The Lipstick Pickup Podcast with Emily Vardaman Walters
A lipstick pickup is an electric guitar pickup with a captivating sound and appearance that has a devoted cult following that grows with each passing year. True to their name, they were originally chrome lipstick tubes stuffed with magnets and electronics that were the inspired invention of Nathan Daniel, founder of Danelectro. Born from his genius instinct for innovation as well as his devotion to a "rigid cost control" philosophy, they were an essential component of the guitars that helped stoke an affordable rock-n-roll revolution.
The Lipstick Pickup Podcast is an amateur (but very inspired), unscripted, rarely edited conversation devoted to the entirety of the subject. Hosted by Emily Vardaman Walters, The Lipstick Pickup Podcast is a fan-friendly primer on the subject of Danelectro guitars and their impact on the history of popular music of all genres.
The Lipstick Pickup Podcast with Emily Vardaman Walters
PROOF READING THE DANELECTRO STORY WITH HOWARD DANIEL | The Lipstick Pickup Ep. 18
On this episode of The Lipstick Pickup podcast, Emily gets 411 help from Nathan Daniel's son Howard about the myth of the Lipstick Pickup and the importance of getting the Danelectro record straight. Please visit https://pen4rent.com/ for more from Howard Daniel.
"I've learned so much from you and I should have been keeping better notes, but this time we're going to have it for the record. And I hope to add this sort of approach to future episodes in my podcast where I just simply call somebody like you, 411-INFORMATION. The best approach and one of the inspirations for my podcast is the power of the telephone. I'm calling Howard to introduce him to my listeners and give some service to some great work that he's done, keeping the world informed about his father, Nat Daniel, and the world of Danelectro. They can all be found on his website, which is www.pen4, the number 4. It's pen4rent.com. which is how I met you. And then when I first started publishing the podcast, I heard from you, and we've had an occasional phone call ever since, and this one we're going to record. "
Thank you.
Speaker 01:Hi, good morning. This is Emily Vardaman Walters with the Lipstick Pickup Podcast calling for Howard Daniel.
Speaker 00:Well, you've got me.
Speaker 01:I'm Howard Daniel. Nice to talk with you, Emily. Nice to talk to you, too. Again, I can't thank you enough for taking my call today, for picking up. You've been so helpful to my podcast and my exploits. We've had some great conversations about your father. Nat Daniel and the history of the Danelectro Corporation over the last year or so. And this time we're going to record it.
Speaker 02:Great.
Speaker 01:I've learned so much from you and I should have been keeping better notes, but this time we're going to have it for the record. And I hope to add this sort of approach to future episodes in my podcast where I just simply call somebody like you, 411-INFORMATION. The best approach and one of the inspirations for my podcast is the power of the telephone. I'm calling Howard to introduce him to my listeners and give some service. to some great work that he's done, keeping the world informed about his father, Nat Daniel, and the world of Danelectro. They can all be found on his website, which is www.pen4, the number 4. It's pen4rent.com. which is how I met you. And then when I first started publishing the podcast, I heard from you, and we've had an occasional phone call ever since, and this one we're going to record. Howard is in the business content writing and editing business, and his website, it's a great summary of your professional services, but it's also got a blog that is... A great read for anybody who likes somebody as interesting and well-traveled as Mr. Howard Daniel. I think one of the first times I really started to appreciate your father now as a personality is reading your writings about him on your website. And also, the introduction to the book that I have, know and love, and am eagerly anticipating reading. a greatly expanded and revised edition of the book Neptune Bound. And to you, your original intro, because there's a new book coming out and you've got a new intro. You've got lots of new information that has been clarified, discovered since the first publication of that book. So I want to just talk about the old book and tell our listeners, most of them already anticipating this book, by the way. I am grateful. This is your words, Mr. Daniel. I am grateful to Doug. who out of admiration for the originality and quality of Danelectro guitars and amplifiers has spent over a decade of his life and a great deal of his resources in creating Neptune Bound, which he has called quote, a labor of love, unquote. It is no doubt the most comprehensive, authoritative book on the subject written to date. I am also grateful for Doug's invitation to write this introduction. The best way to do this, I realized, was to compose the tribute that follows to the man who created Danelectro, my father, Nathan I. Daniel. That was the start of your introduction in the 2007 book. So, we don't want to divulge. There's a lot of ahas and additional information, and we're not going to give away any of them today. We're going to talk about things that already need a lot more awareness in the history of the Danelectro stories, and that's what we're going to do. Great. And at the end, I'm going to give a quick teaser. At the end, I'm going to have Howard explain to me what he knows and what he does not know. about why they called them lipstick pickups and where the idea came from. But we're going to save that to the very end. I'm going to take it from the top. And one of the talking points that I admire and remember about this, because it is very much accurate about your father, was, quote, he was devoid of interest in fame or publicity, unquote. Tell my listeners about this aspect of your father's life?
