“I took it to my hotel room and played it all afternoon!”: How Iron Maiden’s Adrian Smith got his hands on the legendary Greeny Les Paul
Few guitars have quite the same legendary status as Greeny, the 1959 Gibson Les Paul Standard once owned by Fleetwood Mac’s Peter Green, and now under the custodianship of Metallica guitarist Kirk Hammett.
As the story goes, Peter Green played the guitar while with John Mayall & The Bluesbreakers before selling it to blues ace Gary Moore in the early ‘70s for around £120 – a sum no higher than Green had originally paid for it.
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Moore played the guitar for three decades – both in Thin Lizzy and throughout his solo career – before selling it in 2006 for a sum between six and seven figures. The guitar passed through the hands of several private collectors before Hammett bought it in 2014.
And a chance encounter at a hotel in Canada presented Iron Maiden legend Adrian Smith with the opportunity to get his hands on Greeny, and naturally, he jumped at the offer.
“Kirk’s a great guy,” Smith says in a new interview with eonmusic [via Ultimate Guitar]. “He’s a lovely guy, and I bumped into him in a hotel in Canada. We were just waiting for the lift. We’re just checking in, and Metallica were there, and the first thing I said to him, I said, ‘Oh, you bought Greeny.’ He goes, ‘Yeah, I’ve got it. You want to play?’ I said, ‘Yeah!’”
“So I went to his room. [Photographer] Ross Halfin was there as well, because he’s a mutual friend, although I know Kirk a little bit, and we sat, and he gave me the guitar and a little practice amp, and of course, I did [Fleetwood Mac’s] Oh Well. And then he says, ‘Look, I’ve got to go out.’”
Smith explains that Hammett and Halfin were busy taking photos, so Hammett suggested Smith take Greeny back to his hotel room and play it to his heart’s content.
“I took it to my hotel room and I had a little practice amp in there, and I just played it all afternoon,” Smith goes on. “It plays great; it’s the intonation, the feel, the sound. I mean, it’s just a wonderful, great guitar. I’m glad somebody’s using it, and it’s not on a wall in somebody’s air-controlled, climate-controlled guitar locker. It’s out there being played, as it should be.”
Kirk Hammett regularly plays Greeny onstage with Metallica, and you can watch him do so yourself at any of Metallica’s upcoming 2026 tour dates.
Check out the band’s official website for more info.
The post “I took it to my hotel room and played it all afternoon!”: How Iron Maiden’s Adrian Smith got his hands on the legendary Greeny Les Paul appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.
Source: www.guitar-bass.net
