Odyssey: Attila Balogh and the Quest for the Perfect Guitar

Odyssey

Attila Balogh and the Quest for the Perfect Guitar

Craig E. Jones

Odyssey

Copyright © 2020 by Craig E. Jones

Front and rear cover design by Robert Florian. Front cover photo of a 1977 Odyssey by Robert Florian, rear cover photo of Attila Balogh, circa 1974, courtesy of Steven Balogh.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Tellwell Talent

www.tellwell.ca

ISBN

978-0-2288-4329-0 (Hardcover)

978-0-2288-4328-3 (Paperback)

978-0-2288-4330-6 (eBook)

Table of Contents

Prologue

BOOK ONE: THE DREAM

Chapter 1 - Beginnings 1948-1972

Chapter 2 - For Love 1972-75

Chapter 3 - Partnership 1975-76

Chapter 4 - The Early Years of Odyssey 1976-77

Chapter 5 - Granville Street 1977-79

Chapter 6 - Peak Odyssey 1979-1980

Chapter 7 - The Personalities

Chapter 8 - Scylla and Charybdis 1980-82

Chapter 9 - Aftermath 1982-89

BOOK TWO: THE INSTRUMENTS

Chapter 10 - The Odyssey Design

Chapter 11 - The Core Line

Chapter 12 - The Attila Line

Chapter 13 - One-Offs, Customs and Rare Birds

Afterword

Appendix

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Prologue

We know how it ended.

On the morning of October 27, 1989, employees unlocked the doors of a small drum-manufacturing workshop in downtown Vancouver and descended into the basement. There, they found the lifeless body of 41-year old Attila Balogh, beneath a fallen piece of industrial machinery.

Balogh left behind a wife, Anne; two teenage children, Steven and Allison; an extended family and dozens of good friends. The loss was sudden and profound.

But Attila Balogh also left a unique legacy: a couple of thousand electric guitars and basses that were displayed and played all over North America and Europe, by rock superstars and discerning unknowns alike. These were the fruits of Balogh’s hurried life’s ambition: to build the perfect guitar.

He came at least very close: his instruments’ unique combination of tone, playability and esthetics has led some to assert that they are among the best solidbody instruments ever made. If you pick up a good example, it’s difficult to argue.

Perhaps the most extraordinary aspect of Balogh’s creative output, besides its quality, was its intensity. The first Odyssey guitar was built in 1976, when the luthier was just 28 years old. The last probably passed through his hands in 1982, when he was 34.

All this had almost passed into myth. In the years since Odyssey folded and Attila’s tragic death, there has not been so much as a magazine or newspaper article written about the young genius and his guitars.

But the beauty and function of Odyssey instruments are still celebrated among a small group of cognoscenti and collectors in Canada, Europe and the United States, and the collectability of these increasingly rare guitars and basses seems to be growing. Attila’s devotees stalk Odysseys, and rumours of Odysseys, in estate sales, pawnshops, on Craigslist or Kijiji. Examples of the higher end models such as the 100 and 500 series are rarer than Holy Grail 1959 sunburst Gibson Les Pauls (and in the eyes of many, at least as good), and yet can be had, often, for a thousand dollars or less, from sellers who have found them under a bed and have no idea what they are.

Attila’s guitar legacy can also be measured in human terms: A number of luthiers working today describe Balogh as an inspiration,¹ and a few can even claim that he was, in those years, something more: these are the ones who remember Attila as a guide and mentor. Rob Friedman, a fixture of Vancouver’s guitar scene for four decades, believes that Balogh’s brief tenure at the apex of guitar-making in the city spawned a renaissance of luthiery throughout the province. It is true that before Balogh and his friend Jean Larrivée set up their respective operations in Vancouver and Victoria, there was only a very small community of guitar builders in the province, most of whom were dedicated to acoustic instruments, and no producers of scale. Now, there is an entire village – by some counts, fully half of Canada’s working luthiers live in B.C. – an extended family now in its second or third generation. Many of them trace their education in the craft directly to Balogh, or to one or more of his disciples. But even if they don’t, they acknowledge his importance: he helped establish Vancouver as an incubator of guitar innovation, and put it on the international map. In that sense this story isn’t over, and never will be.

This book proceeds in two parts, Book One and Book Two. In the first, I tell the story of Attila and Odyssey guitars in a narrative form. In the second, I go into detail about the instruments themselves. I did it this way because I appreciate that there will be some who are interested in one of these parts more than the other. I didn’t want to bog down the history with detailed expositions on the instruments; and on the other hand I didn’t want those who were mainly interested in the technical stuff to have to wade through the whole human story looking to distill the information they were after. But my hope is that people will read both parts, because I don’t think Attila is as distinct from the guitars he made as you might at first think. If you want to understand the guitars, you have to know about Attila, and vice-versa.