Speaker 00:Well, you know, he never... Obviously, I grew up with him, and I had occasion to remain in touch with him throughout the rest of his life. He passed away at the end of 1994. And it was obvious to me, he was just not interested in fame. He... was in the business of thinking about a lot of things, but in particular, thinking about problems in the physical world. And one of the first problems that he set himself to solving was how to make a better amplifier. And this is way back when he was barely 20 years old in the early 1930s. And he came up with a revolutionary design for an amplifier. But I don't want to get into that. But what I can tell you to respond to your question about fame is that, you know, I left home when I went off to college. And then after college and grad school, I... went overseas and worked first in the Peace Corps and then in the U.S. Foreign Service, meaning at American embassies and consulates overseas. But I came back home and decided to work with him on a project that he was then engaged in, which was developing an ocean-going vessel, a boat, that could go fast and do it very smoothly in rough water and inexpensively. And that was after he had left New Jersey where I was born and grew up and where he spent most of his life. And he had gone to Hawaii after my mother passed away. There was nothing more to keep him on the east coast really and he didn't like the weather and it made him feel uncomfortable whenever in the winter time he would get a cold and couldn't shake it until the warm weather came around again in the spring so he went to Hawaii in search of a wonderful climate and he found it there of course and that's when he invented this boat and I started working with him and one of the things that I found When I worked with him on that boat project, in beginning to try to get some publicity for his boat idea, we were in touch with people in the media, and a couple of the people we were in touch with, one of them a radio broadcaster, the other a cameraman for TV, were themselves guitarists and they knew about Danelectro and they loved it and they were quite aware of the great number of innovations that my father had brought to the industry. And so he was flabbergasted that people even knew who he was and that there were, so to speak, Danelectro fans out there in the world at large. And he found them, you know, basically 5,000 miles away from New Jersey where he had I need these guitars and amplifiers.
Speaker 01:Do you think, one thing we talked about, I want to ask you, your dad was generally unaware, not of rock and roll. He was not a person that listened to rock and roll. Do you think that's one reason why he was surprised at how the notoriety of the Danelectro, because he was sort of not really involved in rock?
Speaker 00:Mm-hmm. from when he was a young guy in the early 1930s until he sold the business to MCA in 1966, I believe it was, or 67. And then just a couple of years later, when the entire guitar business... took a nosedive, which went out of business when MCA, which had bought it several years earlier, realized that business was not very good and that they just decided to liquidate their investment. So they closed this thing down. It was not just that he was not following rock. He was not following rock. the industry anymore.
Speaker 02:He
Speaker 00:completely moved on. He went to Hawaii. He enjoyed the place. He enjoyed the weather. He enjoyed the scenery and the water. And he saw something that really grabbed his attention as an innovator, which was that there were no boats. If you wanted to travel from one island to another in this archipelago, in which the main The major islands where most people live were roughly, most of them, about 100 miles from each other. You had to fly. You couldn't take a ferry because there were no ferries. And the reason there were no ferries is that the water is rough. It looks beautiful, but it's rough. And so he started to think about what sort of a vessel... would it take to provide fast, inexpensive, and smooth riding transportation between the islands? He applied his knowledge of physics to this problem, and he realized that there was no boat at that point in existence that combined all three of those characteristics, namely speed, low cost to build and operate, and a smooth ride in rough water.
Speaker 02:And
Speaker 00:so he started thinking about that, just as he had thought about various electronic problems in developing his first revolutionary amplifiers back in the early 1930s. And, you know, he was well equipped to do that. He had a very lively, innovative mind.
Speaker 01:I... To my next point, your quote, the essence of the Danelectro story is Nat Daniels' lifetime of innovation. I'm going to get you to talk about materials and things like that. Anything else you want to expand on his time in Hawaii? Was it in Honolulu where he lived? Is that right?
Speaker 00:Yes, it was in Honolulu. broader question that you asked about his lifetime of innovation. It began when he was a very young man
Speaker 02:and
Speaker 00:got interested in electronics. As I wrote in the introduction to Doug Tulloch's book, a version of which, almost identical, is on my website that you mentioned earlier in this discussion. He was probably the first kid on his block, or certainly in his neighborhood, to build a a crystal radio set and I suspect a lot of listeners today in 2025 have no idea what a crystal radio set was but in those early days you could put a few things together by hand and be able to pick up radio broadcasts and he did it as a kid I would guess he was probably in his early teens when he did this and Then he started thinking about circuitry and applied himself in particular to a way to make an amplifier which didn't exist at that point, an amplifier that could amplify sounds from the lowest lows to the highest highs within the range of human hearing. Before that, what amplifiers existed uh were able to amplify signals uh at different frequencies some frequencies better than others and so amplification might not have been so good in a high range or a low low range but he figured out a way to to get uniform amplification throughout the human range of hearing. The range of human hearing from the lowest lows to the highest highs. And that was a revolutionary breakthrough. And by the way, he never patented it
Speaker 02:because
Speaker 00:as he explained to me and anybody else who was interested, he couldn't afford a patent attorney. And so he did it and he incorporated it into amplifiers and certainly into every amplifier he ever built. But lots of other people were doing the same thing later because it was not a patent. It was not protected by a
Speaker 01:patent. Let
Speaker 00:me just, if I may go back.
Speaker 01:And
Speaker 00:so that was perhaps the earliest example of his innovativeness.
Unknown:Mm-hmm.
Speaker 00:And the latest example of his innovativeness was after his danelectrc business was sold by MCA, which had bought it in the mid-'60s, and he retired and went to Hawaii, where the weather was a lot nicer than on the East Coast, and applied himself to the problem of, hey, is there no ferry between the islands? And then realized why there wasn't, because there was no boat that could... compete with airlines in terms of relatively low cost, making the journey from one island to another quick enough to compete with an airline, and give a ride that was smooth enough so that people wouldn't be seasick in rough conditions. in rough ocean water. And he came up with a concept that met all three of those criteria. It was fast, it was inexpensive to build and inexpensive to operate, and it gave a smooth ride in rough water. No other boat in existence even today, does that. I worked with him on trying to get it commercialized, and unfortunately, we did not succeed. And the patents he got on that boat have long since expired.
