Of course, as one should know, the obvious guitar(s) we are talking about, are the special custom designed guitars by Paul Dean - the lead guitarist from the band "Loverboy". I know I already have a Google Site on this subject - albeit more focus on the first two runs of Odyssey and Hondo, but here's sort of the more "personal slant" version. Since these articles are more about how we musicians get into the guitars the players we like play, and how they influenced us and our tastes as players and/or builders.

At the time, nobody knew WHAT these early red/black guitars were. Actually, being the 1990's, few cared at the time, and most people made speculations Dean was playing a modified Fender Lead III or a Rickenbacker - at least, that's what WE thought in the United States. I had a hunch though, these were possibly custom built guitars, possibly made by a Vancouver Luthier, and oh how right I turned out to be.

The 64' Stratocaster (left 1981, right 2015) - which I recall was said to have been a daphne blue model with a tremolo originally - was at some point "smashed imitating Pete Townshend". Unlike most smashed guitars though, this one was put back together using a lot of interesting construction techniques that can be quite inspiring for those of us trying to find our own sound.

Basically, the body was glued back together, the tremolo route filled in with Oak, Fir, Pine - per more recent reviews, he said he does not remember exactly. Apparently there was some chisel-work inside the body, which as re-filled with DAP PLastic wood. The neck was put back together with LePage's Bondfast using 2 Drumsticks for Splints, and it had a break at the 10th Fret. The guitar was then left in a hot car where the glue on the neck went for shit and finished off the original neck - a shame because the guitar had an amazing resonance, attributed to the open pockets of air inside the neck, particularly the 10th fret where the neck likely broke the most. Among other specs, possibly performed after this event, included using a Gibson Les Paul Stoptail tailipece for a bridge like a LP Jr, being ground into "intonation" somehow, a Anti-Scratch metal-backed and rubberized pickguard, custom wiring of Dean's own design to allow him to get neck, neck+bridge, bridge, and then turn on the middle pickup with a toggle switch for all three or neck+middle or bridge+middle (omitting the middle pickup setting alone).

So he put a brand new Telecaster neck on the guitar and it "had sustain but no real tone". So Dean tried soaking the neck in the bathtub, putting it in the oven, shaving it...all sorts of weirdness. So Paul copied the neck style but in his own home made neck with a deliberate break at the 10th fret to recreate that "resonance". This Stratocaster would become his main guitar. I think he was using it as early as Streetheart's "Meanwhile Back in Paris" - Pressure, Just For You, Action, and a ton of other songs on that record sound like that guitar, and it sounds a whole hell of a lot like it does in Loverboy - a very fat, but spikey, Strat tone, with a bit more gain than usual, leading me to wonder if Dean's stock Fender pickups were overwound at the factory (possibly another set of those legendary Abigail Ybarra pickups?).

The Strat is pivotal because this was the guitar that would lead TO the "Dean Machines" and ultimately his work with Odyssey and Hondo - and later Kramer/Larrivee. All the pedigrees were already there, moderate output pickups, custom wiring, a Gibson style stud tailpiece/bridge combo, specially chambered body, specially chambered neck, and his own very skinny neck profile. Go look at the "Lesson for the Weekend" Video which gives a ton of closeups of this guitar - I can see even from the video, that Paul's neck profile from this guitar was copied to his "Dean Machine" - and then Odyssey and Hondo followed suit.

