This is a 1963 vintage Danelectro Silvertone AMP-IN-CASE guitar and amplifier, model 1457. This auction includes the guitar and case as pictured. Every piece & part on this guitar and case is original. The guitar features Dual lipstick pickups, stacked piggy back knobs, pickup toggle, and clean original finish.

Everything on this baby is nice. It's real hard for me to to part with this particular one, because I like it so much. The guitar is very clean. The guitar is a 9 out of 10. The amp/case rates at an 8. The neck is with only a tiny ding (pictured). She's straight & a real player. It has a bright deep tone.

This is the hardest working rhythm, lead & slide guitar I’ve ever seen.

You can really pound on it, with NO FRET BUZZ! Chords ring like a chorus. It stays in tune all the way up the fretboard. You can bang on it, as if it were a big-ass acoustic.

THIS Guitar is in great shape along with glowing white side-vinyl and crisp pickguard. If you are looking for a rare red & white DUAL LIPSTICK PICKUP Amp-in-Case.. This IS the one.     

A DANO AMP-IN-CASE
PRISTINE CONDITION.
Superb Razortone Electronics & natural acoustic sustain.   

       

Mick Jagger uses this exact Red & White Silvertone model to perform his Lead Guitar (slide style) on the new tour/album.. to record/perform the song “Back of My Hand”...critically acclaimed as his best effort since 1978.

Jagger bought the guitar out of the Sears catalog in 1963, and then formed the Rolling Stones in 1964. Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood have also used Mick's guitar in the studio.                    

All Across the board, this is an ax of epic proportion!  

The sound that comes out of those handwound single coil lipstick pickups is bright, warm, and clear.

THIS Guitar single handedly

started the Rock & Roll Revolution. 

It started it all by being the first guitar of millions.
We all learned on it.

Read my story below & the information on how it all began.

That SOUND!  Historical significance is one thing, but sound is all that matters on stage.

This one will BLOW YOU AWAY.

Wants to be played!! Please don't buy this thing to show it off--it wants to be beaten silly on a stage. The action is perfect for my taste, I've played dozens of these things & this guitar is far above the fray!

Danelectro's  ingeniously  simple design works smoothly, positively, and accurately. Gleaming black lacquer sparkle finish with white pickguard and trim. This is a really nice & ultra-clean Danelectro which will be appreciated by both players and collectors.

All Across the board, this is an ax of epic proportion!  

The sound that comes out of those handwound single coil lipstick pickups is bright, warm, and clear.

 

He worked with  Nat Daniel, founder of Danelectro Guitars, to create a good quality, yet inexpensive guitar for the beginner.

What they got was an Excellent guitar that stands the test of time.

Combining the amp-in-case was Joe's idea.

Putting the pickup in a lipstick tube was definitely Nat's.

 Good ol' Grand-Dad-Electro!

 

"These guitars are my grandfather's legacy." -- C. Daniel Fisher

I own many of these, and no two are alike. They all have their different qualities. THIS one's great for slide. The frets on this Ax are mint. I'm talkin' shine. This Guitar's fretboard is liquid SMOOTH.

Your fingers just want to keep glide'n on it. It's my definition of sweet playability. Best described as having ROCKIN spring to the feel, you'll just want to keep whompin' on it!

Not many people know that these guitars are actually semi-hollow. As a result of the genius of how they are constructed, & what they are made of, the guitar is light as a feather & it sings like an acoustic.  

A+  playability.
Action is set perfect    
However, its Fully adjustable to your taste, but why mess with perfection?                

This Guitar STANDS ALONE, 
And the Bridge & Rosewood Saddle on this Ax?

THEY BOTH ARE MINT. 

Brazilian Rosewood Fretboard.

American Made. 

Guaranteed original--never a repro or reissue!!

This vintage Dano is READY TO PLAY!