Speaker 01:There are wonderful photographs of what Howard is explaining to me in this, in Neptune Bound. Do you have those photographs on your website? I'm sorry. Do you have the photographs of the outrigger, the super outrigger on your website? Yes, I do. It's
Speaker 00:in one of my blog posts. And I would have to think about, well, I don't think I want to interrupt this phone
Speaker 01:call. I
Speaker 00:would say that anybody who gets to the website, and oh yeah I believe the title of the piece that I wrote about it I wrote about it in a couple of places but there was one that was one piece that I wrote that explains it in quite some detail and I think quite clearly with photographs to go with it is titled or something very close to this title, Nat Daniel's Final Invention.
Speaker 02:Ah,
Speaker 00:okay. But if anybody gets to the website and uses the search, the little magnifying glass indicates you can search for something on the website and simply type in the words, Or the one word. It's written as though it were one word. Super Outrigger. Super Outrigger. That will come up.
Speaker 01:It's a well-organized website. I've spent time on it. And you're right. It is easy to find things you've written. I counted your blog post or essays under the subject of Danelectro. You had 16 there and a bunch of essays on your father. So there's a lot of great information in there. Your dad was a real innovator and not all of them make it up in the air, as we well know. But it was a fabulous idea. Did he travel between the islands or was he just looking at the possibility of just, it's sort of a civic nature to think about how travel could be improved, accessibility could be improved, which brings me to my next point. And I'm really excited to talk to you about this on the record. I told you in some of our conversations that my dad also made an effort for the war. He was a combat veteran. But one reason why I love reading his letters is that he was a specialist and he was in awe of all the jobs that were being done that and help the war effort from rationing to everything. And your father, I'm going to quote you exactly. During World War II, Nat Daniels served as a civilian designer for the U.S. Army Signal Corps in Fort Monmouth. Did I pronounce it right this time? Monmouth. Monmouth.
Speaker 00:Monmouth.
Speaker 01:New Jersey. I went and looked up. the Signal Corps, and how important it was to the war effort. One of the big things was the Signal Corps Laboratory, and what your father did for them must have been very important. Will you tell me a little bit about that, for the record, on the record?
Speaker 00:Sure. Well, the main thing he did, his main contribution, was to find a way to shield the the workings of Jeeps and motorcycles, or not simply Jeeps, but gasoline-powered vehicles like trucks, Jeeps, what have
Speaker 02:you,
Speaker 00:and motorcycles. When an engine of that type is running, it emits electrical energy radio waves, in effect, electrical signals that can be picked up. And it just makes, if anybody is trying to communicate with each other through a walkie-talkie, for example, on the battlefield, And, you know, somebody in the trench on the front line communicating with battalion headquarters a little bit further back from the front line to get or receive orders or something that could save the day or something. or lose lives if it didn't get through. If a messenger maybe came roaring up on a motorcycle, that would draw out the communication because there would be a lot of interference. So the Army was looking for an inexpensive way to keep this kind of interference from being emitted by gasoline-powered engines that would be used in the war. And my dad set his mind to finding it, and that's what he did. They said not only did he do it sitting there at his workbench at Fort Monmouth, but they, after he came up with the idea, they sent him off to Jeep manufacturers and motorcycle manufacturers. He went to the places where they manufacture Jeeps in the Detroit area, and I believe there was, I want to say, in Massachusetts, Indian motorcycles. Anyhow, he traveled and worked with these manufacturers of vehicles to make sure that what they produced and was shipped off to the Army would not interfere with radio communications. on the battlefield. And there were other ways of doing it than the way he came up with. But he was asked to do it in a way that would save money and save vital raw materials that might have been used to do this in a more expensive way. And he did that. And at one point when I was a kid, I asked him about the work that he did working for the Signal Corps in Fort Monmouth during the war, and he said, I saved the government a million dollars. And I don't know whether it was really actually a million dollars, but he saved them a lot of money, and he probably, because he helped eliminate this kind of interference with battlefield communications, he probably saved an untold number of lives.
Speaker 01:I agree with you completely. Yeah. I agree with you completely. And I have reason to say this because I have access to my war letters. And my father made the march all the way from Omaha Beach to Potsdam Conference. He's constantly talking about communications. They were critical. He was in the hell on wheel. I don't know much about military history, but it was critical. And he talks about it. Radio connections. His Silver Star was awarded for forward observance. He radioed things back. And not to get into my father, but I get it, Howard. I totally get it. get you saying he saved lives, I can tell you that I agree with you 100%. He might have saved my father's life.
Speaker 00:Well, who knows? Yeah, it would be nice if he had.
Speaker 01:Those things are so important. During
Speaker 00:the war, clear communication is critical, absolutely critical. He was able to help there. So I'm proud of him for that.
Speaker 01:Amazing. And he started making amplifiers in the 30s, and then he has to take all of that offline and contribute to the war effort. But it was in concert with his skill set and his innovation, though. And that's why I think it's such an interesting part of the story. Okay, next quote. And this is one thing when I even, when I proselytize and get evangelical with people about the Danelectro story is it is a short one. And you have a quote in your essay, 1949 to 1969. The Danelectro l years were marked by a series of innovations. Let's talk. Thanks to your father, Nat Daniel.
