These were Japanese (actually built by Terada in Japan, another of the 'behind the scenes' builders for brand names, like Matsomoku, Greco, and Tokai, for instance) imports for the Polytone amp company in LA. Like a lot of amp companies, they figured 'why not sell guitars too?' and this bass and some 'jazzy' guitars rounded out the line. Polytone was real popular with 60's/70's jazzers, and in old interviews with 'Wrecking Crew' era SoCal players like Carol King and Joe Osborn or Ray Brown, you'll see references to the Mini-Brute amps, which were the cool setup for jazzers in those days, Benson used one a lot. And they're still around, still in business, albeit with amps only:
http://polytoneamps.com/index.html This 'look' is fairly typical if you remember these 'other' brand guitars, like Westone, Electra, etc. After Alembic and Stars Guitars, brass was the s--t, and you see a lot of that school of axe with all sorts of big, cludgy brass bridges (anybody remember that massive DiMarzio aftermarket brass bridge?), brass knobs, nuts, etc. The idea was that these heavy parts would add sustain, completely missing Alembic's original idea of using this stuff to isolate the string vibration from the body. But boy it was just the thing to hot-rod your sled with back then. Big Voodoo. Revoltingly, the really cheap stuff would turn green like bad costume jewelry. Funky ! !
Like most of these ill-informed, slightly huckster-ish ads, it's about as Alembic as a barn door.
Joey
