Italo!

View Comments

• ITALO, Russian? When I first saw this I thought I was looking at the EKO product line of the sixties. Surely there's a connection?

• The Russians copied the Italians for much the same reason they copied the Italians in making Fiat cars, there were some ties in that Italy was once the home of the biggest and noisiest Communist Party and was a good Western base to run spies out of: it had a more than slightly corrupt civil service and a border with Switzerland which was porous for people with fieldcraft and/or mountaineering skills.

  Unfortunately, for all the success of Italian violin makers, their guitars were never particularly good. Russia was occasionally good at copying Western technology but usually poor at choosing WHICH Western tech to copy.

  The Czechs did better with the Futurama/Grazioso which was a Strat restyled to Slavic design sensibilities. While not a great guitar by Western standards it was a whole lot better than anything else from the Eastern bloc. They can be made into a decent playing guitar in most cases with a little work and with rewinding the pickups and rebuilding the organ style switches. Beatles emulators seem to be the bigger market because George Harrison owned one, as well as Jimmy Page.