Speaker 00:Well, I'm not looking at it right now. I'm just sitting here quietly. So I'm going to reach back in my mind. But yeah. Probably the most important innovation he made was that revolutionary amplifier circuit that got him into the business in the first place back in the early 30s. But generally, there were some other noteworthy innovations. Perhaps the single most important or best-known one by people who are interested in music and guitars, in particular popular music, was his innovation in creating an electric sitar. The sitar is a classical Indian instrument which looks nothing like a guitar and which produces a very distinctive sound which I hate to encapsulate it in one word, but I'll use the word twiney. It's so much more than that, but it's got an interesting sound, let's just put it that way. And it became popular in Western pop music, rock and roll, because the Beatles, back in the 60s, went to India at one point, and they spent some time And among other things, they spent time with Ravi Shankar, who was a well-known Indian player of the sitar, the real sitar, the classical instrument that they use in India. And one or more of these four guys, the Beatles, learned to play it. well enough that it was used in some of the recordings. And it's a cool sound. It's a great sound. So my dad used to collaborate with a guitarist, a very innovative musician by the name of Vinnie Bell. And they would talk about a lot of things. And it was very helpful to my dad to be talking with a musician who used the guitars and amplifiers that he was making about things that would be of interest to people who played these instruments. And at one point, Vinnie said to Dad, boy, wouldn't it be interesting, wouldn't it be cool if you could get... the sitar sound out of a guitar that somebody could just pick up, who knows how to play the guitar, pick up this other instrument that looks like a guitar, kind of, but sounds like a sitar. And that started my dad just thinking about how to do it. So they examined, my dad examined a real sitar, one, you know, from India. And he found out what the secret was to the sound. And the secret had to do with the shape of the bridge. The bridge is the piece of the guitar that the strings rest on at the lower end, meaning the end closest to where you pluck the strings, as opposed to the other end at the top of the neck, called the head of the guitar, where the strings start out their journey down to the bridge. and the bridge of a sitar is quite different from the bridge of a guitar and it produces a kind of a buzzy sound that is very it's what makes the sitar sound like it does and my dad isolated the the essence of the problem he saw it and went to work and they figured out how to make such a such a bridge for a guitar and he did a few other things and that would enable a guitar player to Go ahead and just pick up the instrument, an electric sitar that's the kind that my dad made, and play it like it was a guitar, and any tune he wanted, and it would sound like a sitar and not like a guitar.
Speaker 01:Yeah.
Speaker 00:That was his most recent innovation in the field of guitars, but he's also a... They called it the Bellzouki because it looked sort of like the classical Greek stringed instrument called the Bouzuki, B-O-U-Z, instead of Bellzouki. And the Bellzouki, my dad gave the Bellzouki its name because, again, he got the idea to try to make something like that. from his friend Vinnie Bell. This all took place way back, I think it was in the early 60s, when there was a movie came out that was called Never on Sunday. It was made in Greece, and throughout the soundtrack of this movie, there was Greek music, and it was played on bouzoukis. And bouzouki is, the actual bouzouki, is an instrument That is double stringed. That is just like a guitar normally has six strings. Well, a 12-string guitar has 12 strings, which is six pairs of two strings. And when you play it, because of the way the strings vibrate, just a little, not quite perfectly in tune with each other, you get a sort of a tiny sound. And that is the sound of a bouzouki. So they figured out, you know, we could make something that sounds kind of like a bouzouki, but again, any guitar player can pick it up and play it because it's like a guitar. It's got six pairs of double-stringed Six pairs of strings. Six pairs of two strings. And it sounds great. And the body of it, you can make the body any shape you like, so they made it in the same teardrop shape as the actual Greek bouzouki, and they called it the bouzouki because my dad's friend Vinnie Bill gave him the idea to do it.
Speaker 01:It's so perfect. We are on an audio call, but it's so perfect that my set here, and it'll be a video. Over me is the Vinnie Bell electric sitar, and on the other side of me is a Bellzouki. So as you were explaining what these instruments are, I'm pointing them out. I have them on my wall. And I can't thank you enough for explaining the origins of it because this is another thing I love getting on the record from you. You also confirmed what most people generally or should know is that Danelectro produced the first electric 12 string. That's right. I don't play guitar, as you well know, and you don't either. That's why we can talk about these things without getting mired in too much, because we don't play. I can
Speaker 00:interrupt for a moment. My dad couldn't play the guitar either.
Speaker 01:Yes.
Speaker 00:But he knew how to make them.
Speaker 01:He sounds like a bit of an acoustical... genius too, you know, for him to be able to sit back and look at those things and figure out the buzz bridge, as we call it. It is what gives that sitar its buzzy, resonant sound, and it was a stroke of genius. Most guitarists who really understand these instruments say that the reason why, as wonderful as the lipstick pickup tubes are, and they are integral to the sound, it's really about that buzz bridge.
Speaker 00:Yeah, well, the buzz bridge is only on the sitar. Oh,
Speaker 01:yes, I meant the sitar. But another thing that I like to let people know is that it was the Belzuki. The Bellzouki has the wood bridge, the rosewood bridge that people love, by the way. They love that bridge. The rosewood bridge is beloved everywhere. Oh, cool. I haven't seen it since I was probably a teenager. I was probably still in high school at
Speaker 00:the time.
Speaker 01:Soundtrack or the music won an Oscar or the movie won an Oscar. That was an era in which foreign films catching fire, you know, internationally influenced tastes. You know, when you think about France and Italy and all these filmmakers and that one, when you look at it, you can understand why everybody wanted to look or sound Greek. I
Speaker 00:was going to say that. The bouzouki sound is wonderful. And the music, the particular tunes that were playing in
Speaker 01:that film
Speaker 00:were great. No wonder it caught fire and won an Oscar. It deserved
Speaker 01:it. Thank you for talking about that because it's just another dot that I like to connect your father and Vinnie Bell together as a collaboration. These Instruments are so influential, and they're so important on the timeline of recorded music. And I think Vinnie Bell used that Bellzouki and sitar a lot more than you can even find credits for, and I continue to find things. And I've told you that I can find those instruments used a lot here in Nashville. The Bellzouki and the electric sitar.