"Gangs" - Contrary to my previous site where we kinda' lumped the Odyssey Prototype from the Working for the Weekend music video in with the original Dean Machine guitars. "Gangs" is likely the first "Dean Machine" as it matches his old red Strat build very closely. It appears it's the first one to have the "Dean Machine" body design, but with a few different curves and it seems a little more elongated in some photos. The pickguard is similiar to a Musicman Stingray Bass in that it's a round circle, but instead, houses three Seymour Duncan Vintage Flat single coil pickups. The wiring scheme is surmised to be the same as Dean's more recent Stratocasters from the 2000's-2010s, there's a 3-way switch that does Neck, Neck+Bridge, and Bridge, and then the mini toggle turns the middle pickup on, allowing for all three pickups, or neck+middle or bridge+middle. The bridge looks to be a Gold Leo Quan Badass bridge, with 1 volume, and one tone. The guitar turned up on the Odyssey guitars facebook page sometime in the late 2010's in a 70's Fender case with a undiclosed owner. It get's it's on-website nickname from it's appearance in the "Gangs in the Street" music video for the 1981 Loverboy Album "Get Lucky". It seems the guitar took over for his Strat (except the Encore tunes) sometime in 1981, and carried over to the next prototype in late 81' or early 82' while still on the same tour.

"P-90" - It seems while the old Strat and "Gangs" were on tour, Paul also had a custom Gibson Les Paul with dual P-90's in it like a Special but with some odd feature, and maybe that's where he got a taste for P-90 pickups. I know for a fact P-90 didn't get it's pickups from the Yellow Les Paul guitar though because the Yellow Les Paul was present for "Lucky Ones" at the same video shoot where they also did "When It's Over" "Gangs In the Street" and "Working for the Weekend" (it can be seen in the background of that video IIRC). P-90 is called such because it's the only Dean Machine I'm aware of that had P-90 pickups in it. The rest either had Strat Pickups or DiMarzio Super II Humbuckers in them. This guitar was prominently used on the 1982 leg of the Get Lucky Tour, and in the music video for "When It's Over", and likely toured until sometime in late 1982 or early 1983, around the time the third Loverboy Album "Keep It Up" Was released. It featured a more squared-off body variation, had a huge round thing on the headstock for awhile, Grover rotomatic tuners, regular black gloss plastic pickguard, 2 P-90 pickups of unknown brand or origin, a Leo Quan Badass wraparound bridge in chrome. It's seen a lot in 1982 tour photos for the Get Lucky Album. It's fate is somewhat unknown, though I recall in an e-mail from Paul sometime around 2017 or so I got in response to my other site...likely just by the tone of him mentioning missing it, it could be one of the guitars that he lost on tour. But I also surmise he may have just had Super II's and a Anti-Scratch ABS Pickguard put on it to be like his other "Keep It Up" Tour axes. Tough to say. Could even be the one he still has that has Humbuckers in it. This guitar could have been active as early as 1981 as a bootleg of Loverboy in 1981 with the VERY RARE song not on any album called "There Goes the Neighborhood" (sung by Dean himself) is present and that guitar sounds way too fat to me to be single coils (though hard to tell on a well aged cassette from over 40 years ago).

The Working for the Weekend Guitar - I'm supposing that the first Odyssey guitar Paul Dean had was this extremely different example that can be seen in Loverboy's "Working for the Weekend" video, from 1981. What's crazy is while this is the best known music video for Loverboy, the guitar in it is a real mystery. It does have the Paul Dean signature body shape, but it has a lot of features that make it differ from later iterations and/or from a normal Odyssey Paul Dean. For starters, the body is at least bound, if not has a separate top wood like a Gibson Les Paul, painted sunburst, and bound. It has two Humbuckers which could either be Odyssey's own in-house pickups, or DiMarzios like they started using sometime later on I surmise (at this point). It has a 24" fret neck, unknown scale length, 3x3 headstock, looks to have coil splits for the humbuckers (extra switches), and a Leo Quan Badass bridge in chrome. This guitar is never seen in any other Loverboy performance or music video that I'm aware of, which likely suggests what I'm about to talk about a little next. This guitar was at the same session as "Gangs", Yellow LP, and "P-90" which were used in the videos they were named after.

