Is The Rainforest Under Threat By Gibson Guitars

"Way up here you grow up liking Fenders or you grow up loving Gibsons," says Billy Jack, 55, sitting inside a Nashville music shop eyeing up a trio of shiny new Gibson guitars. Cradling a $3,800 (£2,413) Gibson Les Paul, Mr Jack, an experienced guitar player, recalls riffs gone by while he describes his liking for one of rock's iconic instruments. "You can hear it in your ear. It's how fast you can run through your chops. It's the sound. You just cannot go wrong."

Facing a criminal investigation, Gibson boss Henry Juszkiewicz has formed an uneasy alliance with the Tea Party, even appearing on stage in Nashville at a sun-drenched weekend rally called to support his firm.

Introduced to a cheering 500-strong crowd as "the man who stood up to the federal government", the mild-mannered Mr Juszkiewicz followed a string of tub-thumping speeches and political country music acts.But he seemed hesitant to add his voice to the anti-Washington, anti-regulation clamour, instead urging the crowd to keep fighting "injustice and unfairness".

Mr Juszkiewicz values the seized wood at $500,000 (?317,517). That's enough rosewood for 10,000 fingerboards - a strip running along the neck of the guitar vital to the overall tone and performance of the instrument. With Gibson's production lines badly hit, the firm is seeking alternative supplies. But finding new wood will not be easy. Illegal logging means reputable supplies of wood used to make guitars are scarcer, and more heavily regulated, than ever before.

Henry Juszkiewicz insists the wood is from a sustainable source, and the dispute is really over tariff coding. Gibson has letters from the Indian government supporting its interpretation, Mr Juszkiewicz says, but they have not been made public. "The government is using innuendo with words like 'fraudulently', as if there was some deception taking place. We've been purchasing that wood for 17 years exactly the same way." In any case, he insists, an armed raid "should not be the first response to an import-export issue".

The two Gibson cases are the first cases under Lacey since forest products were added to the legislation in 2008, according to Scott Paul, director of forest campaigns for Greenpeace USA. Despite the criminal probe, there is "no suggestion that the Indian wood was cut illegally," he says. Instead the debate rests - as Henry Juszkiewicz contends - on the tariff coding.

The 2009 Gibson raid, though, could have more serious repercussions. In that case the firm is suspected of knowingly importing wood from Madagascar that was cut illegally. "Everyone is innocent until proven guilty," Greenpeace's Scott Paul says of that case, while warning that the industry as a whole has questions to answer. "There has always been an underlying feeling that a significant proportion of the wood used in musical instruments has come from illegal or highly dubious sources."

Instead of threatening the future of America's guitars, though, one veteran musician hopes the furore can prod the industry towards a sustainable future. "The wood that goes into guitars is crucial to the tone of the instrument," says Laurence Juber, an acoustic guitarist who lined up with Sir Paul McCartney in Wings. "I can show you the difference in sound between Indian rosewood and Brazilian rosewood and ebony and maple."