Memphis Guitars
Memphis Guitars were guitars produced during the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s.
Overview
"Memphis"-branded guitars and signal processors were affordable music gear imported from Asia and distributed in the United States by C. Bruno and Sons from 1969 until November 1989. The product line included Fender- and Gibson-styled instruments as well as some original designs. In the early years, Memphis was a house brand were manufactured by Matsumoku Industrial of Nagoya, Japan. Later, original designs were apparently built by Yamaki .As recently as the early 1960s, the American retail-music industry had had little if any foreign competition. The legions of would-be Elvis Presley imitators found flat-top acoustic guitars similar enough to The King's Martin D-18 bearing names such as Harmony, Regal and Kay, all of which were American makes. Fender Musical Instruments of Fullerton, California had kept pace with the demand from those who would emulate Merle Travis or The Beach Boys. But late in 1963, like a gift of providence to the sagging music industry, the Beatles burst onto the world stage and, almost overnight, the once-flat market for electric guitars boomed like never before. Companies already in the guitar business were soon operating at full capacity; and by 1965, the American retail music industry was selling as many as 1,000 electric guitars and amplifiers a day. Demand was so strong that even companies that had never made a musical instrument got fat contracts to make them. The demand was beyond what the American guitar factories could meet, and the demand pushed the prices American guitar makers were able to charge upward and beyond the budgets of most American households. Guitar retailers had little or nothing to sell to the average first-guitar buyer.
Meanwhile, across the wide Pacific, Japan was still rebuilding its economy from the devastation of World War II, and the average Japanese worker was putting in long days at low pay. Most Japanese guitar designs had been loosely based on the Fender Stratocaster; that is, they featured a neck that was screwed onto a body cut from a slab of solid wood or wooden laminate and a separately pre-wired module with most or all of the electronic components fit into a rout in the front of the body . Budding young American guitarists wanted to look like their British idols and to sound like them as nearly as possible, and the idiosyncratic Fender-ish Japanese guitars of the past simply would not do.
Enter Bruno, St Louis Music, Unicord and other American importers of Japanese-made products: all of these were only too happy to provide American music retailers with reasonable facsimiles of the most-coveted instruments. These importers, in turn, contracted with various Japanese gakki to make the faux-Rickenbackers, faux-Hofners and faux-Gretsches for which, eventually, the teeming hordes of less-affluent guitarists would settle.
The gaggles of screaming pubescent girls who filled the seats of the stadiums and theaters when their mop-haired idols came to play could not have cared less about the instruments with which their idols serenaded them. But the music scene was evolving and, by 1967, the distorted sounds pioneered by black American blues artists had become popular among young British musicians. By 1968 dawned the second wave of the British Invasion, the era of rock music and of the guitar hero. The louder, higher-gain tones favored by these young men required solid-bodied guitars rather than the hollow or semi-hollow models on which they had cut their teeth, because the latter tended to feed back -- that is, to create a feedback loop of the sound coming back to their guitars from their amplifiers and thence being picked up and re-amplified until all that could be heard was an unpleasant, screeching howl. Pioneering blues-rock guitarists such as Mike Bloomfield, Peter Green and Billy Gibbons, searching for a more-manageable alternative, happened upon the solid-bodied guitars made by Gibson and bearing the name of legendary guitarist Les Paul.
Owing to the example set by various British rock guitarists --- and a young American who went by the name Jimi Hendrix -- the popularity -- and therefore the prices -- of American solid-bodied electric guitars were growing, and at an accelerating rate. Around the world, an entire generation of young male guitarists yearned for "axes" like those their guitar heroes played. So retailers everywhere, in business to --what else? -- make as much money as possible, began contracting with their suppliers for guitars that the legions of poor players who hung around the stores, staring at the unreachable Gibsons and Fenders in their glass enclosures, could and would actually buy. So, beginning in the latter 1970s, Matsumoku made decent copies of American-made or -designed guitars bearing the Memphis label. Gibson Les Paul-styled guitars were the most popular models bearing the Memphis name, although even a glance at online marketplaces of used instruments, such as Reverb, turns up about as many Memphis-labeled guitars of designs apparently inspired by the Fender Stratocaster.
