The following piece appeared in the July 2008 issue of the UK's
Guitar & Bass Magazine, under the title, "Trace Invaders". It was subsequently syndicated to a Spanish magazine. The article also gathered some favourable comment from the experts on
TokaiForum.com and you can access a PDF copy of the published article - which includes some great photography - on the sister TokaiRegistry.com site,
here.
THE GUITAR THAT CHANGED THE WORLD?
The guitar that changed the world? A cursory look at the picture might well evoke an “oh yeah” sort of response but take a closer look. The “strat” here is, of course, not a 1957 Fender Stratocaster but a 1981 Tokai Springy Sound, the guitar which made Fender sit up and pay attention to what was happening in their market-place.
PAYING THE PRICE
By the late seventies, the major American guitar-makers were paying the price for long-standing quality issues. As the big, blunt crayon of history has it even today, seventies guitars were terrible – a decade of wobbly necks and poor finishes. By contrast, players and enthusiasts were becoming all dewy eyed about the legendary guitars of the late fifties and early sixties. For Fender fans, “pre-CBS” had become a descriptor of high quality denoting the dedicated work of skilled and impassioned luthiers. Of course, the reality was less clear-cut and even the strat’s legendary “V” shaped neck may have arisen initially from poor Quality Control and a new guy on the cutting machine. Be that as it may, by the late seventies both Fender and Gibson were suffering from severe reputation problems. At the same time, Japanese companies had been steadily increasing their own quality and had found a market longing for good quality instruments and for access to the looks and sounds of those near mythical machines of the fifties and sixties. Japanese makers Greco and Ibanez were among the first to satisfy this demand with high quality instruments but Tokai quickly became the best known: for the quality of their guitars, for the attention to detail of the replicas and, not least, for the sheer cheek of their badging.
NOT SO NEW KID IN TOWN
Founded in 1947, Tokai Gakki Co. Ltd already had a deal to supply parts for Martin’s acoustic guitars when, in 1976, they launched their Les Paul replica complete with a Gibson-styled script on the headstock saying “Tokai”. They named the guitar “Les Paul Reborn” in the same scripts as Gibson’s “Les Paul Model”. In 1977, Tokai followed this with the “Springy Sound”, modelled initially on a 1957 Stratocaster. With this model, the company copied Fender’s famous “spaghetti” logo (so-called because the script was long, thin and gold) and all other lettering from the Fender headstock. [Picture 002, “Spot the difference”] “Fender Stratocaster” became, “Tokai Springy Sound”; “Original Contour Body” became “Oldies But Goldies” and “With Synchronized Tremolo” became, even more cheekily, “This is the exact replica of the good old strat”. Of course it wasn’t just the temerity of Tokai which was to affront Fender and Gibson. These guitars were seriously good. At a time when Fender was being driven by the cost and bottom-line imperatives of being part of the CBS conglomerate, Tokai was taking its time, working with the likes of Joe Walsh, Billy Gibbons and Rick Nielsen to examine the original models. They dismantled, measured and took hundreds of photographs. In fact, they did exactly what the big boys now celebrate in the press for their current re-issues; attention to detail. Not only that but – particularly for their Les Paul models – Tokai enjoyed an advantage over their US counterparts in that they had access to woods of the highest quality like Brazilian rosewood which were then embargoed in the US (the US signed up to the CITES treaty on endangered species in 1974, Japan joined in 1980). Progressively, Tokai got the specifications more and more accurate. For example, early Springy Sounds with rosewood fretboards had a “skunk stripe” on the back of neck. On the original Fenders, the skunk-stripe only appeared on solid maple necks in order to cover the channel where the truss rod had been laid. Guitars with a rosewood board had the rod inserted from the front before the board was fitted so that a separate skunk stripe was unnecessary. By 1979-1980, this particular anomaly was phased out. By 1981-82, Tokai had reached the peak of accuracy with their higher end models even using traditional cloth-insulated wiring.
WORLD DOMINATION AND LEGAL BACKLASH
Originally aimed at the domestic market, by the early eighties, Tokai were exporting worldwide. In the UK, Blue Suede Music started importing Tokais in 1982 with their eye-catching “Tokai is coming” ads featuring a naked girl cavorting with a Springy Sound. (The model was the girlfriend of Blue Suede’s owner). However, Fender and Gibson had now woken up to their shrinking market share. Fender entered into a joint venture to establish Fender Japan in 1982 and they launched their first serious re-issues on the US market (the 1957 and 1962 Vintage Stratocasters). Battalions of lawyers, and Tokai’s own desire to enter the US market more fully led to more “respectful” replicas: the Les Paul Reborn became the “Love Rock”; the pseudo-Fender logo transitioned (in the UK) through a black, block-capital “TOKAI” (1983) before moving worldwide to a gold lettered script that couldn’t be mistaken for the famous Fender. In 1984, the Springy Sound became “Goldstar Sound” and for the US market, the Fender style headstocks were also re-shaped to a less attractive but also less litigious pointy shape. The “lawsuit era” was over and Fender and Gibson filled the market with increasingly faithful reproductions of their respective back-catalogues through low-end brands like Squier and Epiphone and through increasing numbers of reissues under their own premium brands. At the time of writing, the Fender.com site offers 44 separate Stratocaster models of which a quarter are vintage/classic/reissue models and a further quarter are Artist models arguably driven by the same dynamics. Their Custom Shop site offers even more. In fact the “Spot the Difference” picture [Picture 002, “Spot the difference”] illustrates both Cause and Effect. It is easy to see mimicry in the Springy Sound which so irked Fender at the time. However, the Fender headstock is from a 2004, Mexican built Fender “Classic 60’s” Stratocaster not an original; part of Fender’s continued response to the market demand for replicas of the famous guitars from forty or fifty years ago. And, to add a further twist of irony, for the last ten years, the Tokai factory has built solid-body guitars for Fender Japan. The impact of the lawsuit era and guitars like the Springy Sound continue to be felt.