I've included my dad's blog about our families connection with Silvertone. It's called...“THE FATHER OF THE SILVERTONE GUITAR”. I've also included a page from my Grandfather's book titled "Tales of a Dinosaur". It's from his Auto-bio, the real Silvertone-Danelectro story told from his perspective.   When you look at these pics, bear in mind that the shiny white areas that appear to be on the body are only just reflections of the sun and clouds. This guitars body & black sparkle finish IS really sleek, clean & excellent.

NEAR MINT. Side Vinyl GLOWS Ultra White. The inside of the case is Sleek and Clean. Dano's Electric!   (Photo Art Montage)             My Grandfather was the principle buyer for Sears Roebuck Musical Instruments from 1959 to 1968. He eventually moved up the corporate ladder, all the way until he became the Vice President of Sears Roebuck in 1980! He worked equally along with Danelectro and Harmony. They were suppliers to him. He personally took part in the creative design process by working with the suppliers, figuring specifications and pricing of the guitars, to finalize the finished product to sell. A big part of his job was to market the guitars to the public, who at that time for the most part, were parents buying them for their kids. The Amp-Case was a revelation in terms of quality & affordability. Electric guitars were very expensive because of all the vital accessories that were needed to achieve sound. Basically, you couldn't have an electric guitar without an amp.. The revelation occurred when Joe put all the accessories together in a single inexpensive package. This was something that the whole country could afford. And so, with 50 bucks alone, Dad's across America could buy their sons an instrument to learn on, and they could discover the joys of rock & music. And yet, at the same token, if it didn't work out, there would be no harm done. In terms of money spent, at least they would have tried. Some kids would play a few chords for awhile, get bored & would then want a more expensive so-called "name brand" guitar. Back in the day Silvertone Danos hadn't gotten the true respect that they have earned today. I believe that these guitars are comparable to the best around.. They weren't supposed to be though. Was it luck? How can a experimental guitar built insanely cheap, with raw materials like masonite, and surplus lipstick tubes, sound any good at all? In my opinion, it was a combination of many things.. The magic of string tones traveling through the aluminum nut, across the rosewood fretboard, resonationing themselves through the lightweight & semi hollow masonite body, and finally, those same string tones careening forth and coming together to pierce wickedly as a thunderbolt, into the hand-wound single coil Lipstick Tube pickup. This is how Danelectro  ELECTRIFIED  the heavens!  Anyway some of these Amp-Cases eventually got thrown away, by the very same person who originally bought them (dad), but yet still, a lucky few were stashed away, as Amp-Cases hidden & frozen in the attics of time.. Only to be found again, discovered & uncovered as real time capsules. We now in this current era 45 years in the future, realize that these Relics ARE EXCELLENT Axes, all along. Silvertone Amp-Case Dano stand the test of time! Curtis D. Fisher Check out this Silvertone 606! (it's an heirloom & not for auction) Harmony gave this guitar to him in commemoration in 1962. It was the first one ever made in Harmony's new plant. The Silvertone 606 was Joe Fisher's first major selling Success. Joe explains more about it, and how the amp-case idea began in his book excerpt below. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ The following is an excerpt from my Grandfather's auto-biography titled,       “Tales of a Dinosaur” ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------       MAGNETIC LIPSTICK TUBES??? Guitars were important because of their high unit volume and profitability. The Danelectro Company was a supplier of electric guitars and amplifiers. Nat Daniel was the founder, president and sole owner, who in addition to amplifiers also introduced the affordable solid body electric guitar in the early fifties. Today the Danelectro brand is a collector’s item among guitar aficionados. Nat was an innovator who understood the principle of “rigid control of expense,” an example of which was his innovative and inexpensive guitar magnetic pickups used in electric guitars. He made them from surplus lipstick tubes, bought from a cosmetics manufacturer. He inserted the electronics in the tubes and