This Valco “mutt” guitar was built with leftover parts at a Japanese factory, including an old tremolo, random pickups and switches, and a bridge that makes it difficult to intonate.
When you’ve built your entire life around guitars, our columnist says, it’s shockingly easy to connect their history with just about anything—including dogs.
I was talking to my wife the other day about selling guitars. My daughter wants a car, so I’ve been unloading a few nice electrics on fellow collectors with the hope that I can get my girl something safe to drive. My wife and daughter were joking about how much guitars are a part of our lives, and how I can connect anything to guitars, design, and music.
Seriously, you can present me with just about any topic and I can probably wrap some guitar lore around it. My wife asked if I had ever connected guitars and animals, and I got to thinking about it. Maybe I had? But, just to show her I can tell a tale, this month I’ll be writing about our dogs and “mutt” guitars!
So, back in 2015, I was searching a pet-finder website, looking to add a dog to our family. The kids wanted a dog, and even my wife, who has awful allergies, accepted the fact that we all had a lot of love to give to a pet. I was searching adoption agencies, primarily looking for a dog that didn’t shed, when I happed upon the cutest little puppy! His name was Bucky, and the story went that he and his littermates were born in a barn in Ohio. The mom had passed away shortly after giving birth, so the litter was being rescued by a local adoption group. I started to fill out the forms and do all the paperwork to get little Bucky, but then I saw he also had a brother that hadn’t been adopted! So along with Bucky came his brother Brody, and that spring, we welcomed two of the sweetest little boys into the family.
These two were trouble from the get-go, but we loved them, and I have to say that the year we got them was one of the best years of my life. The boys looked pretty similar, each having a light tan color; almost vanilla. But no one could figure out what breeds they were. Like, they were total mutts! Some terrier, some poodle, some hound? We heard it all. In the end, it really didn’t matter, because these mutts were ours, and we were gonna love them, no matter what.
Okay, so back to guitar land. This topic got me thinking about “mutt” guitars. See, back in the day, a lot of guitar factories all over the world would try to use up parts. The CBS Fender era was a notorious time for strange designs that were meant to use up stock. The Japanese makers did the same, with similar results, but a little more extreme. All the time, I see guitars that had left a factory with a mixup of parts, and sometimes I’ll see something that I’ve never seen before. These “mutts” can perplex and bewilder collectors because it seems like some of these were one-offs.
“The CBS Fender era was a notorious time for strange designs that were meant to use up stock.”
Take, for instance, the mutt I’m presenting here. The body and neck are from the late-’60s Valco run of guitars, known as Lexingtons. I’ve written about Lexington guitars before and how much I like them, but this guitar is a total weirdo. Why? Because the pickups, electronics, and tremolo are all Japanese sourced. Which begs the question, why are we seeing a factory stock guitar with a mix of such disjointed parts? Well, these were the mutts!
The Valco company, located in Chicago, was in the final years of production, and started sourcing out bodies and necks to Japan. In other words, those parts were made in Japan, shipped to the U.S., and Valco would then put on their U.S. parts and pickups. But this strange bird was finished off in Japan—which is where I found this guitar—using a super old tremolo, the odd switches, rando pickups, and a really basic bridge that didn’t allow for any intonation. How did it sound? Meh. How did it play? Meh. It was simply a hastily made guitar, using up leftover parts.
Mutt guitars are a real mixed bag. Some are okay, some are amazing, and some are real stinkers. But there is some fun in finding these rarities. If you have the time, the search is the greatest thrill, just like finding two good dogs. This one is for my mutts, Bucky and Brody!
The ET-270 has a tone switch that offers a powerful boost to the guitar’s low end.
This guitar, which Kurt Cobain used in the late ’80s, has pickups that really shine with high gain.
As 2023 draws to a close, I find myself in an unusual place. Why? Because I’m just about the happiest I’ve ever been in my life—seriously! Seeing my kids grow and loving what I do has all coalesced into a wondrous feeling of bliss. Also, yours truly turned 50 this year! To be honest, I never thought I’d make it this far, and perhaps that’s why I feel such joy lately. Who knows, who cares? Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, I think?
