Imagine walking into a Woolworth store in the 1960s and seeing this hanging on the wall…all them pickups and switches…pointy horns…come on!  This just had to be the balls for the aspiring young guitarist.  Of course once you got this home (if you were able to convince your parents to buy it), it probably looked way better than it played!  Either way, these short scale department store guitars were all the rage in the mid 60s.Even though these guitars were marketed towards beginners, they have features and sounds that really allow for grinding, raw music.  With many guitar makers going for clean sounds, these guitars combined with an early fuzz are a true love connection!  The pickups on this particular guitar read out in the high 4k range, and they sound totally powerful.  As with most Kawai guitars from this time, the pickups are wired in series.  I always love this wiring, but with this guitar the pickups seem to “stack” on one another to create a built-in overdrive effect.  Seriously, the sounds in this guitar are just stunning!Audition was the guitar “brand” of Woolworth and Woolco stores back in the day, so most times when you see an Audition guitar, it was sold through this department store chain.  There were Woolworth stores all over the place, and I even remember one at the local mall in the 1980s.  Although I don’t remember seeing guitars there!During this time in Japanese guitar history, many makers were “borrowing” design cues from one another.  And this particular guitar was modeled after the popular Tiesco Shark Fin guitars of the same era.  As a matter of fact, in less than a year Kawai would purchase all the assets of Teisco and start producing the guitars in the Kawai factory.  This is what makes this particular model interesting, and rather rare.  After Kawai purchased Teisco, the Kawai guitars stopped resembling Teisco guitars.  I mean, Kawai owned the company! They could capitalize on the Teisco aesthetic without having to copy anymore.Also during this time, Kawai was still using solid necks, and was experimenting with different body wood types.  There’s a lot of variation in Kawai guitars during this time, since they used about 15 different pickup designs (sometimes using a pickup only once on a particular guitar), and up several dozen body designs.  Yeah, there were a lot of different models!I’ve only ever seen one other of this model, and these were probably produced for a single product run and then left on the shelf for another hip design, vying for the demand of the young mods perusing the Woolworth aisles.  In fact, I’ve seen Audition guitars made by many different Japanese guitar manufacturers.  So you see, Kawai was competing with other factories as well.  Either way, I’m just glad these old rockers still exist, floating around out there like pointy boots and nehru jackets.