NEPTUNE



Dan Electro Guitars & Basses

Danelectro Jizzblaster:

Pro I:

Sitar Twins

Freaky collection of Fatdog's Danos -- circa 1968

Another one of Fatdog's bird'seye-topped Danelectros

Longhorn Trio













New/old stock Neptune Pager

Custom Danelectro Project in progress

using old Danelectero stuff

Now for the necks

Two Danelectros

Proof of Life -- still alive -- Danelectro!

Baritone Jizzcaster

Dan Electro Baritone

...And a few more pixs of Spring 2002 projects in progress:

Dan Electro Custom Jimmy Page (lefty)

Fatdog Working the Neck

Freddie Roulette and Fatdog

Levitating Project

Finished neck

The Dan E Jizzcaster

DanE Jizzcaster

Baddest boy in town. Long-scale Brazilian. Wide fretboard. Two tubes in series - parallel with phaze. $600



















Black Daneleectro Jimmy Page 2-pickup $500



Danelectro Jizzcaster solid body $400



50's baby-blue Danelectro longhorn $800



Black new/old stock 60s Danelectro longscale dual tube. Badest boy in town. $600



Dan Electro baritone. Formica top convertible 30" scale length. One lipstick p-up. $400



Coral longhorn bass-Hagstrom. 2X2 neck, Hag HB. $300



Dan Electro 50s 6-string longhorn. Baby-blue refin, 24-fret, stacked pots. $1000



Electric Sitar Similar to Dan-E. Buzz yur brains out. This really works. $400











* Fender®, Strat® and Jazz Bass® are all registered trademarks of the Fender Musical Instrument Corporation.





FatDog's Dedication to Dan Electros

An historical perspective, spiced with talk of new hybrids to come.





A guy called up once and told of his dad working at an army base in New Jersey (electronic engineering division). He said alot of technicians lost their security clearance for failure to take McCarthy's loyalty oath and Nat Danials hired them. He said when he was a boy, these new Dan E workers still visited his dad, who kept his job at the base, and brought over kinky, weird electric guitars they were developing.



As I mentioned earlier about prototypes: once a teenager from New Jersey called up and wanted to know if I was interested in these weird Dan E guitars that he and his mom found while cleaning out their basement. Of course I bought them. And I bet his dad was one of those fired army electronic engineers.



Fatdog



Ramblings With Masonite

The first time I set my paws to a Danelectro was 1968 jn the back hall of Randy Prune's store. Randy became Randall Smith of Mesa Boogie. Prune Music was a '60s Berkeley vision of a used music shop. Its back hall was one step from the trash. He showed me a Masonite curiosity accompanied by a fiberglass Supra a la the White Stripes. He gave me the Supra and I left the Masonite for someone else. Prune eventually moved and was replaced by Guitar Resurrection. Sales and repairs were run by Larry Jameson and his pal Mike Stevens (who went on to work in Fender's Custom Shop). There we put "Danelectros in tuxedos," as Larry used to say. He was a large influence on my obsession with these proletarian guitars. We souped up Silvertones, put Fender and humbucking pickups in Danelectros, refinished them, upgraded their gears and bridges. The commune of Berkeley's music clientele were hippy musicians like Country Joe MacDonald, Creedence Clearwater, Santana, Sons of Chaplin, Moby Grape, Dan Hicks and Terry Garthwaite's Joy Of Cooking.

Larry's old school sign painting career gave him a creative eye, superb craftwork and a daring touch. He'd take a guitar to the bandsaw and reshape it like a barber drastically changing someone's hairstyle. We'd be awestruck when he'd cut away a Gibson L5 or a Super 400. Once he scored a stack of flame maple classical guitar backs he started overlaying and binding anything solid, including Danelectros. Beautiful sunburst longhorns and U2s resulted. Mike Stevens once swapped me something for a long scale solid-body Danelectro jazz bass. When he was done with it, it had become a cream and black gem, an object of real beauty. Over the years, even in Fender's custom shop, he would call me and marvel at how awesome his bass still was. One time, Howard Klepper and I were carrying a huge 2X14 foot slab of oak for a Danelectro body which was to be overlaid with a veneer of redwood burl. It slipped from his hands and my back still remembers it four decades later.

Now it's 1972. Enter the Moose, a.k.a. Mark Silber, just back from Tangier. He was the dude that was King of old axes. His old Greenwich; village store was legendary for 30's Martins, Gibsons and Everything cool that was played in the 60's. People made pilgrimages to see his- inventory of banjos, mandolins, old guitars and curiosities, myself included. He left for North Africa in 1968, and when he came back to Berkeley four years later we bonded over Danelectros. We swapped and traded all sorts of masonite and poplar. One time I found a Dano in the Berkeley dump, half in the mud like a fossil. I refurbished it and still play it today.

In the mid seventies Ralph Novak restored and tuxedoed some Danelectros. During the punk heyday in the San Francisco area, Danelectros, Voxes and Supros were in, and we were the ones with the goods. Most needed improvements in wiring, gears or bridge to be up to pro standards. It's ironic; I didn't at all like the punk sound or philosophy, being a jazz, latin and blues listener, but the movement, fad and its sound really put us on the map, and made me the long green.

Nat Lane had a huge store on 3rd Ave and lllth St. in New York, and for reasons unknown gave me hundreds of weird and demented guitars which I sold and then sent him payments. This inventory gave me the goods and notoriety. Bands like the Psychotic Pineapple, Dead Kennedys, Lucky Stiffs and the Rubinoos played and popularized these Danelectros and offbeat guitars. Eric Drew Feldman of Captain Beefheart and NRBQ and Jesse Colin Young played longhorn basses. John Seabury, rock artist, musician and cartoonist glamorized these guitars in band posters and Subway adds.

