Vintage & Rare guitar(s) of the week: 1968 Fender Telecaster paisley pair

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Here we have a pair of original 1968 Fender Paisleys - a Telecaster (as used by Elvis guitarist James Burton) and Telecaster Bass - both in remarkable condition for their age. The paisley design was effectively wallpaper applied to the guitar before being sealed beneath a clear finish with a pink "burst" around the perimeter to hide the edges of the paper. Often with these original paisleys, the finish has cracked badly through to the paper, and the pink finish usually fades to a not unpleasant gold. You'll see in the photo above that the Telecaster guitar suffers from a crack where the right forearm would rest, and the pink burst has begun to turn gold. But look at those necks - hardly a mark on them; they could almost be new. Both guitar and bass are complete with the pickup/bridge covers that players usually remove and use as ashtrays or whatever; their presence here would probably appeal to the collector more than the player.

The pair are currently being sold via Vintage & Rare for $37,000 for the both of them, or $19,500 for the Telecaster guitar and $18,500 for the Telecaster Bass. At those prices we're talking collectors really. For the rest of us who just happen like the look of them, there have been various Japanese re-issues since the late 1980s which you could turn up for a fraction of the price.

G L Wilson

© 2011, Guitarz - The Original Guitar Blog - now in its 10th year!

Emperador stereo hollowbody guitar, probably 1960 Japanese

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Here's another vintage guitar to identify. It's a thinline hollowbody, looking similar to early Yamaha semis, but has the split stereo pickups similar to those on the 1960s Goya 12-string semi-hollowbody that we looked at on Friday.

The name on the headstock is Emperador, yet another name that is new to me and is quite likely a brandname for a particularly retailer. My feeling is that it is Japanese in origin, although it is conceivable that it may be European.

If anyone has any more info on this instrument please let us know in the usual way!

Thanks to DeeCee who found this guitar for sale here, priced at €800.

G L Wilson

© 2011, Guitarz - The Original Guitar Blog - now in its 10th year!

Osbama Tango acoustic guitar

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The Osbama brand stands for Oswald Bachmann Markneukirchen - Markneukirchen being this town in Saxony (next to the Czech border) famous for its music industry since the late 17th century. Situated in GDR after the WWII, it is where many of these electric guitars we enjoy so much have been conceived and built, and many East-German brands you are familiar with included its first syllable in their names - Musima, Migma, Marma...  

The Osbama Tango was a very successful model at the time, combining traditional music quality and art-deco design - the lightning sound holes are particularly bold and elegant. Like often, its lines are more dynamic and elegant that it equivalent from West-Germany, with which it still shares the inevitable German carve and blonde finish.

An interesting fact - that might explain why it is sometimes so difficult to gather information - is that these guitars were usually not branded to ease their distribution in the black market. Both in the east and the west, post-war Germany was avid of entertainment, and musicians were often retributed with black market goods from occupation armies, including instruments, and a good Markneukirchen guitar was appreciated in the west, though it was better if it was untraceable...

Bertram

© 2011, Guitarz - The Original Guitar Blog - now in its 10th year!

Car

Tango Osbama

1960s Made In Japan Inter-Mark guitar

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The seller wonders if the neck and body on the above-pictured 1960s Japanese guitar are mismatched because the colours don't quite match, but note that the finish has faded - and there's no rule to say that it has to fade consistently. Yes, it's certainly an Inter-Mark headstock, but the body looks like no Teisco I've seen. My guess would be the whole guitar is an Inter-Mark.

Has anyone out there seen another like this, or maybe know what the model is?

Whatever it is, it's currently listed on eBay with a Buy It Now price of $399.

G L Wilson

© 2011, Guitarz - The Original Guitar Blog - now in its 10th year!

ESP Gundam Axe guitar

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Here we see an ESP Gundam Axe guitar listed on eBay with a Buy It Now price of $799. The seller doesn't tell us very much about it, only that he bought it in Japan in 2007 literally whilst running for the return flight home.

The insubstantial body does look very much as it has been crafted from plastic; the fact that the blade section of the axe shape contains a built-in amp and speaker make this all the more likely. Of course, ESP are no strangers to the use of plastic in their guitar bodies, witness the Devil Girl.

As for the shape of the guitar it is most odd, and especially strange for guitar that looks designed for the metal market it has a lone humbucker pickup in the neck position and not in the bridge position. Also with the bridge having such a small footprint on an area of "body" comprising more thin air than actual body material I can't imagine that the guitar would sustain very well.

Although it looks very metal the ESP Gundam is more of a novelty guitar; it's another guitar inspired by a Japanese anime series, the Gundam being giant fighting robots or "Mobile Suits". The guitar we see here appears to be based on a weapon as used by one of these robots.

Personally I think I prefer the Doraemon guitar (now, don't get all technical with me and say that Doraemon was originally a manga series rather than anime - it's all related).

G L Wilson

© 2011, Guitarz - The Original Guitar Blog - now in its 10th year!

Another Gibson Marauder, this one with Bowen Handle vibrato

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Further to yesterday's post about the Gibson Marauder, here is another example currently being offered for sale on eBay with a Buy It Now price of $859.99.

This is one of the earlier models with a 3-way toggle pickup selector switch. It also has a Rosewood fingerboard as opposed to the Fender-esque Maple as often found on these guitars.

The most significant difference is that it is equipped with a tremolo, or rather vibrato, namly The Bowen Handle (almost certainly a later addition and not original to the guitar). This looks to be a top-mounted vibrato which wouldn't require any routing into the body, an alternative to the Bigsby perhaps. I wonder what ever became of this system? Obviously one would need to try it as to ascertain its effectiveness but it looks to my eyes as if it could be a very useable system. I do like vibratos where the mechanism is from behind the bridge rather than being integral to the bridge.

