lineage of guitarists known for expressive, vocal-like phrasing rather than pure speed. He typically performs in a power trio format reminiscent of Cream or Mountain, putting maximum weight on every note since there’s no second guitarist to share the sonic space. In 2021, Nichols became a Gibson global ambassador, a title shared by only a small handful of players including Slash, Dave Mustaine, and Lzzy Hale — a significant marker of industry recognition for a guitarist who was essentially unknown a decade earlier.

Nichols has toured alongside players like Zakk Wylde, and while his own technique and tone are the clear centerpiece of this guitar’s story, his influences — particularly Hubert Sumlin’s raw Chicago blues phrasing — remain audible in every bend and vibrato he plays.

The pickless technique is worth dwelling on a little longer, because it’s not simply a stylistic quirk — it fundamentally shapes what kind of guitar and pickup configuration actually works for Nichols. Fingerstyle and thumb-driven playing produces a naturally softer attack than a pick, with more variation in dynamics between individual notes within a single phrase. A single, well-voiced P-90 responds to that kind of dynamic playing far more expressively than a hotter, more compressed humbucker would — every slight change in attack registers as an audible shift in tone, which is exactly the kind of responsiveness a technique built entirely around touch and control needs from its instrument.

Why a Signature Guitar Skips Its Own Namesake’s Influences

Most signature Les Paul Customs in this catalog lean on a chain of famous prior owners — Page, Slash, the Allmans, Perry, Moore — as a kind of borrowed prestige. This one deliberately doesn’t. Nichols’ entire signature line is built around erasing that borrowed-prestige approach and replacing it with a single, specific, verifiable origin story: one loaned guitar, one formative moment, one player’s own voice built from there. That’s a meaningfully different marketing philosophy than most signature guitars in this thread, and it’s part of why the Gold Glory reads as more personal than a typical artist-endorsement build.

It also explains why the guitar’s spec sheet looks the way it does. Every choice — the single bridge pickup, the stripped-back electronics, the vintage-correct Custom body shape — traces back to replicating the specific instrument Perry handed him in that LA studio, rather than to a marketing team’s idea of what a “signature Les Paul Custom” ought to include.

Tone Recipes

Raw blues-rock power trio (Nichols’ core sound): P-90 straight into a cranked tube amp, minimal pedal coloration, thumb-and-finger attack for dynamic control that a pick can’t replicate as easily. Push the amp into natural breakup rather than relying on a distortion pedal.

Vintage Chicago blues (Sumlin-inspired): Amp on the edge of clean, focus on note choice and space over volume, let the single P-90 voice carry the phrasing without additional gain stacking.

Epiphone Gold Glory vs. the Alternatives

Against a standard two-humbucker Les Paul Custom, the Gold Glory sacrifices tonal versatility for focus — there’s no neck-pickup warmth or pickup-blend option, just one voice tuned precisely to Nichols’ raw P-90 attack. Compared to the Epiphone Dot or other P-90-equipped Epiphones, the Gold Glory’s solidbody Les Paul Custom construction delivers tighter low-end and more sustain, at the cost of some of the semi-hollow warmth.

Buying Guide

The Gold Glory (~$699) sits in the middle of Nichols’ three-model signature lineup: less understated than the original black “Old Glory,” and one step below “Blues Power,” which adds a custom-voiced Seymour Duncan JJN P90 Silencer pickup designed specifically to address the noise issues inherent to single-coil P-90 designs while preserving their raw tonal character. Players drawn to the gold-top aesthetic and Nichols’ stripped-down philosophy should find the Gold Glory a faithful, well-built entry point into his signature line, with the ebony fretboard and pearloid block inlays giving it a more upscale visual presence than the price tag might suggest.

Buyers who plan to gig extensively in noisy, high-gain environments should weigh the single P-90’s inherent hum against the tonal character it delivers — the Blues Power variant’s Silencer pickup exists specifically to solve that tradeoff for players who love the sound but need quieter stage behavior.

Practical Ownership Notes

With only a bridge-position P-90 and no pickup selector, there’s very little to go wrong electronically — this is one of the simpler wiring layouts in Epiphone’s catalog, which also means fewer components to maintain and less that can fail on the road. As with any P-90-equipped guitar, expect more single-coil hum than a humbucker-loaded instrument, particularly at higher gain or near unshielded electrical equipment. The wraparound “Lightning Bar” bridge simplifies string changes compared to a separate Tune-O-Matic-and-stopbar setup, though it offers slightly less fine-tuning control over individual string intonation.

A Signature Model Built on One Honest Moment

What makes the Gold Glory worth including in this series isn’t just its connection to Joe Perry, though that story is genuinely one of the better origin tales in the whole catalog. It’s that the guitar’s entire design philosophy — one pickup, no compromises, built around a single player’s specific technique and taste — runs directly counter to the “more is more” approach that defines most modern signature guitars. Jared James Nichols built a career on proving that a single P-90, a bare thumb, and total commitment to one tone can carry an entire live performance. The Gold Glory is that philosophy made into hardware, and it’s a rare example in this catalog of a signature model whose specs actually tell you something true about how the artist plays, rather than just which famous names were willing to lend their signature to a marketing campaign.

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