By the late 1970s or early 1980s, Bruno had expanded its Memphis-branded line beyond the less-expensive Matsumoku models to include higher-end Yamaki-made guitars of Yamaki's own design. But, by the end of the '80s, the demand for Japanese-built products had pushed the wages of Japanese workers past the profit point of the gakki, so importers like Bruno awarded contracts for production of the more-affordable guitars to relatively cheap Korean makers such as Samick.
At least by the start of the 20th century, and likely earlier, manufacturers had been buying components -- and even completed products -- from other companies, and even from competitors. General Motors once made only chassis, buying car bodies made to order by Fisher, originally a coach maker. Ford bought Cleveland engines for its muscle cars. More recently, Fiat Chrysler has bought Cummins diesel engines for its Dodge trucks. Daimler-Benz and GM have bought identical transmissions from ZF, Getrag or other German manufacturers to install in Mercedes-Benz and Chevrolet SUVs. More to the point, Harmony Guitar Company and Regal Music swapped guitars and put their own brand names on them. Gibson sold guitar bodies to National, which attached its own necks to them. Sears Roebuck sold guitars made to order by Danelectro and Harmony and Kay so that Sears stores would have something to sell to the higher-, lower- and mid-priced markets. Many guitarists know that, in 1957, Gibson's parent company, Chicago Musical Instruments, acquired the assets of its former competitor Epiphone and, by the end of the 1950s, was building Epiphone-branded guitars right alongside Gibsons in its original factory in Kalamazoo, Michigan; it sold these Epiphones through music retailers that had chosen not to be Gibson dealers rather than be forced to sell Gibson products at prices CMI determined. In other words, CMI turned Epiphone into a brand it could sell to buyers who wanted Gibson quality but didn't want to pay extra just for the "Gibson" name on the headstock. CMI covered the house-brand market, too, selling small batches of custom-order guitars to small midwestern department-store chains such as Dwight. And now, at last, to the point: Japanese guitar gakki, in the business of building guitars and other instruments , did the same thing: they built batches of guitars to order, applying decals with names specified by wholesale customers such as Bruno, while also retailing original designs under their own house brands, i.e., names the gakki themselves chose. And, at least until the late 1970s or early 1980s, most Japanese guitar gakki were happy to put whatever name a bulk importer like Bruno wanted on the headstock of the guitars it was buying from the gakki. Matsumoku, Yamaki, Nippon Gakki, Hoshino, Teisco and other gakki also made guitars with no label at all, leaving the labeling to their wholesale customers. As a result, a large number of Matsumoku- or Korean-manufactured guitars, although virtually identical to guitars bearing the Memphis waterslide decal, bear various other names instead, and a few bear no name at all.
A few particularly time-consuming, labor-intensive steps in the manufacture of guitars can make the difference between profit and loss instruments that keep working well long after they have been paid for, and those that do not]. One such step is the making of the "nut", the string guide between the fretboard and the tuning pegs. Traditionally, nuts have been made out of bone, rough-cut one at a time with power tools and finished by hand, a high-precision process that has led some manufacturers to try various work-arounds. Some makers install nuts mass-extruded out of plastic. But another common solution has been the addition of a "zero" fret. The early, first- and second-generation lower-priced Japanese guitars are easily recognized as lower-end models by the zero fret on their fingerboards next to the nut. The zero fret is said to allow the open strings to ring as true as the fretted ones, as well as setting the string spacing and height at the lowest register of the fingerboard. Early and lower-priced Memphis-branded guitars can often be identified by this feature. Also, apparently because of the traditional design features of the most popular Gibson and Fender models, a bolted-on neck is a plus on a Fender-style guitar, but a minus on Gibson-style guitars, most of which feature a "set " neck.
The Memphis name also appears on various guitar-effects pedals, including delays, reverbs, overdrives, and the Memphis Fuzz. One of the most common is the Memphis phase shifter, named "Roto Phase" . It is a simple-to-use stompbox featuring single monophonic input and output jacks, and a single knob that controls the speed of the rotating-speaker effect.
For information about the current market value of Memphis-branded guitars, the reader is encouraged to consult guitar-related media such as Vintage Guitar magazine or Harmony Central, or call Gruhn Guitars of Nashville, Tennessee.