In the mid 1980's Kramer was the hottest guitar brand on the planet at the time, and they had a huge roster of celebrity endorsers.....some well known like Ritchie Sambora, George Lynch, Eddie Van-Halen......but they also had a lot of other guys outside the realm of "big rock/hair rock" guitar like Paul Dean (Loverboy), Paul Reynolds (A Flock of Seagulls), and obviously Elliot Easton of The Cars.

However, Elliot Easton, or so it seems, never actually used the Kramer built version. The prototype for the Kramer EE-Pro 1 and EE Pro-2, he used a ghost-built prototype version made by esteemed luthier Tom Anderson. The guitar above is one of Elliot's actual guitars he likely used with The Cars which was originally posted to "Route 66'" guitars website in the late 1990's.

"Interview Excerpt from Elliot Easton

Elliot had this to say about the signature line in this interview.

From Vintage Guitar Magazine By Willie G. Moseley

At one time, you had a Kramer signature model guitar.

That was something that I designed with Tom Anderson, who's a fine builder. The guy who was running Kramer at the time, Dennis Berardi, loved to hang around rock bands; I don't know any other way to put it. He was a nice guy, and he offered me the opportunity to design my own signature instrument. I took it as a challenge to come up with something for Kramer that had more of a traditional vibe. At the time, they didn't offer a guitar that didn't have a Floyd Rose. So I designed a guitar with a Tele-style bridge. It was available in two models: The Tele bridge and Seymour Duncan Quarter-Pounder system with a five-way switch for a lot of sounds, or with a humbucking-single-single pickup setup with a Floyd Rose. I thought such a guitar might have some appeal to country players and roots rockers who might go for the Tele configuration.

Looks-wise, I was inspired at the time by that orange Jackson guitar Jeff Beck was playing around the time of his Flash album. I wanted something that looked like it could have existed, but didn't. The pickguard on the Kramer is an example; Fender could have done that with their Tele, but didn't.

Mick Jagger played one of the Tom Anderson-built prototypes in the Mixed Emotions video. Tom built fabulous guitars, and I can't honestly say that the production guitars had the "magic" of the Anderson-built ones. That's not to put Kramer down, but you're talking about two completely different setups; one is an artist in a small shop, building one guitar at a time, the other is a huge factory, which by its very definition has to turn out a lot of instruments. In effect, Fender has gotten around the same potential problem by offering the Custom Shop; they don't ask you to expect the same thing out of a Mexican-built Strat as one that Jay Black builds for you (chuckles).:"