Having looked at the most expensive electric guitars offered in 1960s – over 50 years ago. Traditional makers – Gibson, Guild, and Gretsch – concentrated on flashy amplified archtops that retailed up into the $700 to $800 range – beautiful instruments, but not representative of where the electric guitar was going. More forward-looking makers offered high-quality solidbody instruments topping out around $400, notably Gibson’s Les Paul Custom and Fender’s new Jazzmaster.
As odd as it may seem today, in 1960, most guitar makers shied away from the proven (but non-traditional) true solidbody. Gretsch and Guild offered guitars the same size and shape as a Les Paul, but with a chambered semi-hollow body. Harmony and Kay, masters of the budget option, also went this route with cheaper, but conceptually similar, instruments.
Arguably the most forward-looking-and long-lasting of this design came from the New Jersey shore; Nathan Daniel’s Danelectro company took an extremely utilitarian approach, untethered to traditional guitar-making concepts. The firm’s motto was, “The highest quality and the most moderate price go together when it’s a Danelectro,” and they meant it! Everything Danelectro sold was absolutely built to a price, but with Daniel’s creative engineering, often amazingly functional. This resulted in a catalog where the de facto top of the line had a lower list price than some makers’ least expensive offering. Both the Guild and Gretsch price lists from 1960 bottomed out with single-pickup/non-cutaway archtop guitars at more than $150; Gibson had the plain-but-functional single-pickup Melody Maker at $100. Danelectro offered the “Standard” two-pickup model (a.k.a. “Jimmy Page”) a dual-pickup electric semi-hollowbody as a pro-level model at the same $100 list. So what was the most expensive offering from New Jersey’s pride exactly 50 years ago?
Danelectro’s actual highest-priced offering varied year by year, but the consistent “top of the line” title-holder (for a six-string guitar, anyway) was the immortally stylish Model 4123 Guitarlin (“Guitar+Mandolin”) often remembered as the “Longhorn guitar.” Along with the matching Longhorn Bass (four- and six-string) it was introduced in the 1958 catalog at the price of $150 – not top of the line quite yet. For that year only, the also new three-pickup Model 3031 Standard guitar was more expensive, at $165. This changed in the 1959-’60 catalog, when the three-pickup Standard was replaced by a new three-pickup Deluxe (Model 6036-7; the difference being trim and wiring) with the price dropped to $145; the Standards topped out with the $100 twin-pickup Model 3021. The Longhorns debut was alongside the double-cutaway re-designed Standard models; the previous single-cutaway style was retired.
Reportedly, the Guitarlin’s lyre-like body shape started as a doodle by Nathan Daniel. Stylistically, it’s unmatched as one of the most distinctive-looking instruments ever. It’s actually the same body frame as the double-cut shorthorn, with chunks of Masonite, poplar, and air removed, creating the sweeping, deep, symmetrical cutaways. All are built using the same flat-sided semi-hollowbody construction of Masonite and pine with a poplar neck, but the Longhorn’s smaller body cavity has less hollow space than other Danos, with a correspondingly brighter tone. In typical Dano fashion, guitar and bass share components; though the extra-long neck blanks are not identical, many parts are the same, while most hardware is common across the range. Both use a characteristic bronze-to-white sunburst specific to Danelectro. “Alert guitarists will quickly appreciate the musical possibilities and showmanship offered by this new guitar” ran the ad copy, with “showmanship” being the key word!
The main practical advantage of the Guitarlin was its 31-fret extended neck which “shades into the mandolin range” as Danelectro put it. The fingering is pretty cramped at the top end, but is quite playable. Of course, the actual selling point was its absolutely wicked looks, combined with the low price! Sound-wise, it’s pretty typical Dano – clean and crisp at lower volume, shading to snarly when cranked. There was no true “bass” pickup on the Guitarlin (it would have had to be on the extended fingerboard!) but Nat Daniel had a way around that.
