Indeed, Greg Lake's Pirate 8-string is graphite. If you have Bass Culture, the Entwistle collection book, you'll see that John owned this bass as well. In that book there is also another graphite Scorpion bass with a Bigsby vibrato! And the two basses in the previous post are different basses as well!
I always called these gunslingers. I believe they referred to this form at Alembic as the pistol grip.
Mica hasn't mentioned it yet, but way back in the 80's she visited me at my office with Greg Lake's guitar, which was the sibling of the bass in the first picture. If I remember correctly, it was also pistol grips and had amazing mythical beast inlays (I particularly remember a manticore on there, which was the symbol of ELP's record label). I'm a huge Greg Lake fan, so I should have bought this, but it had a signficant pricetag (just imagine what those inlays would cost today) and I wimped out.
David Fung
