EKO guitars were almost archetypically “’60s” guitars.  Cool colors, cool shapes.  And not expensive.  They were the stuff of garage-band dreams, at least before Japanese guitars dominated the budget guitar market.  But, if you’ve ever had much experience with EKOs, you know they were not especially durable, probably because, in the rush to meet the endless demand for guitars back then, the woods weren’t always all that well seasoned.  Thus I was really surprised when I walked into Cintioli’s Music in Northeast Philadelphia and found a batch of relatively upscale EKOs…from the 1980s!  What’s up with that?!

EKO guitars were made by Oliviero Pigini & Company of Recanati, Italy, just north of Castelfidardo.  Castelfidardo was and is pretty much the center of the accordion manufacturing trade, which arrived there—according to legend—in the 1880s.  Accordions as in “piano accordions,” with a full keyboard, not the older, little button types.  Piano accordions came to the U.S. during the early 20^th Century, mainly played by Italians.  Fast-forward to the early 1950s when there was a major fad for accordion playing, perhaps due to the popularity of the Lawrence Welk Show on television beginning in 1951.  Accordion manufacturers in Italy (and elsewhere) ramped up production and accordion distributors and music studios proliferated throughout the U.S., including the LoDuca Brothers in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, which became the exclusive American distributor of Pigini-made accordions.

1982 EKO CX-7 Artist-T CU

At its peak, the LoDucas operated a whole chain of music studios and had large orchestras of youngsters all playing squeezeboxes.  Alas, the fad was short-lived, as fads often are, and by the mid-1950s the bottom had dropped out of the accordion market.  What to do?  It was hard times for both manufacturers and importers.

After a number of false starts, the situation was solved by the Folk Revival of the late 1950s, when the next fad—this time for acoustic guitars—began.   Many of the Italian (and other) accordion makers began to add guitar production (or began sourcing guitars from guitar specialty houses).  This included Oliviero Pigini, who began making acoustic guitars carrying the EKO brand name.

The LoDuca Brothers, who had a relationship with Sears, Roebuck and Co. just down the road in Chicago began selling EKO acoustics to the big catalog retailer.  EKO guitars were on their way.  Electrics debuted around 1963, those nifty plastic-covered jobs.  Accordion makers, after all, were pretty skilled at wrapping plastic over their products.

EKO guitars had a pretty good run in the U.S. during the 1960s until the Japanese challenge began to triumph by around 1968 or so.  To be honest, demand for guitars in general began to fall off by that time, and rising European wages began to make their guitars more expensive, increasingly favoring Japanese products.  Plus, Pigini, who loved fast sports cars, got himself killed in an accident about this time.  EKO guitars were pretty much out of the scene by the 1970s.

I wasn’t really aware of EKO guitars during the 1960s until I met my wife, who had been conned into buying an acoustic EKO.  It was totally unplayable with a thick polyurethane finish and about ¾” action.  I did what I could to help, but there was no way, given my admittedly uneducated luthier skills at the time.  EKO guitars didn’t exactly get off on the right foot with me.

Fast-forward again and I became a guitar historian, met some of the LoDuca clan, and acquired a number of cool EKO electrics.  They were better than my wife’s acoustic, but had their share of problems.  Sixties relics.

Then I walked into Bennie Cintioli’s shop in the 1990s.  Cintioli’s was a major local music store back when such things were locally owned, not part of a national Guitar Center chain.  Cintioli’s had been there forever and I pulled many a treasure out of its unsold basement hoards.  

I don’t recall how I first encountered the EKO, but I think they had discovered it in the basement and put it out on the counter as a curiosity.  I took one look and it was a no-brainer.  But what was it?

Turns out that EKO had gotten into the “copy” scene during the 1970s, but most of their guitars were sold in Europe and elsewhere, but not the U.S.  By the end of the 1970s they had become mainly a small “custom shop,” taking small orders from small-scale importers.  Including Benny.