The Longhorns – guitar and bass – feature an oddball wiring circuit shared only with the contemporary “Deluxe” models. Instead of the concentric Tone and Volume setup used on the familiar Silvertone and Danelectro Standard guitars, the Longhorns use stacked pots that function as on/off (the top) with a Volume control underneath. The unlikely-looking “flipper” switch tips (made of painted wood!) are peculiar to this system. There is no tone control… the tone setting is built into the pots with large capacitors wired into the circuit. “Each feather-touch pointer turns its corresponding pickup on or off,” says the catalog. “Each pickup is pre-tuned to emphasize its own range; treble, middle or bass. This results in the simplest, fastest selection of truly different tone colors.”
Unfortunately, the result is also the user never hears the natural sound of the pickups… the large bass and treble emphasis caps are always engaged. The most useful tones are generally found by keeping both pickups on and blending the volumes, but many players have lost patience with this system and re-wired the guitars more conventionally. This particular concentric pot also seems crankier in action than the more common double-taper versions; original Guitarlins sometimes suffer irritating ground-outs and unexpected electrical failures. Daniel’s usual foolproof engineering seems to have been missing, or perhaps simply overthought, in this case, and one wonders if the Guitarlin might have proved more popular with the simpler, more user-friendly wiring of the Standard model.
Despite this oddity, the Guitarlin is such a striking and logical design, it seems surprising it’s not more commonly encountered. There are several other possible contributing factors; Danelectro did so much business with Sears, Roebuck & Company – some sources claim up to 85 percent of the company’s output went out as Silvertones – the Danelectro brand may have languished as an orphan in its own home. Add to that the fact the brand was viewed as budget-concious, dealers may have been reluctant to order the company’s higher-priced offerings and concentrated on the proven Standard and Convertible models listing at $100 and below. These were built in huge numbers and are still common today, but the Deluxe series and the Longhorns qualify as rare. The Guitarlin underwent few production variations; changes were the “skate key” Danelectro-made tuners in place of Klusons (circa 1963) and the addition of the “Totally Shielded” sticker on the headstock (and the actual copper foil wrapping the pots inside) a couple of years before. While the “flipper” knob tops were commonly pictured in the catalog, not all Guitarlins appear to have been originally fitted with them, although it’s hard to say precisely as many have been removed by guitarists irritated by the ease of “flipping” the guitar into unintended silence with an errant pick stroke!
In the early ’60s there was one instrument listed by Danelectro at a higher price – $175 to be exact – but it wasn’t strictly a “single” guitar. This is the Model 3923 Doubleneck guitar/bass, often now referred to as the “Stan & Dan” model because of a famously brilliant LP cover featuring that country/gospel duo displaying a brace of them. This LP was shown in Tom Wheeler’s American Guitars in 1982 and the name has been attached to the model ever since. The doubleneck debuted in ’59, using typical modular Dano construction, and is essentially a single-pickup Shorthorn guitar and bass built onto one large bronze/white sunburst body. The stock bass neck is extra-short with only 15 frets and both it and the guitar have only a neck pickup, so neither has much sound range. While a useful “double” and undoubtedly a good value, with only basic electronics and a lot of hollow space in the body it was not Danelectro’s most versatile-sounding creation. Still, at less than a third the price of a twin-neck Gibson, there were enough customers to keep in the line for seven years. In retrospect, it’s too bad the Doubleneck was never offered as a guitar/six-string bass combination (some have been subsequently converted).
Another new Danelectro debuted in ’63 which took over the “top” priced spot-the 12-string/two-pickup Bellzouki Model 7020, which sold for the whopping (for a Dano) price of $210. Perhaps Vinnie Bell’s royalty pushed the price up a bit! The Longhorns remained the highest-priced regular guitar and bass offered; these two were more obviously specialty instruments. Jed Clampett once played a Doubleneck on the “Beverly Hillbillies,” chosen of course for its looks…
The Guitarlin did find some spotty fame in the ’60s. The most notorious professional user was Link Wray, who was pictured in perfect guitar-hero mode – bomber jacket, creepers and Longhorn – on the cover of his 1960 LP Link Wray and the Wraymen. It’s also worth seeking out a fabulous (if blurry) clip of him playing his Danelectro on “The Jack Spector Show” (a local DJ-hosted TV showcase) in 1960; the song is “Trail Of The Lonesome Pine” and there are guitar close-ups aplenty. Why this forbiddingly cool combination of player and instrument didn’t instantly sell thousands of Guitarlins to impressionable teens remains a puzzle, but the Longhorn does not seem to have scored another such high profile user in the US. Link himself, ever sensitive to the charms of a cool-as-ice guitar, switched to a Polaris White Firebird III by 1964!