Per Craig's book. He mentions that when Paul Dean brought his guitar into Odyssey to have them copy it, it had several "unique design elements" that made the guitar "only playable by Paul himself", and Attila Balogh and his team worked with Paul to develop what eventually they would come to produce. Which guitar this was is anyone's guess (I'm guessing Gangs or P-90), and likely the above prototype was the initial product of those meetings with Attila and Paul to refine the design. Paul's basic design focuses mostly around the neck being a 3-piece maple neck, with three truss rod slots (one in the middle for the truss rod, and then two on each side... "Resonance Slots" that give the guitar a bit of a hollow midrangey howl signature to Dean's sound). The body was to be Canadian maple and cut to the shape of his home-built "Dean Machine" guitars. The guitar featured 1 volume, 1 tone, a 3-way selector switch, and 2 DiMarzio Super II Humbuckers. The bridge is a Leo Quan Badass Bridge like all previous iterations. One item of questioning in the book is the "Anti Scratch" haircell ABS pickguard which debut on these guitars. SOme accounts say that it was a "cost saving measure" or a way Attila was getting around supply issues at Odyssey at this time. But some other thoughts I have is that Paul Dean's old Stratocaster has a "Anvil Case" (a road case used for stage equipment that is rubber with a metal backing) pickguard on it that was originally covered in rubberized material (now long gone), which Dean did not directly cite, but mentioned that features from that Strat went into his Odyssey guitar, so this may have been a more production friendly version of an "Anti Scratch Pickguard" since metal is hard to mill, and some shots of the Strat already by 1982 show the screws sinking into the rubber and the pickguard having a strange warped appearance.

Paul commissioned 50 guitars from Odyssey in 1982. At least a couple or a few went to Paul Himself, with one of them being sent out while Loverboy was on the road with the paint barely even dry by the time they sent it out per the book. Another 4 or so went to friends, family, business associates, etc, and the remaining 45 or so were split in half: one half going to Vancouver B.C. music shops, the other half staying in Paul Dean's garage for as long as a few decades. Rumor has it some of the remaining half in Paul's garage were later sent to LArrivee while he was working on his Kramer model to have the frets, necks, and other potential "issues" refined to meet Paul's standards. At least one of these guitars had a regular Gibson Stoptail on it and was sent out to Hondo - likely the guitar they copied - and that Odyssey was also used in Hondo's first ad for the Hondo Paul Dean II and III guitars released sometime in 1983, around the time Keep It Up was released. In 2020, there were some photographs hinting at a potential future model with Odyssey showing Paul does have one of the original's still in his possession to this day. It's probably used in the studio now.

I believe that Paul met Billy at some show, and Billy got him in touch with one of Hondo's people. Hondo Guitars was a Texas based guitar company who had their guitars manufactured overseas in China, Korea, and Japan by Matsamoku, Samick, and possibly some other Asian building houses (Tokai?). I'm hazarding a guess Paul gave them one of the Odyssey guitars to copy (the one shown in the first Hondo Ad in 83'), and then Hondo made a copy of it.

Paul says in some interviews from the time that the Hondo guitars were meant to be reliable, affordable workhorses that stay in tune and don't break the wallet. At between $329-375 they weren't cheap in 1982 money (that's roughly how much a Fender Jag-Stang was new at $799.99 in 1996 when changed for inflation), so these weren't mere copycat toy Guitars. He even, IIRC, in reference to Kurt Cobain's Jag-Stang interview in Fender Frontline in 1993 or 1994, said something similiar to Cobain to the effect of wanting a guitar anyone could play with no preconcieved notions attached to it - which to me is one of the greatest things a guitarist can say about their signature model because it means it can transcend it's assumed intended audience.

People, myself included, would automatically assume, based on HOndo's most commonly seen "pawn shop fodder" output that the guitar would have been a inexpensive, Chinese, plywood plank with a stock Hondo neck on it, and some stock Hondo pickups. But this assumption - though I'll get more on that in a minute - is utterly wrong. See, Hondo around 1981-1983 was pretty much on par with what Fender/Squier are doing now. They had guitars made of reputable tone woods, decent playability, even had DiMarzio badge-manufacturing pickups for them (The DiMarzio K10, which came on the Paul Dean II stock for a time, was a really good pickup), and we'll get to the Paul Dean's themselves in a minute.

