Gibson Firebirds destroyed

watch Gibson destroy hundreds of its own Firebird X guitars

It looks like Gibson has been taking the destruction of guitars out of the rock club and into the light of day, on a new scale. A cringe-inducing video which you can watch below shows a construction vehicle crushes hundreds of meticulously arranged Gibson Firebird X electric guitars. In the outcry that followed its posting, Gibson released a statement explaining the video’s origins. According to them, these guitars were an “isolated batch of Firebird X models built in 2009-2011 which were unsalvageable and damaged with unsafe components. This isolated group of Firebird X models were unable to be donated for any purpose and were destroyed accordingly.”

Former Gibson employee BJ Wilkes gave an interview with The Guitarologist about the video, explaining that it happened after former CEO Henry Juszkiewicz was ousted as the company submitted a plan to exit bankruptcy. “They literally could not sell these guitars and they were on the books,” Wilkes said, continuing that “investors were all trying to clean up the mess before the end of the fiscal year.”

Perhaps we needn’t shed many tears over this wanton guitar destruction, though; the Firebird X, which features “a pair of Bluetooth footswitches to bring a pedalboard-feel to the built-in effects, an updateable audio engine processor, an included computer audio interface with a built-in SD card recorder (for computerless recording), analog guitar tone emulations, Robot Tuning technology,” among other things, was described as a “horrible guitar with too much technology all based on Windows 98 or something” by Wilkes.