G L Wilson

© 2011, Guitarz - The Original Guitar Blog - now in its 10th year!

1967 12-string Goya Rangemaster

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The Goya Rangemaster in not unknown to Guitarz readers, since GL showed one with blonde finish last year (with detailed information). Here is a magnificent 12-string version with good photos allowing to enjoy all the details of this great guitar: the split pickups, the twos switches plates (nine switches all together!) , the strangely shaped pickguard and the bizarrely placed small F-holes.

For me who have a soft spot for double florentine cutaways semi-hollow guitars, I cannot find a better combination of classicism and vintage Italian eccentricity: I just love this guitar!

Bertram

  © 2011, Guitarz - The Original Guitar Blog - now in its 10th year!

Gibson Maurader from 1978: LP style with bolt-on neck and Flying V headstock

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Our look at the new Modern Player series from Fender the other day generated a lot of comments, including one that said it was odd that Fender had borrowed the name of an unsuccessful Gibson from the 1970s. To be fair to Fender, they had originally used the name on prototypes in the 1960s, but indeed the Marauder name is best known to most guitarists as being firmly in the Gibson domain.

The Gibson Marauder was produced from 1974 to 1979 and originally sold for under $400 USD. The design is obviously derived from the Les Paul but has some Fender-ish traits in that the body is contoured and the neck is bolted on to the body. The fingerboard on the above-pictured example from 1978 is Maple which is another Fender-like appointment, although a more traditional Gibson-esque Rosewood fingerboard was also offered.

Pickups are custom designed Bill Lawrence units sealed in clear epoxy: a humbucker in the neck position and a solid-blade style single coil at the bridge (angled like the bridge pickup of a Tele or Strat).

The earliest examples produced had a 3-position pickup selector, but the Marauder pictured is a later model featuring a rotary switch allowing a blend of the two pickups to be selected. On even later models (from 1979, I'm guessing), this switch was located between the volume and tone knobs.

Often considered too Fender-like for Gibson players and vice versa, the Gibson Marauder wasn't a particularly successful guitar, although that didn't stop the Japanese producing copies of it. I remember in the punk days seeing The Buzzcocks using these guitars and I thought they looked very cool especially with that Flying V-style headstock shape. I guess they were reasonably cheap at around that time and would have been favoured by the punk bands.

This example is currently listed on eBay UK with a Buy It Now price of £699.50.

G L Wilson

© 2011, Guitarz - The Original Guitar Blog - now in its 10th year!

Courtney Love's signature Squier Vista Venus

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I'm happy to have found a decent picture of a Squier Venus, for I wanted to show one for a while now. Though it's not overwhelmingly creative or new, it's still one of the last few efforts of Fender to produce a new design (that's so rare that for example the new release of Fender recycles the 1960s Marauder prototype).

Well actually it's not exactly a Fender effort, since while searching information about the Venus, I uncovered a story of blatant plagiarism, that you can find extensively detailed here. To make it short, some guys created a guitar based on the idea of blending the cool design of a Rickenbacker with the playability of a Fender, and they came up with the Mercury, producing a few handmade models. They sold one to Courtney Love (though they were actually trying to present it to Kurt Cobain), and she enjoyed it so much that she ordered some more, but their small company collapsed and they quit he guitar business.

A few years later they figured out that Squier had released the Venus, allegedly co-designed by Love, but obviously a copy of the Mercury with a Fender-ish headstock (knowing that you cannot patent a guitar shape, but only the headstock, as Fender knows very well for having issued the most copied guitars ever). Tim George who designed the Mercury and tells this story says that he cannot blame Courtney Love as much as Fender. You just have to have a look at these pictures to judge if this story is convincing or not!

Mercury vs Squier Venus

I don't know or care about this copying issue, but I really like Courtney Love, she's much more than what tabloïds show, she's a powerful and struggling woman and an inspired artist who opened the way for many others. And I do love women playing guitars, there are never enough of them - I cannot understand how could anybody ever consider that electric guitar is a male domain!

Anyway let's go back to the Venus. It was short-lived - released in 1997 and terminated in 1998 - and existed in 6- and 12-string versions. It had a characteristic Tune-o-Matic-like bridge and string-through-body holes, and if the commercial versions had two pick-ups - bridge humbucker and neck single-coil - and three different finish, Courtney Love's stage custom models had various finishes and only one pickup, different ones in different positions as much as I could judge from the pictures I found...

Bertram

© 2011, Guitarz - The Original Guitar Blog - now in its 10th year!

Traveling Willburys collection for sale includes 5 guitars and a pot of jam

guitarz.blogspot.com:

The Traveling Willburys were a supergroup of sorts comprising members Lucky (Bob Dylan), Otis (Jeff Lynne), Charlie T. Jr. (Tom Petty), Lefty (Roy Orbison) and Nelson (George Harrison).

The group spawned all sorts of memorabilia including these guitars which were marketed by Gretsch but actually built in Korea. They are loosely based on the classic singlecut Danelectro design. I hadn't previously realised that so many variations existed.

Here we have a whole Traveling Willburys collection for sale which includes five guitars, i.e. one TW500 (I think that's the twin pickup model), one TW300T (that'll be the one with the trem), two TW200s (the non-trem TWs with the humbucker pickup) and one TW100 (the single coil equipped guitar).

The collection also includes three Traveling Willburys guitar boxes, a framed Traveling Willburys poster, a Traveling Willburys canvas bag, and a pot of "Genuine Will-Berry Jam".

Currently listed on eBay with a starting price of £999.

G L Wilson

© 2011, Guitarz - The Original Guitar Blog - now in its 10th year!