1986 Ibanez Axstar AX75 Electric Guitar

While Ned Steinberger is generally the luthier most associated with the appearance of the headless bass and guitar in 1979, the minimalist concept his guitars reflect should really be seen as an evolving process. Back in the late 1930s Les Paul began analyzing the notion of an electric guitar and came up with his famous “log,” an Epiphone archtop that he cut the sides off and inserted a solid chunk of wood to eliminate feedback. His audiences couldn’t get used to the idea, so he had to screw the sides back on for performance, but he was clearly searching for the minimum needed for a good guitar.

There are no doubt other examples. Arguably lap steel guitars built since the early 1930s also fit this description. They’re little more than a chunk of wood or aluminum representing the string length of the guitar, with a pickup and tuners that could go at either end of the instrument. About as basic as you can get!

1986 Ibanez Axstar AX75 Electric Guitar

The idea of a minimalist electric Spanish guitar resurfaced again in 1967 when Dan Helland, a guitar player and teacher in Green Bay, Wisconsin, reached a conclusion similar to, but likely independent of, Les Paul’s, deciding a guitar could be no more than a neck stuck on a 2×4. Somehow he connected with the Holman-Woodell guitar company of Neodesha, Kansas, who were at the time manufacturing the solidbodies marketed by Wurlitzer out of Chicago. His design called for a neck stuck on a square slab of wood yielding the famous La Baye 2×4 guitars and basses. He had about 45 of these made and took them to the 1967 Chicago NAMM show where he sold zipity doodah. Helland gave up guitar design and became a photographer.

A little bit earlier another fellow named Dave Bunker of Puyallup, Washington, began to turn his thoughts to a better guitar idea. Bunker (yes, Bunker Hill is named for a relative!), born in 1935, began playing guitar in around 1949 and in around 1951 started teaching in Puyallup. The in 1955 he saw the traveling demonstration show put on by the great tapping guitarist Jimmie Webster and Dave adopted that technique. Conventional guitar design is not optimized for tapping, so naturally Bunker began to experiment and in around 1961 started making his own guitar designs. One of his ‘60s inventions was the idea of the “tension-free” neck. Basically this consisted of a heavy brass nut fixed to a thick brass bar that was attached to another block of metal in the body. A wooden neck was routed out and slipped over this brass core. Strings were anchored into the nut and stretched down to tuners on the butt end of the guitar. The brass neck core took all the tension of the strings, keeping the wooden neck free of any tension whatsoever. Like Les Paul’s “log,” Bunkers guitars often had variously shaped wings that could be bolted on to give more of an illusion of “guitar,” but he was getting down to the bare minimum!

1986 Ibanez Axstar AX75 Electric Guitar

One other name that should be mentioned is Allan Gittler (1935-2003). In the mid-‘70s Gittler began to really, really get to the minimum of what a guitar was to be. In around 1975 he introduced the Gittler guitar, basically a skeleton. The body was a steel tube, with tubular nut/string attachment, tubular frets, about as low as you could go and still have a guitar!

Then came the Steinbergers and Andy Summers and the heyday of headless. Everybody had to have one. Some makers simply ripped off the Steinberger. Others, such as Cort, licensed the design. Others, such as Modulus Graphite and Ibanez, came up with their own unique takes on the popular form. Which brings us to this Axstar.

In around 1985 Ibanez found its sales flattening out and needed something new to pep them up. The result was a new series called the Axstar. Two models were conceived, both to be made for them by Chushin in Japan, rather than the usual Fuji Gen Gakki. One was popularly called the “shark” because of its obviously finned shape. The other was this headless, commonly called the “battle axe,” designed in Bensalem, PA, by Ibanez’s then chief designer Mace Bailey.

There’s actually a lot more to this guitar than just another headless wannabe. It has a carved maple cap over an alder body, for one thing. Secondly, there’s a two-octave fingerboard. Then there are the low-impedence pickups pumped through active electronics with bass and treble cuts for tonal control. Always a winner! The picture is completed with a Steinberger-style bridge assembly. Only somewhat derivative, with enough to make it pretty interesting.

And pretty rare. It’s not known how many of these were produced, because Ibanez production records only exist for the Fuji factory, but not many. Neither Asxtar solved Ibanez’s sales woes. Their next attempt at jump-starting things was the wonderful Maxxas, but that’s another story for another day…

In any case, despite the respectable power train and the sophisticated construction, with no head, the Axstar deserved to be included among the classics of this understated art form!

Off With Her Head! (1986 Ibanez Axstar AX75 Electric Guitar) from MyRareGuitars.com

1980s Astron Gittler II Electric Guitar

Whatever you call this instrument, the Gittler certainly pushes the envelope of what is a guitar! Alan Gittler (born in 1928) was originally a jazz guitarist in New York, heavily influenced by Remo Palmieri. He played music, composed, and even wrote and produced a film called Parachute to Paradise. He worked as a film editor for many years, invented a number of photographic-related devices, and even wrote a novel. At one point he was performing on New York streets with a Velasquez classical guitar run through a battery-powered amplifier. Gittler, by preference, only ever owned one guitar at a time. But he knew that the classical through a battery amp wasn’t right. So he began thinking about designing a guitar.

It was through this process that Gittler began paring down what a guitar was. While he acknowledged that a guitar’s shape and materials did affect the sound, he arrived at the conclusion that the primary mechanism that determines how a guitarist sounds are his flesh, his fingers, contacting the strings. Anyone who’s played guitar for a long time knows that your sound comes more from your “touch” than your equipment. All he needed to remind him he was playing a guitar was the sound of the strings. So he began stripping away as much as possible and arrived at his minimalist concept of the guitar. He took away as much as he could while still having a “guitar.”

The original American Gittlers were constructed of three sizes of milled stainless steel, with a master jack for output to a single amp plus individual jacks for each string. Plug into a string output and you disconnected it from the others for sending to another amp. They had a specially designed tuner concept that was later “borrowed” by Ned Steinberger. Andy Summers of The Police played one. Other musicians told Gittler that his guitar belonged in a museum. The Museum of Modern Art bought one. These two were among the few. Around 60 guitars and three basses were built in New York.

Gittler eventually moved to Israel and changed his name to Avaraham Bar Rashi. In Israel he was contacted by Astron Engineering Enterprises in Kinat Bialik, Israel, about licensing and manufacturing his design. Bar Rashi agreed. Unfortunately, he should have been more actively involved with Astron early on, because they took some shortcuts that ended up producing guitars that were not sufficiently up to specifications for Bar Rashi’s way of thinking. Bar Rashi even went so far as to send letters to dealers who bought them disavowing the instruments.

But not before they made 500 of them. The Astron Gittlers were known as the Gittler II. They were made of a mix of coated metal and stainless steel. Unlike the original Gittlers, the Israeli guitars have output via a single 1/4″ jack and/or a DIN plug. These also have a little metal spar you can screw on the body for holding the guitar in your lap. The Astron Gittler IIs started with serial number 61. The one shown here is #134. Just when these guitars were produced is uncertain, but it was probably mid- to late-’80s.

So, in the end, I guess you have to say this Gittler II is a guitar, or at least a skeleton of one! It’s fairly comfortable to play and once you get used to the weird frets (which feel almost scalloped), it works fine. Nevertheless, as you might guess, it doesn’t get played very often! When I go to pickup a guitar, I’m a bit more conservative, I guess. I guess this guitar does belong in a museum, after all!

Skeletons in the Closet (1980’s Astron Gittler II Electric Guitar) from MyRareGuitars.com