Speaker 00:One of the other innovations that my dad came up with was a six-string bass. Normally, well, the original bass, which is, you know, the big... huge instrument that you see being played with a bow usually in an orchestra, which is as tall basically as most people, or taller than many people. When people started making electric basses, which are in the shape of a guitar but with usually a longer neck, and tuned in such a way as to give those low tones, the same as the classical bass, It was also four strings, just like the classical instrument that is used in orchestras, four strings. And my dad thought to himself at a certain point, well, why not just use, you know, put two extra strings on it so that with a six-stringed instrument, a bass player can go ahead and play all the bass notes he wants, but if he is feeling creative, he can use those notes upper two strings, the new strings that my dad added to the four-string bass to make the six-string bass, he can play into the guitar range on the same instrument.
Unknown:Genius. And so he pioneered the six-string bass.
Speaker 00:That's just another one of his examples, example of his innovativeness. And I believe the six-string bass has been very influential in the tic-tac sound that they get in Nashville.
Speaker 01:Ground Zero. Harold Bradley. He invented that vibe, that groove, and... And
Speaker 00:he played a lot Danelectro six string Bass.
Speaker 01:Yeah. More. One thing that you explained to me, or I got a nice letter from your son, Adam. He sent some, not fan mail, but a great letter. Maybe you told me, too, the joke. We promised to keep this a clean show, but what did TS stand for? It stood for Totally Shielded. But your dad had a joke about something else about what it stood for.
Speaker 00:Yeah, well, and... Totally shielded, the first letters of those two words are T-S. And sometimes, at least when I was a kid, if you said, well, T-S, that meant, in effect, too bad. It's a nice way of saying, if you don't mind my using a four-letter word, tough shit. And it was too bad for my dad's competitors, other manufacturers of... guitars and amplifiers who did not shield the electronics in their product. My dad began shielding everything so that if somebody was playing a guitar in, let's say, a nightclub where there were neon signs around. Neon signs, just like gasoline engines, would emit electrical signals so that if you were to play an unshielded guitar in a place that had some neon signs in it, like ever so many bars and cocktail lounges and nightclubs and so on, if you were to play an instrument that was not shielded in such a place, the sound would be distorted by the electronic signals. interference from the neon. So my dad thought about this and he figured out a simple and inexpensive way to shield all the electronics in all his guitars and all the amplifiers he made. And he referred to this as total shielding. And because none of his competitors were doing it, he thought it was TS for them. and of the classic. I love it. When he introduced this, he introduced, and he never went back to unshielded product. When he introduced his line of totally shielded guitars and amplifiers, he did it at the Music Industry's annual convention and product show called National Association of Music Merchants, NAMN, which would hold a convention and a show in those days once a year. And so he had a booth, well, not a booth, a room there in the hotel where this was being done, and Vinnie, my dad's friend and excellent guitarist, was demonstrating Danelectro's stuff. And so all the stuff that my dad was exhibiting at this show was totally shielded, except for one thing that he made without the shielding deliberately. He called it Brand X, and it was a guitar that was not shielded. And they also created a little... device that had a neon light in it. And Vinnie would play the Danelectro instruments next to this neon light and they sounded great. You couldn't hear any noise at all from no interference from the neon. But when he plugged in the Brand X that my dad had made, which was in its electronics, similar to basically what everybody else is offering, which was not shielded. then it sounded terrible because it was influenced by the interference emitted by this neon. And so the difference between a new Danelectro that was totally shielded and Brand X, which basically represented everybody else's product, everybody else's guitars, was enormous. So that's why Dad said it was TS for his competitors.
Speaker 01:I like his style tremendously. He
Speaker 00:had a good
Speaker 01:sense of humor. I can tell. Some of the photographs that I really love of your father, I love how you talk about him feeling a lot better physically after moving to Hawaii, getting out of the cold climate, because he looks very happy in many of those photographs. Yes.
Speaker 00:Oh, yes, no question about it. Yeah, and you can say, well, there's one photograph I'm thinking of that you may have seen when you looked over some of the posts on my website. It was probably a birthday party for one of the kids or maybe even for him. But he put a couple of, I don't know what you call it, when you open a champagne bottle, before it's open, you have to loosen... Like
Speaker 01:the wire cage, yeah.
Speaker 00:Yeah, so he put a couple... He stuck a couple of those into his eye sockets so that it looked like he was wearing some kind of strange monocles.
Unknown:And he had a great sense of humor.
Speaker 00:He was a great rock hunter. He told a lot of good jokes.
Speaker 01:Yeah, um... I love it. The total shielding thing was a real source of pride for Danelectro because I noticed that on some of the original instruments that I have inspected, the guitars, which are the things that I know mostly about, they have this sticker right there on the headstock and it says totally shielded.
Speaker 00:That's right.
Speaker 01:And I like it because, you know, I don't know if you know this, but some guitarists call guitars axes. Do you know that? And I've been telling people, no, it's a shield. It's a shield. Totally shielded, wouldn't that, Daniel?
Speaker 00:It's a shielded axe.
Speaker 01:I'm
Speaker 00:talking with Vinnie and other guitarists that we would talk with about how when I went to perform in a club, where there was neon signage around the establishment, that neon screwed up their sound. Yeah. Because it was coming from an unshielded instrument, unshielded amplifiers. So he figured out an inexpensive way to wrap everything in metallic. What he used was a type of paper that is used in construction in the I think electricians use it
Speaker 02:in
Speaker 00:the construction of new buildings. It's got copper foil on one side and a very heavy duty stiff paper on the other but it's not so stiff that you can't bend it. And so he simply used that kind of material Think of something as stiff as, for example, sandpaper.
Speaker 02:Yeah.
Speaker 00:But he used that kind of material to bend around and totally envelop the electronics inside a guitar. And also to shield the electronics of his amplifiers.
Speaker 01:Solved a problem.