I’m reasonably confident in the facts presented here, but I have no doubt that there are some inaccuracies, despite my best efforts. I’ve interviewed Attila’s family, his partners, his employees, friends and customers. I’ve taken the guitars apart, measured and photographed them. I’ve developed a small library of the company’s brochures, some old photos, and magazine and newspaper stories, but there is very little in the way of physical evidence of these events; not only are the businesses gone, in many cases, so are the very buildings where they existed. And as a lawyer I know that even fresh eyewitness testimony is rarely perfectly reliable. So wherever possible, I’ve looked for corroboration, scoured newspaper archives to pin down dates, and constantly pestered those kind souls who became my sources with weeks and months of follow up questions. Through it all, I’ve tried to do what judges do: fill in any remaining spaces through triangulation; reconcile various recollections of events with the available documentary evidence, and arrange these it into the most plausible coherent narrative.

I accept that reconstructing anything like an absolute, objective truth is simply not possible. I hope, though, that it is possible to capture an honest and authentic collective memory for posterity.

If our collective memory is one of Balogh’s genius, and of his single minded and possibly quixotic quest to build the perfect guitar, then at the end of the day, we have the strongest possible corroborative evidence: the surviving Odyssey instruments, at least hundreds of them, possible more, treasured and revered by old players and a new generation of musicians and collectors. To this day, many owners swear that their Odyssey is the best guitar or bass they have ever played, or likely ever will. There is a magic that sticks to the instruments and is apparent even to those who don’t know anything about them, or their legendary maker. They pick one up, in a pawnshop, a friend’s house, or an estate auction, and it sings.

There’s one other thing I should deal with up front, especially for the benefit of readers who are also musicians. Any time a writer uses a term like the perfect guitar, he’s inviting an immediate objection: people have different ambitions for guitars, and everyone’s needs and tastes can’t be embodied in any single instrument. There can be no perfect guitar, the writer will be told.

That’s fair enough, as far as it goes. I accept that you can listen to the slinky tubular tone of a Fender Stratocaster in the hands of Stevie Ray Vaughan, Buddy Guy, or Jimi Hendrix, or the thick, creamy output of Joe Bonamassa’s or Gary Moore’s Gibson Les Pauls, and appreciate that neither guitar could let the player do what the other did. But all that means is that each of these two very different guitars can be, to its builder and player alike, a perfect instrument.

Attila had his own set of objectives for his guitars. From the point of view of physical playability, Attila wanted a guitar that would get out of the way. He wanted to break down each obstacle between a player’s mind and hands, and the sound generated by the instrument. With respect to sound, he wanted the vibrating string to give the cleanest, clearest output, and then he wanted to colour and enhance that to varying degrees before the sound hit the amp. And then of course, Attila wanted his instruments to be beautiful, wooden works of art, because for him, musical beauty and physical beauty were interwoven, as they were in the Budapest Opera House he visited as a child.

Attila prioritized purity of sustain over the woodier tones of other styles of instruments; he sought clarity of each note, good separation and balance across the strings. He wanted a long neck and easy access to the highest frets; he wanted it to hang right and he wanted it to be beautiful. Each of these were choices that foreclosed some advantages inherent in competing designs. And there were many more.

There are other decisions a guitar builder can make, though, that are driven by reasons unrelated to subjective opinions about what constitutes the ideal instrument. For example, once you’ve settled on a 24-fret neck design, you can either make it stronger or weaker. Those frets can be roughly hammered into their slots and left alone like ragged teeth, or they can be carefully inserted, dressed and levelled. The guitar’s bridge can be designed with loose tolerances that suck vibration from the string, or it can be rock solid, returning energy to the note. Those kind of trade-offs are not dictated by the laws of physics or by subjective personal taste – hardly anyone wants a weak neck, uneven frets, or a buzzy bridge – but rather by the quality of the design and the skill of the execution, and the imperatives of cost.

Odyssey’s instruments enjoyed only minor market success and only for a brief time, but not because something better came along to replace them. They didn’t suffer from failures in their concept or workmanship, and indeed both of those things continued to improve throughout the brief life of the company. They failed, in the end, for two related reasons: their style went, for a period of time, out of fashion; and they were just too hard to build and sell profitably, especially during a recession.

Both of these things can be traced, at least in large part, to the same underlying cause: Balogh’s unwillingness to abandon or dilute his vision of the ideal guitar. And in that, the fact of Odyssey’s 1982 flameout doesn’t undermine an argument for the near-perfection of Balogh’s instruments; if anything, it supports it. Balogh’s execution was innovative, exacting and uncompromising. He got closer and closer to his target with each guitar he built. If you think his objectives were worthy ones, then you will likely find no better expression of them.

A review of one of Balogh’s instruments for England’s Music UK magazine described it as one of the best electrics currently on the market. This was high praise for a guitar made by a 30-year old master luthier and a small team of apprentices in a tiny factory on the Canadian West Coast, and moreover a guitar that was well below the cream of the Odyssey line.