In the e-mail Paul sent me, he mentioned that I was "right on" in my assessment that Hondo was going to cheap out on the guitars. Paul wanted them designed to an affordable price point so the non-famous musician could afford them, but still have them be excellent instruments. After a few test-runs with Hondo, they got the guitar pretty much on-point, as I can attest as I've been an owner of a very early 1983 Hondo Paul Dean II for the last 10+ years. Thing is, it's been mentioned he was unware of some things Hondo did, and didnt' get paid for them per a current member of Odyssey.

The Hondo Paul Dean II is a literal word-for-word copy of the Odyssey Paul Dean guitars in every way save for a few small things. The base guitar has a 3 piece maple neck with a Gibson Scale (24.75") maple fretboard, resonance slots (confirmed on mine by fully loosening the truss rod for a minute and playing it and hearing VERY loud buzzing from within the neck when I plucked the low strings, it sounded like there were some angry hornets in there), 10 degree headstock tilt, the enlarged Tele-like headstock Paul came up with, with the longer-wider tuner spacing, with sealed gear tuners, 21 jumbo frets, 9.5" fretboard radius, and a trapezoid non-plate-equipped, beveled bolt-on neck attachment for better upper fret access. The body is a 2 piece Sen Ash body instead of Maple, which has a more aggressive grain pattern than even some of the Odyssey guitars. The pickguard is 3/16" Haircell Plastic Anti-Scratch, with 2 humbuckers, 1 volume, 1 tone, 3-way switch, and a Leo Quan Badass style import wraparound bridge (which HOndo also used on their Fame Series clones of B.C. Rich guitars). The Paul Dean II had some upgrade options too. The Base Paul Dean II had 2 Hondo X14 Humbuckers with ceramic magnets at 7.8K each. The upgraded version of the Hondo Paul Dean featured either 2 DiMarzio K10s or possibly other DiMarzios including possibly the Super II at a $60 upcharge. The guitar came without a case, or a Chipboard form-fitted case, or a hardshell, affecting the price respectively. It seems these only came in one color - Cherry Red - as indicated by the model# PD2-CH. Early models from 1983 have a logo that mimics the Odyssey logo, while later models have the Hondo "Sunrise" Logo on the headstock - starting about 1984.

The Hondo Paul Dean III was more of a strat-type guitar. Paul's email stated he never knew they made the III model. This guitar has far wider, more varied specs than the II. I have seen ONE example in the Cherry Red finish, but other finishes were also used including a Sunburst with a flame-maple veneer on the top, red/black Zebra Stripe, and red/white Zebra Stripe. Supposedly the scale length is 24.75" just like the II, but the necks come with a maple or rosewood fingerboard. The electronics are 3x Hondo X13 Single Coil Pickups, with a 5-way selector switch, 1 Volume and 2 Tones, in a typical Stratocaster type configuration, but with one of the pickups (Neck I believe) wired into one of the earliest uses of a Push-Pull pot (volume) in a guitar I've ever heard of to allow for the full range of pickup combos (+1 actually to Paul's guitars) on the Paul Dean III. The bridge is a regular Six screw Strat copy bridge with Zinc Alloy inertia block. The pickguards I have seen come in both the black haircell like the II on the one Cherry example I've seen, and the majority of the rest have a white single ply pickguard in the standard material Hondo used on their regular guitars like Les Paul and Stratocaster copies. These guitars didn't have the pickup upgrade, but rather, instead, had a "Grover Rotomatic TUner" upgrade for the same upcharge as the pickups on the II. I've seen a guy on e-bay claim he gifted a guitar to Paul of this model with Fender pickups in it, but we all know to treat the internet with skepticism.