Speaker 00:Yeah, solved the problem just like that.
Speaker 01:Problem solver.
Speaker 00:That's the kind of material you could get basically at a hardware store.
Unknown:And I'm sure it's not very expensive.
Speaker 00:And it lends itself to the purpose quite nicely.
Speaker 01:My house was built in 1947, and I've made some updates, but I've tried to leave some things the way they are, including some light fixtures. And when my electrician pops into some of these things, I see that paper. You know, I know what you're... Yeah, it's... Yeah, who knows what it's called? I
Speaker 00:don't know what it's called either, but it's stiff and it's got copper on one side and heavy paper on the other.
Speaker 01:Yeah. This is rolling right in perfectly for the next thing I want to talk about, which we're going to lead into our big teaser about lipstick pickups. I want to talk to you about rigid control of expense and your dad's resourcefulness in in selecting materials like masonite and homosote. And I want to remind the listener, although I know you remember, when we talked over a year ago, the reason why this jives with my own personal history is that my father was a pioneering forester, well above his time, who worked for masonite. And after the war, these things are ramping up and they're being used in building products and all kinds of things, movie sets. And your father, for one reason or another, selected that material. Most people now credit it with the Masonite ones having a very unique tone. Derided at the time, I think to quote you, Sure. Well, first of all, the quote that you just used about rigid control of expense was not something that
Speaker 00:my dad used. That appears in the tribute that I wrote to my dad, what you called the essay.
Speaker 02:Mm-hmm.
Speaker 00:which appears as the introduction to Doug Tulloch's book Neptune Bound and also on my website that quote comes from the buyer of musical instruments at Sears Roebuck Sears was a place that probably accounted for, well, there's no question, accounted for the great bulk of the guitars and amplifiers that my dad manufactured and sold. He sold them to Sears, and Sears sold them to the public, not under the Danelectro name, but under its own brand name, Silvertone. And the buyer, well, there were several buyers for the musical instrument department at Sears, over the years. But my dad, Sears got started buying things from my dad. not long after he went into business for himself after World War II, when he founded the Danelectro Corporation in 1947. And Sears was looking for a particular, well, they were looking for a way to amplify the sound of accordions, of all things. And they wanted to be able to insert a pickup inside an accordion without drilling a hole in the accordion. And nobody could figure it out. And somebody who knew the buyer for Sears at that time, the musical instrument buyer for Sears, and who knew my dad, suggested that the Sears people ought to talk to my dad. And they did. And my dad figured out a simple way to get a pickup inside an accordion without drilling a hole in the accordion. And that started Sears then purchasing one... of my dad's amplifier models and selling it at Silverton. Originally, it was to amplify accordion music, but as accordions faded in popularity and guitars grew in popularity, you know, an amplifier can amplify anything, any kind of musical note that you put through it. And so these became known as guitar amplifiers, and so they were. And that started... an association of about two decades in which my dad was the sole supplier of amplifiers to Sears Roebuck, which made him probably the single biggest manufacturer. of amplifiers in the world at the time. But you talk about rigid control of cost. So the buyer, a later buyer of Sears, because every so often people would rotate in and out of this job at Sears. And whenever there was a new buyer for musical instruments and musical instrument amplifiers, Dad, I think, would be a little concerned. Well, would the new guy like to continue to purchase these things from him or maybe try to find a new source for guitars and amplifiers. Never happened. They always stuck with him. The new guy would come in and continue buying dad's stuff because it was good and it was low cost. So one of these guys is quoted in an article that some Well, I'll name them. There are two guys who are in the music business. One of them is an electronics guy as well as a guitar player by the name of Steve Soest, and the other is a writer by the name of Jim Washburn. Jim Washburn and Steve Soest collaborated way back in the early 80s, 1983. They'd they wanted to get an interview with my dad. They were going to be in Hawaii anyhow, and they had heard that after leaving, after Danelectro closed down, and my dad's leaving the business, that he had wound up in Hawaii. And they were going to be in Hawaii, or maybe just one of those could be in Hawaii. Anyhow, they looked him up in the phone book in Honolulu, and they found him. And they did an interview. And of all the many things that have been written about Danelectro other than the things that I've written, of all the many things that people have written about Danelectro and about my father, not one, except for the article that Steve and Jim wrote, came from an interview with my father.
Speaker 02:All
Speaker 00:the rest of it is based on secondary sources or what I would like to call hearsay.
Speaker 02:And
Speaker 00:a lot of which is baloney. It's just not factual. But myths get born, and they take on a life of their own. Anyhow, Steve and Jim wrote this article about my dad and Danelectro. And it was a very, very good one. And in it, they managed to contact this, by the time they wrote it, he was retired from Sears. His name was Joe Fisher. And Joe Fisher had some nice things to say about my dad. And one of them was this quote that you just gave about my dad's way of wanting to establish rigid control of costs. Because the most important thing about my dad's work and his innovations if you were to wrap it up in one phrase, is that he was able to, and I'm sure that this is in the tribute that I wrote to him, what you call the essay, the introduction to Doug Tulloch's book.
Speaker 02:Yes.
Speaker 00:In the tribute that I wrote to him, what I said was the essence of his innovativeness was that he managed to create high-quality instruments at low cost. And he did it, and that's what Joe Fisher called rigid control of costs.