I don’t think the guitars Benny Cintioli imported were designed by him.  More like he picked a few models to sell at his shop.  These included this EKO CX-7 Artist/T that was made in 1982.  I love the dark-stained pine body and set-in neck.  The brass nut, 2-octave fingerboard, and DiMarzio humbuckers were typical for the time.  This was made just as locking vibratos were coming on the market, but didn’t have one yet.  This is extremely light-weight and a really hot guitar, not at all what you’d expect from and EKO.

Shortly after this guitar was imported by Cintioli’s the craze for weird-shaped metal guitars and then SuperStrats began.  These cool EKOs were obsolete, and Benny had an unsold supply in the basement.  Right after this guitar appeared, EKO went bankrupt and that was the end of the story.  To the end, EKO was the stuff of garage band dreams!

By Michael Wright

The Different Strummer

Mama’s Got (No) Squeezebox: 1982 EKO CX-7 Artist/T from MyRareGuitars.com

While I consider myself to be a “guitar player,” I actually had a blues-rock band back in 1967 for which I also played bass (Hagstrom) and keyboards (Farfissa).  I wasn’t particularly noteworthy on either.  To be honest, I pretty much played them both like guitars.  The good news is I never got into collecting basses or keyboards.  Unless, that is, they were exceptionally interesting, like Westone’s short-lived The Rail.  How could you not like The Rail!  

The Rail was kind of a perfect reflection of the time it was made, in the mid-1980s.  Now, electric guitars have always had an element of “style” about them.  The fact that they make sound by use of an electronic pickup instead of an acoustic sound box frees them from certain physical restrictions.  As cool as a cigar-box guitar might look, it’s never going to sound as good as that classic Spanish figure-8 shape of an acoustic guitar that’s evolved over centures.  But once you shift the responsibility for making noise to an electronic circuit, you do whatever you want with the rest—or at least with the body.  And that puts you squarely within the realm of style!  The kind of image you want to project when you play guitar determines what kind of axe you’re going to sling.

Prior to the ‘80s styles of electric guitars came and went, of course, but there was something homogenous about guitar styles.  Strats were popular this year, Les Pauls were in the next.  With notable outliers on occasion, like the 1967 LaBaye 2×4!

But as the 1980s dawned, guitar styles—just like popular music styles—began to proliferate, to fragment.  Heavy metal was on the rise and with it a taste for exotic guitar shapes, pointy guitars like Flying Vees even more non-Spanish shapes (to go with the wild hairdos).  Companies like Ibanez, Aria, St. Louis Music, even Fender all introduced pointy guitars in various outre shapes.

For players in a more conventional frame of mind, this period saw the emergence of the Super-Strat, a Strat-style guitar with hybrid electronics combining a lead humbucker with two single-coils and, eventually, a locking vibrato system.

On the opposite end of the spectrum were New Wave bands with slick, tightly arranged pop tunes.  For these groups—like The Police—their style was enhanced by the understated look of minimalist guitars.  This was the era that saw the emergence of headless guitars and basses by Ned Steinberger and others, favored by The Police’s Andy Summers.  Kramer had its Duke.  St. Louis Music had The Rail.

The Westone Rail appeared just as St. Louis Music (SLM) was transitioning to a new brand name.  During the “copy era” of the 1970s, SLM’s Japanese-made electric guitars were branded with the Electra name.  The Electra name continued into the early 1980s.  Most of those guitars were made by the legendary Matsumoku factory in Matsumoto City.  Around the beginning of the decade Matsumoku began marketing its own brand of electric guitars called Westone.  For reasons unknown, the decision was taken to consolidate the Westone brand name with St. Louis Music.  In 1984 the separate Westone line went away and SLM’s guitars became Electra-Westone, ending up just Westone in 1985.  

It was with this transition to Westone in 1985 that SLM entered headless sweepstakes with The Rail, the Super Headless Bass, and the Quantum bass.  The Super Headless Bass had a cool, slim, bi-level offset double cutaway with a headless neck.  The Quantum bass had a sculpted minimalist body looking somewhat like a space cruiser out of Star Wars.  Both these had twin humbuckers.