produced the lowest cost guitar pickup in the industry. An acoustic guitar, manufactured by the Harmony Company was our biggest unit seller in 1954, priced at $9.95 in Sears catalog. It was a beginner's guitar and many serious amateurs, some of whom later became professionals, learned to play on their Silvertone, stock number 605. I asked Nat if he could do something with a low priced electric guitar that would appeal to the same beginner's market as the 605. He did and we enjoyed resounding success with this exclusive innovation that included the guitar with an amplifier built in to the case, sale priced at $49.95. I think the reason I respected people like Nat Daniel was because he disagreed when he thought my ideas were off base, even though I, representing Sears, was his economic life-line. How different from the “Tell me what I want to hear not what you really think” malaise of my corporate life. Joseph N. Fisher   A picture of my Grandfather Joseph N. Fisher & Nathan Daniel. They are the Grand-dad-Electro's of the Silvertone:   Inventors.. Innovators.. Men of Visionary Magnitude.   An original Sears catalog advertisement, Look in the upper left hand corner & you'll see Joe's face in the ad. Dig Silvertones? BUY A SHIRT! My Signature Silvertone shirt styles are available for the low price of $8.95 (depending on the exclusive design) Professionally silk screened & Brand New, they are one of a kind & very cool! to check 'em out! This is a picture of the man himself and me. (back in the day)   George Harrison Jimmy Page rocks Danos Nathan I. Daniel September 23, 1912 – December 24, 1994 Danelectro Founder & Inventor   By Howard E. Daniel Electric guitar and amplifier pioneer Nathan I. Daniel suffered a heart attack and died in Honolulu December 24, at the age of 82. Daniel moved to Hawaii in 1974 from New Jersey after a pioneering career as an inventor, designer and manufacturer of musical instrument amplifiers and electric guitars, in which field he was granted at least eight patents. He was best known nationally for his Danelectro brand amplifiers and guitars, which he stopped making in 1969, and which have since achieved collector status. In Hawaii, Daniel was better known for his invention, in 1978, of the SuperOutrigger, an entirely new type of oceangoing craft designed to bring interisland passenger ferry service back to the 50th state.   Early Years Born in New York City in 1912, less than a year after his parents immigrated to the United States to escape the persecution of Jews in czarist Russian-ruled Lithuania, Daniel had to repeat the first grade because he could not speak English. At some point during his second time around, as he later stated, “it was as if someone turned the lights on one day, and suddenly I understood everything.” He then went on to skip several grades and graduated high school ahead of his contemporaries. Daniel developed an early interest in radio, still in its infancy during his teenage years. He dropped out of the City College of New York during the Depression and began assembling and selling amplifiers of his own design. It was during this period, in the 1930s, that he designed and began manufacturing a push-pull amplifier circuit that tested “flat” (provided equal response across the full range of sound frequencies) to the limit of then-existing test equipment. He did not try to patent his invention because he could not afford the expense. Daniel's first “factory” was his bedroom in his parents' New York City apartment. Later he moved his small manufacturing operation to a loft in Lower Manhattan. During World War II, Daniel served as a civilian designer for the U.S. Army Signal Corps at Fort Monmouth, N.J. Among the other problems he worked on at that time, he found a simple and economical way to equip military motorcycles with shielding to prevent the electronic “noise” their engines generated from interfering with the reception of critical battlefield radio messages.   