Contrary to common belief on Hondo, Paul really delivered on these working with them, successful or not. The build quality, on my 1983 Script logo Paul Dean II at least, is much the same as a Tokai or Japanese Fender from the period. The routes are clean, there's no gunk from polishing left in the cavities, all hardware and fit and finish is straight, and there's no signs of the guitar ever having been serviced. AS I got it, it seemed like somebody bought this and hung it on a wall or put in their closet for years. The guitar really has the look and sound (a great example of what these guitars sound like is Loverboy's song "Destruction" from the Metropolis soundtrack coordinated by Giorgio Moroder in 1984 - the clean tone on the breakdown is pure Dean Machine Neck + Bridge full on, my Hondo copies it perfectly). The darned thing also really does stay in tune, I let it rest in my closet for six months of 2024 while I was using my Kramer and the Hondo came back out of the Closet in perfect tune just in time for an impromptu session in GarageBand. Possibly most surprising though his the hardiness of that neck - despite the resonance slots is as strong, or stronger than my Japanese Fender necks, and just as unaffected by climate changes.

Destruction - this 1984 tune is definatley the Dean Machine/Odyssey because the guitar with the right amp sim sounds exactly like my Hondo. You can also tell because there's no whammy bar, and the tone is still very close to Keep It Up, but higher in the mix.

Nothing's Gonna' Stop You Now - Really an enhanced, extended version of a song bit they'd tether to the end of "Queen of the Broken HEarts" on the 1983-1984 "Keep It Up" Tour. This was recorded for the 1984 Summer Olympics. I have reason to believe this song is one of the early Larrivee/Kramer prototypes because Paul's really laying into the Whammy on the main riff, and no guitars he used except one other Stratocaster has a whammy bar on it as far as I'm aware.

At the same time, Kramer guitars were seeking some outside building houses, and Larrivee was one of those in the running (they were also using ESP in Japan, who they ultimatley ran with, and Sports in Canada much to Larrivee's chagrin).

The new designs, as they wound up, were a maple neck-thru design with mahogany wings, 22 fret 25.5" Scale neck with a tilt Kramer "pointy" (though some of Paul's guitars had the Banana headstock), aforementioned pickup config, with individual on/off switches for each pickup, 1 volume, 1 tone, Floyd Rose original locking tremolo (usually in black). These guitars were produced as the Kramer Paul Dean - with the earliest models being manufactured by Larrivee in Canada - who lifted Paul's body design for the Langcaster and RS-series models over the next 2 decades periodically. Later models were made by ESP in Japan, and I've heard rumors some of those were bolt-ons (not 100% though). They came most often in Harvest Yellow, White, Flip Flop Blue/Pink, Flip Flop Red, Black, and Candy Apple Red. Paul most notably had a Harvest Yellow one (seen at Expo 86'), a Purple one (86-87'), a black one (This Could be the Night video).

It seems sometime in 1987 or 1988, as Kramer was parting ways (ie SCREWED) Larrivee, Paul started making partscasters again. Per a Loverboy Newsletter I read on Tami's fansite years ago, Paul was literally putting guitars together in the studio, so it could have been a whole wacky mix of Odyssey, Kramer, Fender, and Gibson going on on Wildside. I know one of them was a black Kramer Paul Dean, because on Hardcore, paritcullarly the "Sword & Stone" video, Paul has a Kramer Paul Dean with the album cover painted on it and what appears to be a DiMarzio Super II humbucker in the bridge (likely to preserve the paintjob over the pickups). I think the "Break it to Me Gently" guitar from that album also was a partscaster using possibly Bolt-On ESP Build Paul Dean parts - but I'll need to re-look at it. So he was still using these in 1989, but it seems he found a favor for Robin/Chandler Mosrite copies (The Robin Raider) - and from there, it'd be a good 30 years before we would see another "Dean Machine" styled guitar officially his.