In '83 came the big explosion or disaster. Lou Rose music in Edison New Jersey salvaged thousands of Danelectro parts and couldn't find a buyer. He lucked onto me, and after a little negotiating I received about four thousand new old stock Danelectro necks, bodies and parts. This became fodder for the Subway crew to chomp into. All sorts of mutations sprouted up; one of a kind mutts or formulated new models were created. The parts included: two Danelectro pickup winders, unopened boxes of pickup tubes from Bridgeport Mills destined to be drugstore lipstick caps, templates and routing jigs, control plates, wiring harnesses and knobs. If you were a guitar builder or into Danelectros, you would flip out and faint just from opening these cartons. Guitar Player Magazine wrote a few articles and photographed some of these artifacts.

We turned out obscene baritones, 12 string solid-bodies, mando-cellos, sitar-creations, nine-strings, teardrop and fiddle basses, righty and lefty fireflys; we made a lefty Firefly model for the guitarist of Operation Ivy, now of Rancid, and he loved it so much he got four more. The ultra loud feedback vibrated them apart onstage. The word was out. Cecil Gulickson in Florida had previously bought a huge inventory to convert to his Condor Guitar synthesizer. His project flopped and he sold his pile to me. Tony Mark of New York Oty sold and traded a huge stash of oddball necks and bodies to me. Then I got a call leading to the most bizarre Danelectros ever. A kid in New Jersey said his dad worked for a local guitar company and had a lot of unidentifiable stuff in his basement. I said send it out, well evaluate it and pay. When that shit came in, I was in awe. My jaw dropped and I almost keeled over. Guitars with big trapdoors in the back, with sixty-seven and one-half volt batteries built in and tubes, non­ cutaway Ul with Zoloton, pre-lipstick tube pickups that had a molded, casted cover, three-pickup amp and case models, thinline beveled Hornets, Jizzblasters with elliptical bodies, the Jimmy Page prototype which I later gave to him.

Over the years there've been many imitations of the Danelectro style, some of them flattery on the verge of theft. There was an Italian-made sixties longhorn with a copper sunburst and faux-lipstick tubes called the Dynelectron. Hondo in Japan made a longhorn bass-and-guitar-lin. Saint-Louis Music / Ampeg made some series-l0 longhorns and Jimmy Page styles. Silvertones were actually made by Danelectro for Sears. The '60's Coral bodies made in Japan were built into some weird guitars. Jerry Jones made high-quality replicas of Danelectros, as did the Evets Corporation in this century.

My outrageous accumulation of Dano stock aside, the '80s were a time of pointy metal dreckschticks, and '50's and '60's stuff wasn't happening. In the nineties a hint of retro was in, and we started remanufacturing Vox teardrop guitars and basses using a hodgepodge of these parts. Out came Mando-cello longhorns which multi-instrumentalists like Ry Cooder, David Lindley, Jackson Browne, Billy Bragg and Tysco Del Ray added to their arsenal of sounds. We made a baritone for Polly Harvey that she-loves. Charlie- Hunter's mom worked at subway in the m1d-70s as a repair tech, and later on I made Charlie his first seven string jazz guitar. That inspired me to cobble together Danelectro stuff to create the seven string "Hunt" model, an L5 sized archtop with a round hole.

I've continued making a six-string version of that guitar which Taj Mahal loves, called the Maestro model, a 17" acoustic-electric jazz box reminiscent of a Howard Roberts Epiphone, all from '60's parts. The FD-30., a tribute to Grant Green, is an ES-33-0 style: guitar made from Firefly components and, P90 pickups. Larry Craven is building solid body Florentine mando-cellos from old short scale necks. Srecho Papic, a Sloventan sitar player, built 00 hollow-body sitars using Danelectro stuff. I recently crafted some long-scale Pro-l's, adding a- mother of toilet-seat pearloid '50's tabletop for the pickguard. We made a baritone Pro-l for Cheap Trick.

At some point we started experimenting with custom wiring and eventually developed our Subway wiring system. We utilize two push-pull pots; the volume has a series-parallel switch on it, the tone has phase-reversal. Traditional Danelectros use both pickups in series, like a humbucker with the coil . separated at the neck and bridge, and this gives them their unique voice, blending the harmonics across a wide divide of string length. Our wiring keeps the simple zen aesthetic but allows a new wealth of tonal modes.

Today, Jizzblasters are the thing. Six-strings, twelves, baritones. The're solidbody Danelectros using new old stock necks and a German carve around the top. We do a variety of finishes ranging from tasteful stains to grotesque Van Goghian gobs of paint. We get commissions for all sorts of hybridizations of new and old, like Jizzblasters with Bigsby trems, and P-90s mixed with humbuckers in front of tele bridges.

It never ceases to amaze me how much Danelectros continue to resonate with multiple generations of musicians. Some are drawn by the funky vintage look, some by the now irreplaceable Brazilian-rosewood fretboards on broad, parallel-truss-rod necks. Some Dano afficionados are devotees of the peculiar lipstick tube tone; some want one just because that's what Mark Knopfler or Jimmy Page played. Really, it's a combination of all of the above, a cheeky blend of functionality and mojo. Check out www.fatdawg.com and click on the little dog saying, "Pull my paw," and you'll see what it's all about.

Woof, Arf, and Bow-Wow,

Fatdog



PERSPECTIVE on Dan Electro

Now I'm going to talk to you about "the disease."

Ordering Merchandise

Here are five key points to put your mind at ease:

Your purchase will definitely arrive in good, undamaged condition AND in a timely manner.





Your purchase is insured against damage in transit.





If you don't like what you've ordered, you can return it within two weeks of purchase.





You have the option of a full CASH refund or a trade-in for something else you like. All you pay is the return shipping, which amounts to about $10 within the Continental United States.





You just can't lose.

Policy