Budding young American guitarists wanted to look like their British idols and to sound like them as nearly as possible, and the idiosyncratic Fender-ish Japanese guitars of the past simply would not do. Enter Bruno, St Louis Music, Unicord and other American importers of Japanese-made products: all of these were only too happy to provide American music retailers with reasonable facsimiles of the most-coveted instruments. These importers, in turn, contracted with various Japanese "gakki" [factories] to make the faux-Rickenbackers, faux-Hofners and faux-Gretsches for which, eventually, the teeming hordes of less-affluent guitarists would settle. The gaggles of screaming pubescent girls who filled the seats of the stadiums and theaters when their mop-haired idols came to play could not have cared less about the instruments with which their idols serenaded them. But the music scene was evolving and, by 1967, the distorted sounds pioneered by black American blues artists had become popular among young British musicians. By 1968 dawned the second wave of the British Invasion, the era of rock music and of the guitar hero. The louder, higher-gain tones favored by these young men required solid-bodied guitars rather than the hollow or semi-hollow models on which they had cut their teeth, because the latter tended to feed back -- that is, to create a feedback loop of the sound coming back to their guitars from their amplifiers and thence being picked up and re-amplified until all that could be heard was an unpleasant, screeching howl. Pioneering blues-rock guitarists such as Mike Bloomfield, Peter Green and Billy Gibbons, searching for a more-manageable alternative, happened upon the solid-bodied guitars made by Gibson and bearing the name of legendary guitarist Les Paul. Owing to the example set by various British rock guitarists --- and a young American who went by the name Jimi Hendrix -- the popularity -- and therefore the prices -- of American solid-bodied electric guitars were growing, and at an accelerating rate. Around the world, an entire generation of [mostly broke] young male guitarists yearned for "axes" like those their guitar heroes played. So retailers everywhere, in business to --what else? -- make as much money as possible, began contracting with their suppliers for guitars that the legions of poor players who hung around the stores, staring at the unreachable Gibsons and Fenders in their glass enclosures, could and would actually "buy".