In 1981, Paul Dean went to Odyssey guitars of Vancouver, B.C., to commission 50 instruments for around $30,000. What he wanted was a guitar with a chambered neck, straight string pull, 10 degree headstock tilt (or 17 degree - accounts vary), and it came with a Leo Quan Badass bridge, "Anti-Scratch" pickguard treatment, and dual DiMarzio DP104 Super II Epoxy case humbuckers. It was a radical departure for Odyssey being essentially a Fender-style design with a bolt-on neck using off-the-shelf-hardware (other Odyssey guitars, including the guitar from the Working for the Weekend video featured hand-made brass hardware made in-house by Odyssey). Apparently this was toward the end of Odyssey guitars time, and around the same time a Flying V I showed on this page was built (utilizing a few familiar features of the Paul Dean guitars).
Odyssey was in a tough spot at the time, and Paul Dean, freshly successful with Loverboy with already 2 albums out, Juno Awards, and a third one on the way, was trying to help Attila/Odyssey, put out a accessible, roadworthy guitar that was reliable. The undertone in a 1983 article where he was talking to a Vancouver paper in between takes for "Keep it Up" (aforementioned third album), was basically similar to Kurt Cobain's sentiment about the Fender Jag-Stang (another favorite of mine) in Frontline almost 10 years later, that he wanted a guitar with no preconceived notions attached to it. Many people call it a Loverboy guitar, I call it "The Jag-Stang of the 80's", because not much unlike Kurt's Jag-Stang, it's a highly underrated guitar with some capabilities well beyond what it's designer is best known for.
Paul kept one or two for himself (those used on the 1983 world tour), gave four or five to friends/family (two of those friends likely being ZZ Top's Billy Gibbons and Journey's Neal Schon - crazy in my mind because I got into Loverboy, ZZ Top, and Journey at around the same time in the late 90's in high school), and the remainder were split in half - one half going to giveaways/charities/raffles, and the other half going to local Vancouver B.C. music shops. Paul apparently gave the last one away sometime in the early 2000's at a Loverboy concert charity raffle. Paul still owns one of these based on photos on Odyssey Guitar's facebook page, and man it's got some mojo.
Accounts on the manufacturing of these guitars can be quite interesting. Such as the neck profile per Paul himself is that he left a prototype with them on the wall as he had to go off on tour. The necks of the newly built guitars were described as being like "Baseball Bats". Much later on, while working with Jean Larivee while working with him on what became his Kramer model (which Larivee exclusively built), he had the necks on the remaining 25 shaved down to spec.
My own sightings and hearings of these guitars vary wildly in small changes such as body shape or wood figure, and reportedly I've read someone the one Dean still has had 3 single coils instead of humbuckers (maybe it's Gangs?). The one above for example has a slightly different body shape from the Hondo guitars below, but the Odyssey in the Hondo Ad from 1983 has almost an identical shape to the Hondo model. Some have the round brass "O" on the headstock, some have the same script as the Odyssey Paul Dean in the and the one in the picture above.
HONDO GUITARS
In the human story that follows Odyssey. Paul Dean was one of the last famous guys to get guitars made by Attila Balogh and his crew. Odyssey was in a dire financial state as a recession was affecting instrument sales in Canada and the United States at the time, and a "perfect storm" of sorts put the company in a tight spot that lead to it's closing.