Of all these The Rail X800 was, to me, the most interesting.  Instead of two humbuckers, The Rail put two pieces of hard maple on either end to two specially tuned stainless steel tubes.  Then it placed a third piece of wood mounted with a single Magnaflux RB pickup onto the rails.  The idea was that instead of two fixed points (neck and bridge), you could fine-tune your tone on a spectrum by sliding the pickup back and forth between those two set points.  The knob on the top is a quick-release tension screw to hold the pickup unit in place.  The only electronic control is a master volume.  Add to that the fine-tuners at the butt-end, and everything is right there under your plucking fingers.

The scale on these was 32.5” with a two-octave fingerboard.

The first Rails were produced in a satin black finish.  In 1986 the line was expanded to include the X800RD in red and the X800SW seen here in white.  The list price on these was $565 with a gig bag.

Since I’m not really a bass player, I can’t really opine about how effective this design is.  Give the geography of the string length between the end of the fingerboard and the bridge, the moveable pickup gives you the equivalent of about 3-1/2 pickups.  I don’t know how much of that is useful from a tonal perspective.  Plus, you have to think about what position the pickup should be in before you start to play.  On a traditional instrument, you just have to throw a switch, which you can do in between beats!

I never played this bass much, but I did used to take a headless Steinberger copy with us on vacations down to the Jersey Shore; it was a great travel guitar that fit in the corner of my car trunk.  But I always found my left hand slipping off the end of the fingerboard because I couldn’t get used to playing with no headstock…

I don’t know how popular these were back in the day, but interestingly this example has a serial number of “5.”  That suggests that the catalog claim of “Limited Production” is probably accurate!  I think I’ve only seen one other of these over the years.  It didn’t help that the Matsumoku factory closed down in 1987.

The rage for headless instruments had pretty good staying power, lasting pretty much through the ‘80s.  Steinbergers and others continued to be made, and I recently noticed there’s at least one dealer who specializes in headless instruments.  But with the ‘90s came Nirvana and the “alternative” Seattle sound that more was anti-style than anything else.  Still, you gotta admire the chutzpah of The Rail bass, whether you’re a bass player or not!

By Michael Wright

The Different Strummer

A Bass With Style: 1986 Westone The Rail from MyRareGuitars.com

Guest blogger Michael Wright takes a look at an Eighties rarity – the O’Hagan Nightwatch. It’s more than a SG/Melody Maker lookalike, you know…

To guitar lovers, the O’Hagan name will probably always and forever be attached to the legendary O’Hagan Shark, a kind of elongated Explorer with a big tail fin (which we discussed here a few years back).  But Jerrel O’Hagan built other guitar models including the Nightwatch, which came in a roughly “Les Paul”-shaped single-cutaway model and a roughly “SG”-inspired Double Cutaway model seen here.

1981 O’Hagan Nightwatch Double cutaway

As I’ve said on previous occasions, one of the coolest things about being a guitar historian is that I get to track down people like Jerry O’Hagan, interview them, and rescue their recollections…while they’re still with us.  Alas, I’ve missed a few folks through slow reactions over the years.  But I did catch Jerry on the telephone many years ago, although I don’t recall how I connected with him.

Jerrel O’Hagan was a clarinetist who found himself working as a rep for a regional music distributor up in Minnesota during the 1970s, chiefly handling imported Japanese guitars.  Unfortunately, his employer wasn’t one of the mega-distributors, so he could never be sure of getting a steady supply of instruments—bigger orders always got filled first.

1981 O’Hagan Nightwatch Double Cutaway HS

O’Hagan briefly imported his own line of Grande acoustic guitars from Japan in around 1975-77, but the market for acoustic guitars for singer-songwriters was moving on to harder rock ‘n’ roll.  That’s when the idea came to him: why couldn’t reasonably priced electric guitars be made in the U.S. of A.?  And, anyway, this craze for foreign-made guitars was bound to pass anytime soon, right?  O’Hagan’s market analysis skills weren’t his strong suit.