21st CENTURY VINTAGE
So, what of those guitars today? Were they all secretly bought up and crushed by a wrathful Fender and Gibson? Have they paled in comparison to the reissue market which they spawned? Well, in fact those guitars – now officially “vintage” themselves - are alive and well and exchanging hands for increasing sums of money. According to the UK’s leading dealer in vintage guitars, Music Ground (http://www.musicground.com/), increasing appreciation of the build quality of early Tokais, along with awareness that the company is now building “genuine” Fenders for Fender Japan has seen prices for these guitars double over the last four to five years. What’s more, they stand up incredibly well to Fender and Gibson’s own reissues. To the quality of build and attention to detail of the originals, you can now add that intangible mojo that comes with twenty-plus years of play, wear and maturing. They may not be as vintage-accurate as the very best of the new reissues but they are, simply, great guitars which have become an investment in their own right. Peter McGovern, an authority on early Tokai models, worked for Tokai Music Australia during the 1980s. Since 2001, he has been a leading contributor to the Tokai Forum (http://tokaiforum.com) which is probably the major source of information on Tokai models and a valuable source for owners and would-be owners. McGovern has also seen the value of vintage Tokais increase over the years with high-end Love Rock models like the LS120 having “tripled in price in six years”. Similarly, Springy Sounds, with their infamous headstocks have “doubled in price in the last two years” with even the lower end ST50 models increasing markedly and maintaining a high premium over their successor, the Goldstar Sound. According to McGovern, there is a lot of ill-informed snobbery and prejudice surrounding the different models with, say, a 1980 Springy Sound being more valued than a 1984 Goldstar Sound when they are essentially the same guitar. Another interesting subject of prejudice is the Tokai Silver Star. These were Tokai’s replicas of the large headstock “1970s” strats. McGovern has worked on hundreds of Fenders and Tokais over the years and is clear that the Silver Star is a far better guitar than any of the CBS Fender originals; “even the tilt-neck works which CBS never managed”. Tokai used the same high quality components on the Silver Star as they did on the Springy Sounds; they were in production at the same time (in contrast to the originals which suffered from CBS’s approach to quality). However, tainted by the originals which they replicate, Silver Stars have not seen the same increase in value as their siblings.
Will Tokais continue to increase in value at the rates of the last few years? The gurus at Music Ground add a note of caution for eager investors. There is, they believe, a natural ceiling generated by the price of new US models. As prices get close to the “real thing” albeit new rather than vintage, buyers will begin to compare real versus “fake”. Peter McGovern also foresees a levelling out of the recent steep rises in value although not necessarily linked to any artificial ceiling. As ever with investment, you need to take all the available information and form your own conclusion. With guitars, however, you get the added benefit of having a great instrument to play whilst waiting for the slow-motion roulette of fashion and value to kick in. Great Tokai guitars from the late seventies and early eighties still sell for figures in the hundreds of pounds rather than the thousands asked for the original Fenders and Gibsons from fifties and sixties.
BUYER BEWARE
What should the potential buyer look for? As ever, overall condition is important and there are some great, near mint guitars out there. The Japanese market has woken up to the price increases overseas and a number of those early guitars are appearing out of closets and attics to be sold in the west. Also, the traditional colours are much in demand: two-tone sunburst on fifties style Springy Sounds, three-colour sunburst on the sixties style and blonde on the Breezy Sound telecaster replica and a few high-end ST100 and ST120 Springy Sound models. On the higher end models (ST60 plus for Springy Sounds) in these colours, Tokai used good quality ash usually in a one or two piece body. Custom colours like Metallic Blue are also sought after as are the relatively small number of Gold Star Sounds which shipped with colour-matched headstocks. There are however, also an increasing volume of fakes out there. Bizarre as it sounds, the increasing value of Tokais has led to people copying the copies. This is compounded by the fact that there is no detailed, recorded history of Tokai models. Peter McGovern again, “There are no records of those early models and we’ll probably never know all there is to know about them.” Even the format of serial numbering changed over the years to mimic the particular Fender model being replicated. This leaves the way open for many unscrupulous sellers to position their wares as Custom Models or as a higher-end model than in reality. Back in the eighties, there was a small trend of players scrubbing the Tokai logos off their “strats”, again creating uncertainty in the future. In turn, this has created an opportunity for firms to offer “replacement” Tokai logos; fantastic news if your guitar has been defaced but also a huge “woopee!!” for the unscrupulous. The Tokai Forum site and its sister Tokai Registry (http://www.tokairegistry.com/) are fantastic resources for would-be buyers to learn as much as is known about the production and model history of the firm. For the more patient, McGovern is currently writing what he hopes will be as close as possible to a definitive history of vintage Tokais. In the meantime, as ever, caveat emptor but also trust to your ears and hands. Pedigree and investment potential don’t count for much if it plays like a dog and, equally, there are some very fine mongrels in loving homes around the world.