Speaker 02:He
Speaker 00:did it in any number of ways, but the most significant, I think, part of it was finding inexpensive materials to use. For example, you had mentioned Masonite, in which your dad played a considerable role. And that was used as the front and the back of the body of the guitars. uh and uh another uh material called homasote which he used uh as the uh the main component of the cabinets of his amplifiers uh when he first began manufacturing amplifiers uh under the Danelectro brand and In 1947, he used plywood, I believe, for those first few amplifiers. And then there was some kind of a strike which made it impossible to get plywood. And he wanted to continue to produce amplifiers. So he looked around for some other substance, some other kind of material that might work. And he found it in something called homasote, which is produced... by a manufacturer in New Jersey out of recycled newspaper. And it is a type of very thick, sturdy, it's a thick, sturdy composite, which some people deride it as cardboard, but it's not cardboard. And he used it for the cabinets of all the amplifiers he ever produced after those first two. And it worked just fine. And one of his competitors, an outfit by the name of K, which also produced guitars, a competitor to Dan Electro, used to make fun of Danelectro amplifiers using homasote for their cases. And guess what? Eventually, Kay started using homosote, too. So my dad had his sweet revenge.
Speaker 01:Yeah.
Speaker 00:And the thing about that. These
Speaker 01:products were revolutionary at the time, and the first time I looked up or saw the word homosote, I saw it described as a wallboard, and I assumed it was similar to masonite. It's not. It's cellulose. It's recycled newspapers, and this morning I went to just quickly look up the history of it, and it's also an English idea that got adopted in the United States, and it was a genius idea. Wow. My
Speaker 00:dad would have been attracted to a good idea like that. Yeah. If I can return to something, I'll let myself get off track. The biggest innovation he made was figuring out a range of different ways, manufacturing techniques and raw materials to use instead of something more expensive that would allow him to create something that worked really well high quality but at a low cost and in terms of the guitar guitars as opposed to the amplifiers it was something that would enable a beginner a young a youngster you know A person who maybe wasn't even 10 years old, certainly somebody with tender fingers, because when you learn to play the guitar, you have to develop calluses at your fingertips to be able to press down the strings to get the different notes you want and the different chords. And so he... wanted to create something that even a beginner and the parents of a young beginner could afford to buy
Speaker 02:without
Speaker 00:having to shell out a lot of money to buy an instrument that was high priced. And so he was always thinking about ways to do things, and a lot of it had to do with ways that he found steps in the manufacturing process that were easy to do. If you think about string arrangements, one of the things that comes to mind, of course, is a violin.
Speaker 02:and
Speaker 00:the best known violins were created in the 1600s by a fellow an Italian violin maker named Stradivarius and today Stradivarius violins are still being played they were manufactured all those hundreds of years ago by this wonderful craftsman the sound of whose instruments nobody can reproduce even today and so some of the Finest guitars and the highest cost guitars are also made by craftsmen, by people. The term for people who hand make guitars is they are luthiers, L-U-T-H-I-E-R, derived from the same word that you have the ancient, very old-fashioned plucked instrument called a lute, L-U-T-E.
Speaker 02:Okay.
Speaker 00:My dad did not employ any luthiers. He employed people you could find on the street and were looking for a job. And one, the big secret to his manufacturing process, and I witnessed it as somebody who used to work summers in the factory in my high school and college years, was that... If you use hand tools, you know, a screwdriver, a soldering iron, a hammer, if you could use these tools, you could make the amplifiers, the amplifier cases, the soldering iron, you could wire together all the different components of the circuitry needed, you know, all the capacitors and resistors, and so on, vacuum tubes that would go into the chassis of an amplifier. And he would hire people with no experience and show them how to do their job. And all the specific elements of the job were pretty simple. If you could use a screwdriver, for example. And if you were a good worker, You were hired, and he kept you on, and he gave you raises real fast. And if you were not a good worker, if you didn't show up on time, if you were clumsy or whatever, then you didn't get a chance to continue with the company. He would let you go. And so he manufactured all these high-quality instruments and amplifiers out of inexpensive components using... the help of ordinary people who would respond to a want ad in the newspaper people who were looking for a job of some kind and and he did not have to pay them like you would pay Mr. Stradivarius to make your violin or a luthier who would painstakingly assemble an entire guitar out of raw materials carving the wood, shaving it and being highly meticulous in the work that he did by virtue of his his understanding and craftsmanship. I know. My dad's products were made by ordinary people using ordinary tools,
Speaker 02:and
Speaker 00:some of the tools or some of the machines that were used in the factory were machines that my dad designed to accomplish stuff that they had not originally been designed to do, but which he got them to do with a little ingenuity to be able to sand, for example, to sand things down without wearing through sandpaper quite so quickly as you might otherwise do, let's say for a little money. He was always looking for ways to make things good, but inexpensively.
Speaker 01:Yeah, it's one of the secrets of Danelectro. They weren't cheap instruments. I love that you use the... that people joke and called it cardboard, about homosode or Masonite. I've heard people call them cardboard guitars, and sometimes they're joking, but there is this perception, and I understand what they did there. They were making attainably priced, high-quality instruments with very ingenious materials, thanks to your father.
Speaker 00:Materials and... not only materials but also thinking in the way they were manufactured
Speaker 02:yeah
Speaker 00:they were put together in in the tribute that i wrote to him i described a machine that he uh developed which was used to finish off uh the fingerboards of uh guitar necks uh and basically it was he built it from scratch uh and enabled him uh to you to use this machine to do a whole batch of guitar necks at a single time. All an employee of the company needed to do was to clip a bunch of unfinished necks onto this rotating machine and come back about an hour later and take them off and they were ready to go. And by the way, the material he used for the fingerboard was rosewood, which is not a cheap material. It's quite an expensive material, but very high quality and the appropriate kind of material to use. And where you couldn't get away with using, for example, you would never make a fingerboard out of plywood. He made it out of rosewood. So, anyhow.