Soon afterward, the Guitarlin had another burst of popularity, this time in the home of the British invasion. Before ’64, the Danelectro line was unknown in the U.K.; sometime in late ’64 or early ’65, Selmer – probably casting about for any electric 12-string to compete with Rose-Morris’ Rickenbacker – came upon the Bellzouki and began importing them. Other models followed and for a brief time, Danos were a positive rage in London. An early pop star adopter was Graham Nash of the Hollies, who in the fall of ’65 appeared on the cover of Beat Instrumental, his guitar is already missing one set of knobs! This brought a flurry of letters to the BI offices, which required a special answer a month later.
Guitarlins and Longhorn basses seemingly appeared in the U.K. by late-summer ’65, distributed by Selmer and costing 70 guineas… In February ’66 they were mentioned as being recently in short supply but newly restocked, at the new price of only 60 guineas. By June of ’66, the “walls were bursting with them” according to BI, but it seems the fad for the unusual instrument had already passed.
The Who’s Pete Townshend is occasionally pictured with a Guitarlin in 1965-’66. Some reports suggest this was primarily due to the low cost, and Townshend would conveniently shoulder the Dano just before the act’s destructive finale! A ’66 ad for Premier drums shows the Who with matching Longhorns. Townshend used the shorthorn Standard model around the same time, and in 1967-’68 played and endorsed the Coral Hornet, a solidbody Jaguar-esque creation from Neptune. To complete the Guitarlin’s “mod” credentials, Steve Marriott of the Small Faces played (or at least posed with) one in ’66. Two such style-conscious players were certainly the sort of “alert guitarists” to “…appreciate the showmanship offered” as Danelectro had hoped in ’59!
In ’67, Nathan Daniel sold Danelectro to entertainment conglomerate MCA, and priorities changed. Though not included in the ’67/’68 full-color Danelectro/Coral catalog, Longhorns were offered on separate one-sheets sometimes still seen with them, indicating production ran close to the demise of the company, when it was heartlessly folded by its corporate owner in late ’68. The price was still listed at $150 – remarkably unchanged over 10 years! By that point, there were many Coral models (including a Deluxe Longhorn-style built on a laminated wood, arched body sourced from Kawai in Japan) listed at higher prices, but no more expensive Danelectro-branded instruments. None of the company’s endorsers in this period were pictured with Longhorns, which appear to have been regarded as old hat. Still, the Guitarlin met its demise as the highest-ranked Danelectro guitar – pretty much where it came in!
Even after the Danelectro company itself folded, the unmistakable Longhorn design lived on. The first revival came about while the original was still in production – the Dynelectron guitar and bass, an amazingly close imitation built (or at least distributed) by Meazzi in Milan, Italy, from the mid ’60s up into the ’70s. The Dynelectron was, in some ways, better-made than the original, with plywood instead of Masonite top and an adjustable truss rod in the neck. These European clones are now somewhat collectible in their own right. In the late ’70s, the general shape was copied by Hondo II (of Japan) in a solid, humbucker-equipped guitar and bass set. More accurate re-creations of the original Danos have been offered in recent times by Jerry Jones and the modern Danelectro company.
The Guitarlins are mostly remembered for their pure style, but like all Nathan Daniel designs, are practical if quirky instruments. Few times in the history of the electric guitar has so much been offered for so little, and the top of the line – literally and figuratively – come so cheap!
Next month, we’ll follow the Longhorn story down – way down, into the bass department, where the design has prospered even more over the last 50 years.
This article originally appeared in VG’s October 2010 issue. All copyrights are by the author and Vintage Guitar magazine. Unauthorized replication or use is strictly prohibited.