Danelectro At the end of the war, Daniel left the Signal Corps and reopened his amplifier manufacturing business in Red Bank, N.J., near Fort Monmouth. He called it the Danelectro (coined from “Daniel electric”) Corp., and over the next two and a half decades produced what Guitar World in July 1983 called “an impressive number of electric instruments … distinguished in their design innovations [and] their quality at a budget price….” He soon won contracts to make musical instrument amplifiers for two major national retailers, Sears Roebuck and Montgomery Ward, which were sold under their own brand names. For about two decades Danelectro was the sole supplier of Sears' Silvertone amplifiers. Danelectro began making electric guitars, with their trademark “lipstick tube” pickups, in 1954. By the time Daniel sold the business, in 1966, to MCA, Danelectro – by then located in a much larger plant in Neptune City, N.J. – employed about 500 people and was shipping an average of more than a full trailer-truckload of amplifiers and guitars every day. The Danelectro years were marked by a series of innovations. Daniel secured patents on, among other things, vibrato and reverberation (“reverb”) systems, a speaker cabinet with an inclined baffle, an electric organ that foreshadowed the principle of some of today's synthesizers (but which he never produced commercially), and the electric sitar (which faithfully reproduced the unique sound of the classical Indian instrument but could easily be played by any guitarist). Daniel did not patent most of his innovations, which also included the first six-string electric bass (1956); a 31-fret “Guitarlin” (1958) with a deeply cut-away “longhorn” body that enabled a guitarist to play an extra 10 frets to cover the mandolin range; an amplifier and speaker built into a guitar carrying case (the amp and guitar were sold, inexpensively, as a set for beginners); a “convertible” acoustic/electric guitar; total shielding of guitar circuits to protect against hum produced by neon signs, motors or similar sources of electrical interference; guitar necks that never warped because they were reinforced with twin steel I-beams; the use of inexpensive, yet strong and stable composite materials in both amplifier cabinets and guitar bodies; a guitar neck-tilt adjustment system “nearly identical [as Guitar World put it] to the one [another manufacturer] used – except that Danelectro did it a decade earlier and didn't bother to patent it.” Besides designing all of Danelectro's products, Daniel came up with simple, time- and cost-saving manufacturing equipment and processes for each of them. Though MCA closed the business in 1969, in recent years manufacturers in both the United States and Japan have been making Danelectro replicas, and there is a lively market for real Danelectro products and original parts. When he learned, several years ago, of the continuing interest in the major portion of his life's work, Daniel expressed surprise, gratification and bemusement. The above is an excerpt of a news release written and distributed to the media by Nathan Daniel's son Howard in December 1994. Obituaries and tributes appeared, inter alia, in the New York Times (12/30/94), Newsday (12/30/94), Asbury Park (N.J.) Press (12/29/94), Honolulu Advertiser (12/29/94), Honolulu Star-Bulletin (12/29/94), Pacific Business News (1/2/95), Rolling Stone (2/23/95), Vintage Guitar (February 1995), Guitar Player (May 1995); MTV also ran a short feature on him. © Howard E. Daniel, 1994. For the full text, go to www.pen4rent.com/pen4rent/tribute.aspx   © Howard E. Daniel, 2007   www.pen4rent.com Heres Syd Barrett rocking his Danelectro Melissa Etheridge     WHAT is a Vintage GUITAR? "Vintage" is a term that has acquired a new meaning apart from its original usage. The term is a combination of Vint (of the vine) and Age (time of creation). This term is used in the wine industry to indicate a wine's harvest date. The use of "vintage" has been modified by collectors to mean old, such as a Vintage Car, or Vintage Clothing. This extension of the meaning is used in guitar terminology to mean "an original, older guitar." Most collectors value guitars from the mid 1920s to 1970. Guitars prior to the mid 1920s are too primitive in design for most collectors. Guitars after 1970, even though they are over 30 years old, have little collectible appeal. All the U.S. guitar manufacturers were in dire straits during the 1970s. Most were bought out by larger conglomerates looking to make guitars as quickly as possible. People ask me if I think brand-new 2008 guitars will be valuable in the future. Frankly, I just don't know. But my off-the-cuff response would be, "no". The materials, environment and society of pre-1970 was much different, thus producing different instruments which I feel can not be duplicated today. For Example, Brazilian Rosewood (used on Silvertone-Danelectro guitars till the late 1960's) cannot be legally imported into the U.S. Also today most guitars are made with CNC (computer controlled) routers and cutters. Thirty years ago guitars were much more of a hand-made item then they are today. Yes, a CNC-made instrument can seem more "quality