Telestar La Boz Bison Copy

Late 60s copy of a 1965-70 Burns Bison, solid mahogany body, three single coil pickups, jazzmaster style tremelo with six-saddle roller bridge, four-way rotary pickup selector with "jazz," "treble," "split-sound" and "wild dog," tone and volume controls, red-to-black sunburst finish, 25" scale neck made of a bazillion strips of maple with rosewood fingerboard, crappy tuners. There's a picture of one in the book "Guitar Stories vol. 1." For what you paid for it in 1968 I guess it had a lot of features, but the neck is wack (more later) so i'll give it a 5.

A guy brought this to a backyard jam session. He had it plugged into one crappy plastic practice amp and then ran the the headphone output into another plastic amp. It sounded just like the solo in Clarence Carter's "Road of Love." Great guitar for fuzzed up 60s blues leads. Probably be even better for slide. Clean sounds aren't bad either. Mahogany body sustains for days. He loaned it to me to mess around with, saying it was his least favorite guitar.

Despite what others say, I've only found a handful of Japanese guitars from the 60s that had decent necks on them. This one is no exception. The neck is twisted, so when you have just the right amount of relief on the bass side, you have a backbow on the treble side and the first 3 frets on the G, B and E strings buzz. If the guitar had a standard 25 1/2" scale, you might replace the neck with a cheap replacement, but it has that funky 25" scale. Make a custom neck for it? Why bother. The bar-shaped frets don't appear to have ever been crowned. The tuners are crap, and you practically have to sprain your wrist to tune it. If you can find one with a good straight neck, though, and replace the tuners you'll be in business.

It weighs a ton. I carry it around my neighborhood to whack unfriendly dogs with. I wouldn't use on a gig unless I planned on playing the solo from "Road of Love" all night long (not necessarally a bad thing).

Uh, yeah, right.

I think I'll just give it back to the guy. Otherwise it just takes up space in my apartment. This could be a good guitar except for the neck. I don't think it's the fact that it was originally a cheap guitar, either. I've played cheap 60s guitars from Europe (EKO, Vox, Galanti, etc.) and they don't seem to have the neck problems and generally just feel and play a lot better, almost as good as U.S. guitars in some cases. Maybe they had more guitar building experience over there and knew where to cut the right corners?