There’s a lot of what ifs and might have beens in the end of this story. What if Odyssey hadn’t tried to expand just as the market for high end guitars collapsed? What if the company had been able to ride out the recession and survive into the electric guitar’s next boom era? What if Balogh had not died before he was able to bring his planned next generation of guitars to the world? Would the vintage guitar auctions today have the original Odysseys side-by-side with ‘57 Strats, or ’59 Les Pauls, or the early Paul Reed Smiths?

The most perfect guitar is nothing more – and nothing less – than one that most perfectly embodies the vision of its creator, and of those musicians who share that same vision. By this standard, did Attila Balogh build the perfect guitar? I don’t know. But maybe.

ODYSSEY

BOOK ONE

THE DREAM

CHAPTER I

Beginnings 1948-1972

The Boy

Postwar Budapest, long one of the cultural and architectural jewels of Europe, was a city in ruins. After one of the Second World War’s longest and most destructive sieges, much had been reduced to rubble, with the famous bridges of the city collapsed into the Danube. Even two and a half years since the end of hostilities, rebuilding had only just begun.

But there was, for a brief period before the Communist Party achieved hegemony, a window in which the citizens of Budapest experienced the wild relief and optimism that had swept most of Europe after the defeat of Fascism. Plans were being made to rebuild a 20th Century Budapest to lead Europe into its sunny future. Engineers, artists, and various other utopian visionaries descended on the city. It was into that hopeful interregnum that Attila Balogh was born, on January 6th, 1948.

Attila’s father was Istvan Balogh, an artist recently released from the army. For the Baloghs there were gray clouds gathering on both political and personal fronts. The new Communist regime asserted its bleak control within months of Attila’s birth, and not long after, his parents divorced. In the postwar years, Attila grew up moving between their houses with his sister, Ilona, 12 years his senior.²

Istvan was a deeply cultured man; his own father had been a fine artist who had painted the backdrops for performances at the Hungarian Royal Opera House, a towering piece of Neo-Renaissance architecture in the centre of Budapest. Istvan would visit his father at work, helping where he could, amazed by the bronze statues of great musicians and composers that seemed to watch over every inch of the building’s space. With such a childhood, Istvan and his two brothers and sister retained an abiding love of classical music, art and poetry.

Music in Hungary was uniquely deep and broad. Here, like few other places in the world, styles collided in beautiful ways: Local Gypsy and Hungarian folk, European classical music, and the latest pop, blues and jazz from all over the world, all were woven into a unique tapestry.

The Balogh family chafed under the monochromatic dullness of the increasingly Stalinist regime, but Istvan and his brothers escaped into their painting, and made a decent living selling their work abroad for hard currency. It was while working as an artist that Istvan met and fell in love with Maria Stefanick, a smart young woman who found herself attracted to the artistry of the Balogh brothers and drawn into their circle. She became his second wife, stepmother to Ilona and Attila, and would soon after give birth to their brother, Laszlo.

Istvan and Maria were both determined artists, and even their children considered them to be eccentric. They were certainly not excessively attentive parents, even by the standards of the day. Because of this, much of the job of looking after young Attila fell to his older sister Ilona. Ilona, now in her eighties, remembers a precocious and headstrong child, who was very bright but possessed a short attention span. He got bored with boring things, she remembers, about as concise a summary of Attila’s personality as has ever been offered. He did not excel in school.

These things happened many decades ago, and Ilona has few specific memories of Attila as a child in Hungary. However, she did remember that, in Attila’s playpen, he had only one toy, a ball. Every other object was a tool of some kind: small tools, big tools, hammers. Once, she recalls, he managed to smuggle in an axe. Of course we took it away, she says. Ilona’s strongest memory of Attila as a boy is that he always wanted to make things.

Increasing resistance to communist repression in the decade following the Second World War boiled over in Hungary with the democratic uprising in October, 1956. The Soviet response was swift and brutal, and soon Russian tanks were rumbling through the Baloghs’ beloved Budapest. Young men and women responded with Molotov cocktails; thousands were killed, many more wounded. The West, mostly, stood by and watched.

Balogh didn’t, in later years, talk much about Hungary or the Revolution. But he did relate one story of a school friend who had died when the homemade bomb he had been readying to throw at a tank exploded. He recalled having reflected that it could as easily have been him, a pretty bracing thought for an eight-year-old. Life is short.

Escape

In October 1956 Istvan Balogh was still making a fair living as an artist, and he had just finished building a house for his wife and their family. But within a matter of days, everything had changed and he had a very difficult choice to make. If they stayed, the Baloghs expected that life would get much, much worse. They also knew that, if they left their beloved city and their friends and family, they would almost certainly never see them again.

Hungary’s border with Austria was being rapidly occupied and closed by the Soviets. Tens of thousands of refugees had begun to stream across it at any