One guitar of note which turns up on the 1990' tour is a yellow Robin Raider - which is basically a "Super Mosrite" in the vein of my own "CreepingNet MadRite" guitars. Basically, it's a rounded over Mosrite style body, with a banana headstock neck on it, a Floyd Rose, and came with a variety of pickup combos, which I'm guessing in Paul's case was HSS. This likely was the guitar used to record the tracks for "Big Ones" and was used on a brief tour sans keyboardist Doug Johnson in 1989-1991ish.

Loverboy then took a hiatus as Grunge Rock wiped out the entire genres of the 80's, and Nirvana, Soundgarden, STP, Pearl Jam, and others took over the airwaves. Kramers were no longer cool, nor was songs about parties, women, and romance gone wrong. Now replaced with the fake-authentic apathy and angst promoted during the rise of Alt-Rock in the early 1990's. About the last thing heard was Mike Reno stating on a VH1 show that Nirvana killed his career - I dunno, Kurt's dead and Mike Reno is still here sounding like the eighties so I'd say grunge died with Kurt, and Rock has taken over with true fans as the music industry fragmented if you ask me.

Not much is known about the guitars between 1990-1997 though. Loverboy reformed for a benefit for a friend in 1992, released a greatest hit's album in 1994 called "Classics" (Which I still own the CD of), and several other compilations like "Super Hits" and "Temperatures Rising".

The band reformed in 1997 with "VI" and by then, Paul was back to playing home-built guitars which starts the hole Partscaster era. I have reason to believe the first one, a sunburst strat with a maple neck, Floyd Rose, HSS config, and no logo on the headstock, was a Warmoth build. By about 1998, Paul added a Les Paul goldtop with Humbuckers in it to the lineup, which can be seen when they were playing "Teenage Overdose" live in 2000 on YouTube.

Through the 2000's and 2010's, Paul played what was referred to on instagram by someone near the band as "body parts strats" - apparently he was buying Fender Stratocasters, and putting the best parts together. Earlier guitars were more like regular HSS Strats with stock wiring and a Floyd Rose, which were seen in white, silver, gold, and some other colors. In the 2020's, he started using his old pickup combo again per that Instagram post with the 3-way switch and toggle for the middle pickup. When I saw Loverboy Live in 2019, he was using an all black one with a Black/White/Black pickguard, on the heels of a candy apple red one with a similiar config that looked a lot like his old red Strat (which he still has and uses only locally or in the studio per some interviews).

About six months later imagine my surprise that on the Odyssey fanpage there's a familiar Odyssey Paul Dean with the headstock logo removed, and then in picture 2, there's Paul peering over the buckle-rashed back of it holding one of the Strats he'd been using for over a decade at that point.

By December 2021, we got our first glimpses of what were prototypes. There were two, one Paul was already probably using - the "Woodshed" guitar, and then a second prototype with a hot rail in the neck, weird rotary switch pickup switching, a relocated Tonerider Generator Humbucker at the bridge, and a Stoptail Bridge with adjustable saddles - and 2 googley eyes on the pickguard.

Then in 2022, in February/March, we saw it, the Woodshed prototype on stage with Paul for the first time, with the famliar resonance, but now with a Floyd Rose. This guitar was used for most of the Unzoomed tour until about late 2022, where it was swapped with a Godin custom build, and 10 custom guitars - known now as the "Sweetheart Customs" were being annoucned as being for sale soon, and several of the inexpensive Paul Dean guitars, now called "Sweetheart Black Bar S" were posted to Reverb with a disclaimer about how "The Player's" name is covered in gorilla tape attached double with Krazy Glue - so if you try to remove it to expose the name - it'll remove the name. It also mentioned he did not dislike the guitars at all, he really liked them, but he wanted to prevent any further complications in developing a new model with a bigger company by not having his name on these. Makes sense.

