`Guitar tinkerer'
After years of performing, Marin musician Danny Click starts DC Guitars
Danny Click, leader of the popular Marin rock band the Hell Yeahs!, can't remember a time in his life when he didn't have a guitar in his hands.
Growing up the youngest of nine children in a small town in Indiana, he got his first guitar, a $20 acoustic, when he was 6, learning to play three chords that an older brother showed him. When he was 12, his mother taught him his first song, the Carter family ballad “Wildwood Flower.” A year later, he earned enough money to buy his first electric, an inexpensive copy of a Gibson Les Paul. By 15, he was playing in bands, earning his first money as a guitarist.
Since then, his life has been all about guitars — playing them, teaching others how to play them, repairing them, collecting them. And now he's making them. He's launching his own company, DC Guitars, designing and building the kind of instruments he's always wanted to play but could never find. Even the most iconic guitars from brands such as Gibson and Fender invariably had things about them he found lacking.
“I've always wanted guitars to be better than they are,” he says on a recent afternoon in a workshop in a back room of his San Rafael home, where he's building his first batch of 20 guitars — handsome solid body
electrics with a vintage look inspired by elements of Fender's Telecaster and Jazzmaster models, Gibson's Les Paul Jr. and the lesser-known Bigsby guitar.
He's aiming to make his guitars no less than “simple and perfect.
“I want them to be bulletproof,” he says. “For a professional musician, they will never let you down on a gig.”
He'll unveil his new guitars at a free concert from 4 to 6:30 p.m. Oct. 15 in Menke Park's Piccolo Pavilion in Corte Madera, at Corte Madera and Tamalpais avenues. He's lining up a “who's who” of top local guitarists to play them for the first time in public with him and the Hell Yeahs!.
`Guitar tinkerer'
A year and a half ago, discouraged that his income from
live performing hadn't returned to pre-pandemic levels, the journeyman musician started thinking about ways for a self-described “guitar tinkerer” to make a living other than relying solely on playing gigs.
“Most clubs won't give you anything even close to what we used to get,” he says. “I realize that they all have to make money, but I thought, what else can I do?”
The notion of creating his own line of electric guitars began as a pipe dream, he says, but became real after he hired an artist to help him draw the contours of a sleek, sculptural guitar body that would be perfectly balanced hanging from a strap around a player's neck.
Some of the outlines of those original drawings are pinned to a wall across from his workbench,
where he builds each instrument himself with guitar bodies of solid ash or mahogany, maple necks in three sizes, quality electronics and hardware, all of it fabricated to his exacting specifications by outside contractors. Describing himself as “happily obsessive compulsive,” he designed everything from the bridge, headstock, knobs and tuners, down to the aluminum rings that frame the pickups.
“Everything on this guitar is custom made for us,” he says, taking one from its rack, strapping it on and stumming a chord without plugging it in, marveling at how long the instrument vibrated — a quality known as “sustain,” meaning the length of time the guitar produces a sound before it fades away.