Wilco Loft Sale - Orpheus bass 70s owned by Jeff Tweedy

Here’s another fun Eastern block treasure from Jeff’s collection. He has a bunch of these fantastic 60’s and 70’s creations, some from Czechoslovakia, some from Bulgaria, a couple from Poland… we think…. Most manufactured under Communist rule. Borders were in flux and Western culture was seeping through little by little. Many of these creations have the whiff of being Western copies or almost-a-likes… shapes and designs seemingly created from memory of specific western instruments. The Almost-a-tele, the Sorta-like-a-Dano. The Could-be-a-Hofner-if-you-squint-a-caster.. This one is a fantastic shorter scale electric bass guitar. The neck is skinny and round like a mop handle. The body, a cool familiar looking offset constructed like a hollow-core door. The pickups read “Orpheus” though the headstock remains in its native tongue and alphabet (cyrillic?). We have had others that use two different spellings of Orpheus (and/or Orfeus) both on the very same instrument. I read that one was for domestic sales and the other was for export.. so the ones that had both were….? Whatever. We love these! They really capture a moment in the world of music, in the world of guitars, and in the world of the world. A moment where the internet was still many decades away. These were days where people were home lathe-ing bootleg recordings into X-ray films just to try and sneak them across boarders. These were days where pirate radio played a huge roll in giving some people access to things that otherwise would never have come close enough to hear.

This bass has been thru it and shows all the road rash and nicks and scratches you'd expect it to by being this old and traveling so far to be here. Could probably use another setup to the new owners specifications, but it sounds good!

This will ship in a cheapo gig bag and will come with a certificate of authenticity signed by Jeff Tweedy showing to all that this was from his personal collection.