A pioneering singer, songwriter, and guitarist, Paul Westerberg paved the way for the alternative rock revolution of the 1990s. He made his mark by fronting the influential rock band The Replacements, and has gone on to a busy solo career. He’s a platinum-selling recording artist, with over 20 albums for indie and major labels. 

Westerberg and First Act got together to design a signature rock guitar, the PW580. It’s a killer electric with a rock and roll soul. Westerberg describes it as “lean, clean, and mean…just like rock ‘n’ roll ought to be.”

The story goes that Westerberg was on tour somewhere in the middle of America, and he stopped into a mass retailer to buy shaving cream, and bought one of our crimson ME501 electric guitars on impulse, right off the shelf. He debuted the guitar onstage that night, and quickly brought it into heavy onstage rotation for the rest of the tour.

When we heard about it, we invited Westerberg to design a guitar with us. So we put our heads together and came up with the PW580 – it’s a killer electric with a rock and roll soul.

Westerberg describes his vision for the PW580:
“…something not too heavy, that I could play quietly or full volume. It has a single pickup, and it sort of snarls. It’s lean, clean, and mean, and it doesn’t have that big, overdriven, fuzzy sound. You can get that with an amp, but the guitar itself doesn’t put it out, and that’s what I was looking for. There’s a definite old-school thing–it belongs in a garage. It probably sounds best in a garage playing surf music or something like that.