Funny thing is though, in 2023, the Godin was mysteriously gone toward the later half of the year while touring with Foreigner, and the new Dean Machine was back, now with what looked like the old school Anti-Scratch Haircell pickguard on it. Wow. So that seems to be where Loverboy has been sticking since the start of 2024 gear-wise - Paul's been using that guitar a lot, so I think he likes it. Maybe he's got someone else working on it now. In 2025 the Odyssey Prototype he has was upgraded to an HSS config like his old strats. It could be PAul doing this himself, or maybe some other company. After some of the mentions of guitars on Reverb during the second Odyssey run, I have reason to believe he wants the privacy of the guitar developments to be left secretive from this point onward due to hopes of getting a deal with a major manufacturer.

I immediatley liked the guitar tones, and the earlier solos were easy enough for me to learn now that I had finally nailed the Blues Pentatonic, but there was more than enough challenges mixed in there to allow me to grow as a player - things like Always on my Mind for example. But I wanted to get into this Paul Dean guy's guitar tone as it was pretty close to what I wanted to sound like in my mind.

Problem is, this was 1997, not 1987. Loverboy, until later the year actually - were pretty much no longer a thing. They had a greatest hits album out in 95, and I had that (plus a few others), but the internet was a literal desert wasteland when it came to this band. That was the fun in figuring it out though. YOu could spend hours on an 80's band and come up with minimal info at best that was so interesting it'd pique your curiosity for weeks, and see a bunch of cool photos you'd never find elsewhere. I could spend all day looking at Nirvana fansites, but Loverboy? Needle in a haystack.

But the interesting thing was going back and seeing them on SNL, and seeing other videos like Hot Girls in Love, or Pop-Up Video had Workign for the Weekend and showed they shot two other videos in that session (Lucky Ones, and Gangs in the Street). And in these videos, here was this mysterious red guitar, it looked like it had a tele neck, but the headstock was too boxy, and the body looked like a Fender Lead III if it had the top half designed by Rickenbacker....and I was not sure what pickup selection these things had. One had P-90s, one had single coils, one had humbuckers - that's all I knew. Did not know who made them, did not know what they were. It was a pure mystery. When I found out Loverboy was from Canada, I suspected maybe they were indeed, made by a Canadian luthier....well....I was not far off the mark.

In high school, our high school guitar teacher had a stack of old 80's guitar magazines and one of them just happened to be Guitar Player "Women Who Rock" with Kelly Hansen on the cover (from Girlschool), and down the side articles was "Paul Dean: Lead Loverboy" - that's where I found out about Odyssey, Attila Balogh, and the Hondo guitars. So now I knew there was, at least, a announcement of a Hondo model. Well, I did a Yahoo! Search (remember, this is before Google became popular), and found what looked like a Gibson Les Paul copy guitar being touted as a "Hondo Paul Dean" - I was thinking "this can't be right". That Les Paul copy turned up all over the place to haunt me for the better part of a decade. What's weird though, is I went to the local Hastings, found a blue book on guitars, and the specs described more matched the Odyssey originals. So someone was definatley misinformed. It also did not help that I had the Loverboy Classics CD and inside was a picture of Paul Dean playign what I think is the yellow Les Paul from the Lucky Ones video.

Now, I knew Hondo at the time pretty well. They mostly made crappy Plywood Strat copies under the "Hondo II" brand. I was almost thinking "This was the 80's, probably had a run of these promotionally done, really cheap, and they probaby sucked! Which means I can find one really cheap and either copy it with quality parts, or soup up the chassis if it's decent (and has the resonance slots). - Oh how wrong I was on this unicorn of a guitar. Every week, I'd go to pawn shops secretly hoping a disused Hondo II Paul Dean or Hondo Paul Dean II would show up, for like....$50 max, and I could just buy it in cash, take it home, and use Stew Mac to soup it up.

But what would make a teenager think an ultra-rare guitar would be cheap? Well, this was 1997, and I mean no slight towards the band or anyone in it by bringing up the TEENAGE MILLENNIAL mindset of the time. In 1997, most of my generation listened to Sublime, Matchbox 20, Oasis, and had little to no interest in a leather pants and headband rock band from the early 80's - except this guy right here (points to self). And knowing how my ankle shorts clad, pink goatee guitar slinger worshipping generation of single-finger Drop-D'ers would make fun of me for liking a band that played in E-standard, wore leather pants, and had an album with fingers crossed over someone's butt....I kept this a secret, and also, secretly knew something pretty awesome. If I WERE to find a Hondo Paul Dean, it'd be cheap, because nobody younger than 20 at the time would know or care, and even if they did, everyone was in this stupid anti-80's malaise at the time.