controlled", But it just doesn't have the same personality of an old school made guitar. The Father of the Silvertone Guitar      Beatlemania hit America hard CW FISHER Thirteen minutes of Ed Sullivan was all it took. Girls, so placid only yesterday, could now not stop their screaming; boys, who yesterday shot baskets, could now do no better than stand around slackjawed, hands in their pockets, suffering in silence. And while most of the girls would eventually recover, millions of old men remain haunted still. Because if "cool" had been a high jump, the Beatles would have been the Empire State Building. And while hair growing might get a guy to the 50th floor, and sideburns to the 60th, maybe--the climb was as high as the price: detentions, groundings, expulsions, drafts. If a boy wanted to climb above the 70th floor he'd better play guitar. The problem was money. Electric guitars were expensive and required amplifiers that cost as much or more than the guitar itself. What prepubescent boy, impoverished by allowance and too young to work, could ever convince his parents to front him $300 for an instrument he couldn't even play, plus another $300 to crank it up louder than the hi-fi? On this point hung futures. National Headquarters - Sears, Roebuck and Company - Homan & Arthington, Chicago, Illinois. 1963 - Two men doodle in a one-man office thick with cigarette smoke. Joe Fisher, 38, is Sears new buyer of musical instruments in a time when a Silvertone guitar meant a cowboy guitar with pick and songbook, or a cowboy guitar with crank and songbook. Nathan Daniel, 51, owns Danelectro, a small manufacturer of electric guitars. Like any manufacturer of the era, he wants Sears to sign on, but Fisher would not be sold. The guitar does him no good without the amplifier. They had to be combined somehow, at an irresistible opening price point. Fisher saw the opportunities of Beatlemania, and he wanted to give American dads a break because he was getting hit up himself by his own son, who was me. So he and Nat Daniel, legendary Prince of Cheap who put pickups in lipstick tubes and preferred flecked paint because it hid the staples, put their heads together to make two things into one thing--the thing with the unfortunate name "Electric guitar and carrying case with built-in 5-in speaker and amplifier," a name that just never really caught on, though it was descriptive as heck. It would be a piece of the cheapest wood available, with masonite stapled to the flat sides, spray painted and edged with vinyl--there's the body. According to Nat, bodies don't matter in an electric guitar (in direct opposition to the ideas of Les Paul, who believed a fine electric guitar should be made of fine woods and weigh more than a sack of fine potatoes). Nat put all his attention into the neck, and here no expense was spared. His pickups were odd then and now, not because of the lipstick tubes, but because he wired them in series. This, they say, is what produced the unique Dano sound that remains locked inside the remains the entire Silvertone line, now scattered across eBay and proudly owned by collectors and still played by some of the world's finest guitar players, Les Paul being a notable exception. Throughout the sixties my father brought many of Nat's creations home for me to test, including the famous guitar and amp in a case they came up with. Of course, he could have picked them up "on accommodation," but I never had the scratch. My dad was like that. Ethical. Nat Daniel is today a legend. His guitars, under both the Danelectro and Silvertone name, have been played by an incredible array of guitar greats: Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix (pictured), Elvis Costello, Pete Townsend, J.J. Cale, John Fogerty, Jimmy Page, Tom Petty, Joe Walsh, Chris Isaak, Melissa Ethridge, Dave Navarro, Jesse Colin Young, Link Wray, Beck, Jack Bruce (Cream), John Entwistle. Even Elvis Presley. Vinnie Bell. Whom I met. It is not an overstatement to say that Silvertone guitars profoundly influenced the course of rock and roll. Without Silvertone, most sons would have failed to make up their father's minds. Their dreams of becoming rock stars would have faded fast, along with their dreams of sex and drugs. Nat Daniel retired to Hawaii and died in 1994. Joe Fisher rose to the top of Sears (not quite the top but near it) at a time when Sears was still the undisputed King of Retail America. He and my mom live in Hinsdale, Illinois. I still play a mean Silvertone, the one with the amp in the case. by CW Fisher @ 2/25/2005 © 2014 C. Daniel Fisher