As the title of this listing indicates, yes yes yes, this is Greco’s portrait of the very Messenger guitar, aka Mark Farner model. The original manufacturer Musicraft made Messenger guitars only for short period around late 60’s, and it happened one day Mark Farner of Grand Funk Railroad was given this guitar, he liked it and started playing at his live (check out Inside Looking Out 1969 live on Youtube). The rest has become the history.

World-famous GFR also seemed to inspire lots of young Japanese wanna-be guitarists, so Greco managed to obtain the design book of the Messenger and there we have this guitar, ME-700. This model only sold in 1974-75 with very small volume, less than 100 units. That said, I don’t know in how many years’ time I come across this guitar again.

My finding from Japanese websites is that Greco’s ME-700 has a few distinguishable designs from Musicraft’s original model – it was hard to obtain DeArmond pickups so ME-700 had its own single coil wide range pickups. Alloy bolt-on neck from original was replaced with 3 piece maple set-neck. Stereo jack & fuzztone circuit switch however, were inherited without much reinvention.

Lastly back to GRF’s 1969 live video, I wonder why the guitar had masking tapes stuck on guitar body. Mark Farner on another video says he intentionally did that for minimizing the feedback. Interestingly, the pickups (both on Musicraft’s original and ME-700) are put on top of guitar body surface, meaning no holes are dug into pickup chamber. This can surely cause much feedback, so if you want to regenerate the exact sound of GFR, please make sure taping, also stuffing form rubber on the f-holes!