In my continuing series on iconic axes, this week we’ll take a look at Jimmy Page’s black and white Danelectro 3021.
Used mostly for playing slide guitar, Page’s Danelectro is strikingly different from his Les Pauls and his Gibson EDS-1275 double neck. The Danelectro is the quintessential pawnshop guitar—inexpensively built, mass produced, and cheap. That said, pawnshop guitars have a lot going for them too, especially the Danelectros.
Nathan Daniel founded the original Danelectro company in 1947. Originally they just made amplifiers for Sears and Montgomery Ward. Eventually they began making forays into guitar manufacture using store names like Silvertone and Airline. The Danelectro, Silvertone, and Airline brands were intended to be inexpensive, no-frills guitars with good tone.
One of the most innovative features of these guitars is the famous “lipstick tube” pickups.
The Danelectro company apparently bought surplus lipstick tubes and designed pickups that fit inside two of these tubes. These pickups are instantly recognizable and have been one of the reasons these guitars have remained so highly regarded and desirable. These pickups have a distinctive tone that stands apart from other pickups.
The Danelectro tone also owes a lot to the construction of the guitars. They are actually semi-hollow. There is an interior frame that the neck and bridge are connected to which also defines the shape of the guitar. The top and back are made of Masonite, a very inexpensive composite wood (no exotic tonewoods here). This makes Danelectros a little more prone to feedback than a solid body guitar.
Jimmy Page plays the two-pickup 3021 model Danelectro. He primarily uses it for slide guitar. The 11-minute opus "In My Time of Dying" off Physical Graffiti is a magnificent example of the tone Page was able to coax out of this guitar. The track was not rehearsed at all and stands as the longest studio track to appear on a Led Zeppelin album. Listen to Page’s tone at the beginning of the song, or even better, at about six and a half minutes into the song where the band starts really going. Wow.
Page also uses the same guitar on another Zeppelin opus from the same album: "Kashmir". And while the Melotron and string arrangements are a bit more predominant than Page’s guitar, there are still some iconic guitar lines that owe a lot to the Danelectro’s distinctive tone.
Danelectros were designed with more of an eye toward making these guitars easy to mass produce than to producing good sound or durability. But it just goes to show that in the right hands even a guitar meant to be sold in a mail order catalog can be an iconic axe.