In 1978 Jerrel O’Hagan set up the Jemar Corporation in St. Louis Park, Minnesota, to produce solidbody electric guitars.  The first guitar was the aforementioned O’Hagan Shark.  That was a neck-through-body beauty—neck-through guitars by the likes of Alembic and B.C. Rich were just beginning to penetrate the guitar-playing world—that looked a little goofy but was actually a swell, well-balanced guitar.  This was the time, you’ll recall, that other Midwesterners were also starting specialty guitar companies, including Hamer, Dean and others.  The Shark hit the market in 1979.  

The Shark, which was heavily promoted in Guitar Player advertising, was moderately successful, enough to encourage O’Hagan to introduce new models, including the Nightwatch single- and double-cutaway models in either late 1979 or early 1980.  While certainly not as exotic as the Shark, O’Hagan’s Nightwatch models proved to be much more acceptable to average guitar players, many of whom can be pretty conservative in their tastes.  

The Nightwatch Double Cutaway seen here is a 1981 done up in a funky blueburst finish.  The “sunburst” finish goes back at least to the 1930s when it was known as an “antique violin” finish, and it’s become one of the standard, prized finishes.  But it got a really weird twist in the late 1960s when Fender botched the finishes on some Coronados.  They managed to salvage the mistake by coming up with the opaque “Antigua” refin, a sort of dark brown to tan sunburst.  It wasn’t too successful.  Fender brought the Antigua finish back in around 1977, transposed into a grey scale.  Gibson picked up on this in 1978 and introduced a greyburst Les Paul, which was put on a number of Gibson models into the early 1980s.  This was apparently moderately popular and a number of guitar companies came up with copies and variations on this opaque, often metallic “’burst.”  The O’Hagan blueburst was one of those variations.

This is a neck-through body guitar, but otherwise pretty conventional.  It has a pair of DiMarzio pickups with two volumes and one tone control.  The brass nut was the cat’s pajamas back in the day, believed to add sustain.  The basic Nightwatch cost around $450 with a $90 upcharge for the special blueburst finish.  The Nightwatch models were by far the most popular O’Hagan models.  The Nightwatch was a straight-ahead rock ‘n’ roll machine, not particularly flexible, but a pretty darned good guitar.

Legendary O’Hagan Shark

O’Hagan added several other models to its line, including a V and a bizarre Strat, but by 1983 an economic recession, some dissatisfied investors, some distribution issues, and a big bank note came calling.  Followed by the I.R.S.  The dark of night fell over the O’Hagan Nightwatch and everything else.  Jerry got out of the guitar business and into the jazz orchestra game.

About 3,000 O’Hagan guitars were made from 1979-83, not especially rare, but not especially plentiful, either.  The bluebursts were special orders, so this would be a much smaller subset.  Plus, DiMarzio pickups were only used in 1981, giving this a pretty small production window.  Still, you’d probably rather swim with an O’Hagan Shark!

By Michael Wright

The Different Strummer

Blueburst Fantasy: 1981 O’Hagan Nightwatch Double Cutaway from MyRareGuitars.com

Vintage 1980’s Aria Pro II ZZ Bass Deluxe

Aria Pro II did some copies of famous American guitars like the Fender Stratocaster and the Gibson Les Paul though it also did its own style of guitars. In the 70s and early 80s the company came into its own in the United States with a series of high end professional instruments. The company had professional endorsements from Herb Ellis, Yngwie Malmsteen, Neal Schon, John Taylor, and many more. Cliff Burton of Metallica used an Aria SB Black N Gold I as well as an SB-1000 bass but was never an official endorser.

Here is the Aria Pro II ZZ Deluxe Bass. These were manufactured between 1982-1987.

Back Catalog Memories: Vintage 1980’s Aria Pro II ZZ Bass Deluxe from MyRareGuitars.com