Electra Anniversary Editions, Continued

ElectraFest 2015 was held nine days ago, at my house. As a consequence of that, and of a major re-inventory and re-arrangement I'm the process of doing with my personal guitar collection, I'm going to have a few Electra-related articles here over the next weeks. Feel free to skip them if you don't care about Japanese guitars, Japanese history, and/or the music of the Eighties.

A little over two years ago, I wrote my first post on 1982 Electra Anniversary Edition Guitars. At the time, I owned eight of them. Today, I have a few more --- but more importantly, thanks to a long conversation with "Mr. Electra," Tom Presley, I now understand quite a bit more about how and why the Electra Anniversary guitars came to be.

If you buy a modern Epiphone or Squier guitar, that guitar will come with a very large sticker assuring you that it was INSPECTED AND SET UP IN THE USA. This sticker will be several times larger than the small one that tells you that the guitar itself was made in China. Furthermore, to judge from what I've seen in stores, the much-vaunted inspection and set up is more like a "wave your hand at the thing and pronounce that it's probably pretty close to okay". Most of the time, things are pretty close to okay. Gibson, in particular, has put an unbelievable effort into Epiphone Qingdao. A couple of years ago when Gibson felt (rightly or wrongly) that the Obama Adminstration was persecuting it for wood sourcing, I heard rumors that preparations were being made to move everything to Qingdao and to shutter at least two of the three Gibson factories in the United States.

One of the most disturbing things about the way CITES is enforced in this country is that the emphasis is placed on source wood and not wooden products Let me give you two scenarios. In Scenario One, illegally-harvested ebony is shipped from Madagascar to Gibson's factory in Tennessee. If Gibson can't satisfy the Federal Government's interpretation of CITES, the wood is seized and everybody goes to court.

In Scenario Two, the same ebony is sent to China to be incorporated into Epiphone guitars. The Epiphones are then shipped to the United States. Because the Epiphones are finished products, the Federal Government takes no interest in them. This is a matter of practicality --- would you want Mercedes-Benz to have to prove the sourcing of every piece of wood inside an S-Class to the government's satisfaction --- but the practical outcome of this uneven enforcement is "China-washing" of wood. I mean --- do you really think that Gibson shipped CITES-legal ebony to Qingdao and shipped the questionable stuff to Nashville? Fuck no they didn't. It was the same wood sent to both places. But China-washing prevents the Feds from getting involved...

...which means that, through Lacey Act/CITES enforcement, the government of the United States is actively punishing companies for building wooden products in the United States. Or perhaps you hadn't noticed that some Epiphones are coming from China with rosewood fretboards that are equal to what you get in a PRS Private Stock? Hmm, wonder why that is.

Sorry for digressing. Where were we? Oh yes. Thirty-five years ago at St. Louis Music, owner of the Electra and Alvarez brands, things were very different from the way they are with the modern Chinese imports. To begin with, SLM balanced production of their guitars across three major manufacturers: Terada, Kasgua, and Matsumoku. Tom Presley has represented the involvement of the three OEMs like so:

Kasuga - Basic Copies of Strat, LP, SG, Tele - basic solid body and basses. Outlaws, LP, a few Vulcans, Semi Thin MPC, first productions of the Leslie West, early MPC instruments.

Terada - Semi Thins throughout the Electra Brand except the MPC.

Matsumoku - Late MPC instruments. Vulcan shapes, Phoenix, Leslie West final produciton and the later Westones - Note: There were NO copy instruments made at Matsumoku.

Between the years 1973 and 1981, the bulk of production was moved from Kasuga to Matsumoku as SLM continued to increase sales volume. As a consequence, most of the Electras for sale at any given time are Matsumoku-made. This, together with the outstanding repuations of Matsumoku guitars sold under the Aria Pro and Westone brands, has tended to eclipse the non-Matsumoku Electras in the minds of collectors.

It was common for guitars to arrive at SLM unfinished in both senses of the word. The company had a full-time shop with several employees who painted, assembled, and modified the guitars as they came in. At some point in 1981, the company decided to celebrate its sixtieth anniversary with special Alvarez and Electra guitars. The Alvarez guitars were made by Kazuo Yairi and can fetch good money.

I don't know how many anniversary Alvarez-Yairis were made. However, thanks to Tom Presley's attendance of last year's ElectraFest we now know that there were fewer than 500 Electra Anniversary guitars made. We also know that they are all Matsumoku guitars, possibly all selected from two or three consecutive container-loads of product delivered to SLM. But here's the interesting thing. Not all Electra Anniversary Guitars are created equal. Some, like the X155 PW double-humbucker Phoenix and X635L laminated bass, were only sold as Anniversary guitars. Others, like the X935, had Anniversary badges applied to guitars that were otherwise indistinguishable from the other X935s imported that year. The reason for this, according to Tom, is simple: they just ordered a bunch of badges and put them on "more or less at random".

Except, that is, for the Sparklecasters, several of which you can see in the photos accompanying this article. They were standard Electra Phoenix guitars that were refinished in St. Louis with bass-boat sparkle paintjobs. How many different colors were there? Tom doesn't remember, and if he doesn't know, nobody knows. I am aware of at least the following sparkle colors, listed in the order of frequency : Red, Blue, Green, Champagne, Purple, Brown. What percentage of Anniversary guitars are Sparklecasters? Well, our community is aware of about sixty Anniversary guitars, which represents about thirteen percent of the 470 or so Anniversary guitars that probably made it out the door at SLM. Thirty-five of those have the bass-boat paint. So it's safe to think that there are about 200-250 of them out there. Some percentage of those were refinished, destroyed, thrown away, or just plain lost.

I currently own eighteen of those sixty known guitars. They range in condition from new-in-box to "player-grade" to unplayable. Some are completely original. Three of them have lost their original pickups; there was a time where the hot-wound MMK45 humbucker had a certain underground reputation among heavy-metal types and some people bought Electras just to strip out the pickups and abandon the rest of the guitar. One of them was re-routed for a Kahler tremolo.

Most of them, however, have survived the past thirty-four years considerably better than I have. I doubt they'll ever be worth anything to anyone besides me, but I like the idea of being a custodian for these under-appreciated, under-documented, frequently misunderstood instruments. If you're a guitarist yourself, you should keep your eye peeled for the Anniversary guitars. They're brilliant to play --- but more importantly, if you ever find yourself in a tight spot and need to sell it, you know a guy, don't you?

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