Hence my assessment, if the Hondo was great, I'd keep it, if the Hondo was crap, I'd copy it, if the Hondo was alright but needed some tweaks - I'd hot-rod it. That was the master-plan all along.

By 2003, a Canadian named LutzKibbutz started posting images and making reviews about his guitar all over the internet - a 1983 Hondo Paul Dean II - similiar to mine (for all I know it is mine in a former life). He left a glaring review on Harmony Central - that place was like the "Angry Guitar Nerd" website - think Angry Video Game Nerd, but guitars - but here's this guy making the first, and very positive review on the guitar. To be honest, I was a bit shocked, was this really a Hondo? Did Odyssey MAKE the Hondos in some batch? That really piqued my curiosity.

I bid on one in 2005, and later bought one from Underground Vintage in 2010. $200 smackeroos for it, and then I got it home. Unboxed it with my girlfriend (now wife). And, uh,....this thing did not look Korean made at all. All of the routs were clean, no polishing residue inside, it had name brand pots that looked original (Alphas), sure the switch was import, as were the Humbuckers (Samick X14s), the tuners were smooth, the finish was flawlessly intact - I mean, here's a $200 guitar that looks like it was built like a $700 Japanese Fender, so at least initially, they did Paul Dean good, though I hear rumors that he did not get compensated in royalties on these unfortunatley.

The Hondo Paul Dean II, as of October 2010, joined my rig as a permanant fixture. And while yes, this thing really nails songs like "Working for the Weekend" or "Stike Zone" perfectly, especially since the 2017 period-correct DiMarzio Super II upgrade, I use it a LOT for my own original music, where it fits right into my sound perfectly. This lead to me making a lot of jokes about "My "Paul" Is a "Paul Dean"" and whatnot, because I was using it in lieu of a Gibson Les Paul style guitar most of the time. You can tell because I have a sharper distortion sound, there's no whammy bar, and sometimes I'm really wringing out every last ounce of Sustain and resonance from that chambered neck. BTW, one of the biggest things LutzKibbutz's reviews sold me on this guitar with, was the description of the extrmely skinny neck, it's thinner than a 1.5" Fender "A" width at the nut. but unlike an "A" Width Fender, it widens out toward the body quite a bit. Also, the action is crazy low, with about the thickness of a school ruler at the 21st fret, and no buzzing or choking out - that's very UN-Hondo of it. And I've hardly had to do much but put the Truss rod 1/8 of a turn and lower the bridge, making it one of the fastest guitars in the house along with my Jag-Stang.

So how did it influence me as a builder? Well, at the root, as a teenager, while Eddie Van-Halen "built" his guitars as in assembled out of pre-assembled parts, Paul Dean was making his own freakin' bodies and necks. So that's what I did, made my first body at 17 using free wood from the chop-off section at Lowes and went from there. And from there, I kinda' ran with it. Now I'm building from scratch using reclaimed wood, including another Paul Dean style build with P-90s in it. Paul Dean's home grown "make it work" builds from the 70's and 80's were an inspiration to get me to build my own guitars with whatever I could find available, in a time when building your own guitars out of anything but Honduras Mahogany or Paduk with some EMGs, DiMarzios, or Seymour Duncans in it, was frowned upon. And him making his own wild design choices drove me to find some of my own to take on over time such as pine bodies made of tablestock, or hot-rodding inexpensive copy guitar pickups and adding custom wiring to them, and feel okay about doing it. I think it killed any potential gear snobbishness I may have been predisposed to before it even happened. And since then, it just kept on going and going.