Anyhoo, I was pondering guitars and the year of 1973, reflecting on the era. That year in particular was important because most of the crazy designs of the ’50s and ’60s were gone, and the second guitar “wave” came in the form of copy guitars (mostly Gibson and Fender clones), in which I am aggressively disinterested. In my view, almost all of the coolest guitar designs were gone. Even the uber-cool greenburst Kimberly Bison guitars were gone by ’73. So then, I started thinking about guitars I’ve gotten for my birthday, like my Japanese-made Squier Vista Series Jagmaster that my girlfriend bought for me, new, for $150. Or how I recently got a custom-made BilT El Hombre as a present to myself, in greenburst, of course. But those choices just weren’t right for this column.
So here’s how my thinking went. I was recently reading about the time William Burroughs and Kurt Cobain met, and then my daughter was asking me about that, and then she asked me about Kurt’s guitars and if I had any like his. And then I thought about the guitar for this month, which was still being made in 1973. Life is all about connections, folks!
“Most of the crazy designs of the ’50s and ’60s were gone, and the second guitar ‘wave’ came in the form of copy guitars, in which I am aggressively disinterested.”
The Epiphone ET-270 was used by Kurt during the Bleach era; I used it off and on during the ’90s and early 2000s. If you look at an Epiphone catalog from 1973, you’ll see this model sold for $159, which made it the most affordable electric guitar in the lineup. At the time, the Norlin Corporation had purchased Gibson and shifted Epiphone production to Japan, specifically the Matsumoku factory. Before then, the giant woodworking factory was partnering with FujiGen to produce electric guitars, and Singer to produce sewing machine cabinets. The ET-270 featured the all-in-one vibrato/bridge unit that had been seen on several Matsumoku guitars from at least 1966.
The pickups were also recycled Matsumoku units, but man, these are really special pickups, measuring out at a healthy 9.44k at the bridge, and 9.09k at the neck. I friggin’ love these pickups! They’re loud as hell and handle high gain with aplomb. The ET-270 has a really cool “bass boost” switch that totally increases the output. In catalogs, it was labeled as a tone switch, but that darn switch really boosts the sound. I’ve seen a lot of rhythm/solo switches that don’t seem to do too much, but the effect from this one is profound! Otherwise, the electronics feature a single volume and tone knob and a 3-way switch for pickup selection. The guitars were made well, generally, and in a few short years, almost all the surviving Japanese factories were churning out some very high-quality instruments. As Fender and Gibson quality went down, Japanese guitar quality went way up.
So, was the Epiphone ET-270 the last of the “cool” Japanese guitars? It’s debatable—but for me, this guitar marks the end of the coolest era in guitar design, and pop culture in general. An era that yielded the birth of hip-hop, the Epiphone ET-270, The Exorcist, the debut of Miller Lite, and yours truly.
How easy? Spend 5 minutes with Marshall Dunn, currently touring as Steve Earle’s guitar tech and co-founder of Nashville’s Stage Right Repairs, and he’ll show you. Special thanks to Music City indie venue Eastside Bowl, where we filmed Dunn at work on a stock Fender Mustang Bass.
Dunn starts by removing the strings and bridge screws, and cautions against removing the ground wire. Even though this is a quick mod, Dunn suggests taking it slow and steady (like all work done on your instrument), so he confirms the screw-hole alignment and shows you how to use a tape measure to confirm that the saddles are at the correct scale length for the instrument. He next shows how to use the two strings he removed from the bass initially to check the alignment of the new strings with the fretboard. It’s a matter of checking the relationship of the strings for proper spacing. The saddle notches in the Badass Bridge make that alignment even easier.
Once the Badass is installed, he explains how to do a quick, proper setup—and then it’s time to plug into a Fender Rumble 500 and let the Mustang and its new bridge do the talking. “Ultimately,” Dunn concludes, “I think if you’re going to mod your instrument and it’s gonna make you like it more, it’s gonna make you want to play it more …that’s the whole point. It’s pretty cool what you can do with just a couple of hand tools and just a little bit of time.”
For more information on Leo Quan Badass Bridges, go to allparts.com.