I haven’t bought much new gear in the last few years unless it just falls in my lap and the price is right. This month has been pretty cool in that regard: three new items of weirdness have landed in the hoard pile at Dickerson Ranch.
First up is this wild, hillbilly handmade guitar! It surfaced in Michigan and was found by my pal Justin Wierenga. He posted some photos of it, and I was entranced enough to comment on his post: “Hey, if you want to sell that thang, think of me!” Sure enough, a week or two ago he wanted to sell it, and the price was totally reasonable, so I brought it home. So….what is it?
The guitar is made really well. Whoever made it had experience with making guitars and guitar necks. The workmanship is pretty impeccable. That being said, the weirdness factor is off the charts. It’s a HUGE slab of solid wood, 17 1/2 inches wide (!), but the truly odd thing is how shallow it is—only about an inch deep for most of the body, swelling out to about 1 1/2 inches deep at the biggest throes of the arched top and back (it’s all one piece, solid, not an arch top). A really weird “flying saucer” of a guitar. The pickups appear to be a Fender Musicmaster or Duo-Sonic in the neck position (maybe somebody can verify that for me) and some kind of handmade pickup in the rear position, all wired up with five knobs (?) and an output jack. I did not pull the whole control mess out of its tightly compacted cavity to date the pots, but I guess I will at some point, because the neck pickup has extremely weak output, and the bridge pickup doesn’t seem to work at all.
The materials are all really nice, and the neck is beautifully shaped. There’s an expensive set of gold Grover tuners on there, and a fancy gold Kluson tailpiece, so whoever made it wasn’t fooling around. It came with a vintage Danelectro doubleneck case, which is funny, because that is just about the only vintage case that would fit a very wide and very flat guitar like this one.
The fact that it showed up in Michigan makes me wonder if it was a Gibson employee making something on his own time. But, the lack of resemblance to ANY Gibson construction techniques makes me think that’s probably not the case. With my experienced eye for guitar weirdness, the closest thing I can say is that it looks like one of O. W. Appleton’s unique instruments from the 1950s or the 1960s (I’ve attached a few photos in this post of these “APP” instruments, see what you think), but even the APP guitars don’t really look exactly like this. It’s a mystery. And I love a good mystery. Thanks, Justin, for sending this one to the Weird Hillbilly Handmade Guitar Headquarters of the USA!!
If that weren’t enough, I’ve also been blessed recently with no less than two vintage Danelectro amplifiers. The first one is a big Danelectro Challenger Model 89 from the 1950s that my friend Karl Wallin sold me extremely reasonably through Dave’s Guitars in LaCrosse, Wisconsin. It’s in great shape and has the original cover (both of these amps have original covers, which is pretty weird and rare and difficult to find—and tickles my collecting cockles to no end). It’s a rarely seen 15-inch version, with vibrato, and it sounds huge! Thanks to Karl for sending this one my way!
The last one is an early-1960s Danelectro Explorer Model 290 that showed up on Facebook Marketplace a couple days ago for $250. It was in the freakiest, cleanest condition I’ve ever seen a vintage amp in (with the original canvas cover, of course), so I hopped in the car and drove down to meet this fellow in Orange County who was selling the amp for his brother, who had recently been put into a care facility. It was so clean, I bought it without plugging it in, so I was delighted to find out when I got home that this amp sounds like a million bucks. Hard to describe, but it’s somewhere in the Tweed Deluxe or Magnatone 120 range—just an absolutely killer-sounding amplifier. It’s so clean I don’t think I can take it to gigs, but it sounds so good I will definitely be putting it into the regular rotation of recording amps here at the studio!
For those of you reading this long post who are cursing my name and saying “f*** that guy,” I just want to remind you these are cheap thrills. All three of these things cost less than the cheapest new Chinese crap you can go buy at Guitar Center. I don’t have the $$$ or the inclination to spend $16,000 on a custom color Fender Jazzmaster or $10,000 on a vintage Fender Tweed Deluxe. But Danelectro amps with the original cover for $250? Hell yes, brother, sign me up! I’m a fool for these kind of deals. It’s nice to know you can still have fun with some cheap thrills in the vintage market these days, when it seems like folks are paying wicked-insane prices for everything. You can still find ’em if you know how to look and when to jump on a deal!
