A decent electric archtop, but not golden-age decent

This was a very special guitar for me growing up. When my guitar playing took off in my teens and I started playing more blues and jazz and getting the urge to plug in, I started on a Squier Bullet Strat my Dad had kicking around. This was my very first electric guitar of my own, and of course it blew the little Squier out of the water. But it wasn't really a perfect anything—not a solid-body electric substitute, and not really an archtop substitute—and it was never quite the right fit for me.

The Fusion I had was the gorgeous piano black finish variant made around 1997, and it was a thing of beauty to look at. With its gold appointments it looked an awful lot like B.B. King's "Lucille"—not the true signature model Lucille that Gibson made for B.B. King from 1980 onwards with no sound holes and stereo output, but the old ES-335 variants that he used to play in the 1970s on his most iconic and influential recordings. It has the look and feel of a hollow-body archtop, but with a "chromyte" center block that's something like balsa wood. The Generation III HRFs were made at Gibson's Memphis plant, and the build quality was great at that time, but it's a guitar that tries to be many things at once, and is sometimes the best of both worlds, and sometimes the worst.

The body is thicker than an ES-335, more like an ES-175, which is what Roberts used as the base for this design. The light center block keeps the guitar quite lightweight for such a thick instrument, and also does a fine job of killing feedback when you play live, but it makes a real difference when it comes to sustain. For jazz fusion, it's not a thing you notice, but the guitar neither rings like a true acoustic or sustains like a true hard-bodied Les Paul. I found it versatile in that you could theoretically play any kind of music on it, but whatever you did with it, there were other guitars that sounded better for that thing—with the niche exception, I later found out, of the kind of music Roberts made as a high-demand session musician and great live jazz player.

The other flaw worth mentioning is that its vintage-style finish is not too friendly for hard use. I stored a leather guitar strap in the cutaway bout when carrying the guitar in the case, and the white top and back binding of the guitar just drank up the dye from the strap, leaving it an unsightly stained-orange colour for the rest of its days. That was partially my mistake as a young kid who didn't know how to handle a guitar like this, but don't let it be your mistake too.

A final note—the elegant-looking "finger tailpiece" that holds the strings over the TOM-style bridge has a couple of adjustment knobs that are sometimes billed as "microtuners," but they're really not. They adjust the individual fingers of the tailpiece up and down, with the effect of fine-tuning the tension of each individual string just the way you like it. I had no real sense of how to use this feature as a young kid who was playing straight-ahead rock: the tension in my particular setup was high, which made the guitar louder acoustically and feel more like an acoustic in general when playing it: it was not at all good for string bends, but it was a nice effect when trying to sub this guitar in for a clean acoustic I could plug in.

In short, your mileage may vary with this guitar. It wasn't the right one for me, but for an experienced player who wants exactly what this guitar offers, it may be a better fit. Given that Gibson archtop electrics of this age are now going for upwards of $5,000 on Reverb, though, it certainly has a lot of competition from other semi-hollow archtops. To the extent that this is a 25-year-old guitar with not just the flagship Gibson brand on it, but a signature-series name, you are looking at a premium collector's guitar at a premium price. There are other guitars in this niche that punch above their weight, so make sure you love it before you decide to add it to your arsenal.