Speaker 01:Perfect summary. And, you know... I want to thank you for taking the time. And now I'm going to get into the teaser. What I really wanted to get on the record from Mr. Howard Daniel. In the four years that I've been working on this, almost five, I go into guitar shops. I talk to people about the history of Danelectro. And the name of my podcast is called The Lipstick Pickup. I thought it was a clever name, a clever idea. And people say, do you know why they're called Lipstick Pickups? And I always say yes, that I'm aware that They did use lipstick tubes, but that's when... the story gets murky. What did you say just a minute ago? You said things get relayed and stories get more inaccurate as they go along. I've heard all kinds of things where they described your dad stumbling into a surplus of lipstick tubes. I've heard versions where he walks into an old factory and there's a box sitting there. They were lipstick tubes, but those versions of the story are more elaborate than we know because We don't totally know why I used them, but we know what we know and we know what we don't know. I can't talk to Nat Daniel. I would love to get it out of the horse's mouth, but the best thing I can do right now in 2025 is to talk to the horse's son who worked at the factory. Huh? The colt. Yeah, the colt. The coltish son of Nat Daniel, Howard Daniel. Howard Daniel, please tell me and my listeners what you know and do not know about the choice of lipstick tubes.
Speaker 00:Well, what I can say is that the most common thing that I have seen about this is that they are in almost anything that I've seen written about my dad's guitars is that says anything about the pickups. They refer to the lipstick tube pickups, and they say that it originated because he found some surplus lipstick tubes. And all I can say is that that is 100% baloney. There probably was never such a thing as surplus lipstick tubes. And the story that you have heard, I've never heard it before, but I've seen the surplus story in print many
Speaker 02:times,
Speaker 00:probably dozens of times. The story you talk about having stumbled across a box full of unused lipstick tubes, that's also baloney. My dad realized that it would be... It would look cool, and it would work very well in terms of the electronics of the pickup to encase the magnet and the wire coiled around the magnet, the wire wound around the magnet that is the heart of the
Speaker 02:pickup,
Speaker 00:to encase it in a pair of lipstick tubes, one at each end. And where did he get those? He found a manufacturer of actual tubes for lipstick. It was located on Long Island in New York State. And this guy would make lipstick tubes for who knows how many cosmetics manufacturers. My dad looked up and found such a manufacturer on Long Island and he contracted to buy lipstick tubes. And that's where he got his lipstick tubes. They were not surplus. They were not something he found in a box. He decided that those would be just the right sort of thing to use in case for pickup. And he found somebody who manufactured them, and he bought them. It's that simple.
Speaker 01:Perfect. He selected them because he was a manufacturing genius and very innovative, which is why he used something called Masonite that was used in building products. He used it on the guitar. I know what he did there, which was it's a lot cheaper to buy something that's in mass production than to have it custom made or machined. Yeah. I think that's why I like getting the story straight on the record and relaying it to people, is that the loosey-goosey, not accurate version of the story gives less credit to your father and his ingenuity. I would
Speaker 00:not even call it loosey-goosey. I would call it made up out of thin air and absolutely having no resemblance to fact.
Speaker 01:Yeah, I hear it all the time, and people will tell you things that are inaccurate with grace. Oh, yes.
Unknown:Oh, yes.
Speaker 00:Oh, my dad used to make fun of people like that. My dad used to tell, he used to, when, he would caricature a person of that kind by saying, by pretending to be such a person and ask, and that person would then ask his audience, well, do you know anything about Subject X, Y, or Z. And when the person he was talking to said, no, I don't, then the person would say, oh, well, I'll tell you. As though he knew. But he didn't necessarily really know. And my dad always, he had met a lot of people who would be happy to tell you something that was entirely fictitious. Because he didn't know whether it was fictitious or not, but he thought he knew something. He knew you knew nothing. So my dad had very little use for people like
Speaker 01:that. You are a delight. We're wrapping it up here. I want to tell you one of the wonderful quotes because this is right on time of yours. Nat Daniel was a conceptualizer, an innovator, an American original, just like the things he dreamed up, put together, and gave the world. Tough shit. I
Speaker 00:stand by that quote.
Speaker 01:I'm so sorry that I did not ever get to meet him. But getting to know you over maybe a year and a half now has been as good because you are following in his footsteps in fine order. And you've been a great assistance to me. And we have the same interest in mind. Awareness and accuracy.
Speaker 00:Thank you very much. It's a pleasure talking with you, Emily. I am amazed and highly gratified to know of your interest in the work that my dad did. Thank you so much.
Speaker 01:Thank you so much. I'm going to say goodbye to our listeners right now. Thank you from Emily Vardaman Walters and Howard Daniel. Are you Santa Rosa? What is the name of the town you live in? Santa Rosa, California. It's beautiful there. Do you like the warmer climate just like your father?
Speaker 00:Well, it's not as warm as away, but it's very nice. Actually, water can freeze at night on the coldest winter nights, but it melts during the day. But it's generally quite a pleasant climate and a very lovely area.
Speaker 01:And great bird watching.
Speaker 00:Great bird watching, beautiful redwoods. Gorgeous coastline. Much more interesting than the New Jersey coastline, which is flat and sandy. Whereas the coastline here in the northern part of California and Oregon and Washington State is rugged with lots of boulders just offshore. Very, very interesting. Lovely place.
Speaker 01:Yeah. Well, I cannot thank you enough for letting me call you in Santa Rosa, California today and you picking up. This is Emily Vardaman Walters with the Lipstick Pickup Podcast and Howard Daniel of Santa Rosa, California saying goodbye. Thank you very much.
Speaker 00:You are entirely welcome, Emily.
Speaker 01:Okay, we're done. I cannot thank you enough. I feel like I could have been a talent scout. You were so perfect.