Liberatore
“It all starts with the acoustic sound of the guitar,” he says. “Everything is designed to make the guitar sustain longer.”
His guitars come in a variety of colors and finishes. He's building a pink one for Texas blues singer Sue Foley, who plays a signature pink paisley Fender Telecaster. The gold and brown coat of his rescue dog, Sadie, inspired his “Sadieburst” guitar, a take on the classic Gibson sunburst finish.
Priced at $4,000, almost all of the initial 20 DC guitars are already sold, a promising beginning.
`Marin's Tom Petty'
Entering the boutique guitar business is a new career path for the blond, long-haired, zipper-thin singer-songwriter. Since moving to Marin from Austin, Texas, nearly 20 years ago, he's become best known as the genial leader of Danny Click and the Hell Yeahs!, one of the Bay Area's most acclaimed and respected bands playing primarily original music. He figures he's played more than 700 live shows over the past decade.
“It's almost like I was Marin's Tom Petty,” he says and laughs. “We were the rock stars of Marin. Everybody knew Danny Click and the Hell Yeahs!.”
At age 62, as he launches this new venture, he looks back on a career in music defined by guitars and guitar playing. He once owned more than 40, a collection he's managed to whittle down to about half that.
He began playing professionally after high school, dropping out of college to play in local rock bands and delivering pizzas and auto parts to get by. He was getting nowhere fast in his hometown until he heard Tracy Chapman's “Fast Car” on
the radio one night.
“There's a line in the song that changed my life: `Leave tonight or live and die this way,' and that got me,” he says. “I still get all emotional when I hear it because I remember that exact moment, being disgusted with life, and thinking, wow, I'm leaving here.”
He packed up and moved to Austin because that's where all the best blues rock guitarists were, masters like the late Stevie
Ray Vaughan, Grammy winner Eric Johnson and David Grissom, guitarist for Joe Ely and John Mellencamp.
“They made me work harder to become a better musician,” he says. “In Austin, you better be on your A game or you're not going to play a gig. The best thing I ever did was move to Austin to be a better guitarist.”
In Austin, he formed a blues power trio, Danny and the Hurricanes, and
began writing his own songs in earnest. To supplement his income, he got a job repairing guitars, having already had experience repairing his own.
In 2000, he went on the road as a guitarist for folk rock balladeer Jimmy LaFave.
“That's when it all broke out for me,” he says. “I got better known in Austin.”
But his newfound notoriety came at a price, one that he wasn't willing to
continue paying.
“Over four years, we played at least 600 shows in the U.S. and Europe,” he says. “We toured all the time. I think we were traveling in our van for three months straight during one tour and that's when I realized that I don't want to be a touring guy. It was a bummer, man. It was a good experience, but I decided that I'm never going back out.”
`Tip jar culture'
After 18 years in Austin,
he followed a girlfriend to Marin in 2004 and quickly established himself as a talent to watch. Reviewing his live album, recorded at the Throckmorton Theatre in Mill Valley and released in 2014, I wrote that he's “done more to invigorate the local music scene than anybody in recent memory.” His fans even had a nickname, Clickheads.
A year later, the title track of his album “Holding Up the Sun” was picked up by Starbucks, which played it 8 million times in its coffee shops over the course of a year.
“For that, I got $337,” he says and sighs. “I thought, I can't make any money making records or selling records, so playing live is important.”
Since the pandemic, though, he's seen the live music scene devolve into what he calls “tip jar culture,” relying on the generosity of fans to help support working musicians and bands.
“Tip jar culture has taken over at a lot of places,” he says. “It's a gripe, I know, but it's hard to make a living as a guitar player.”
So, he's purposely diversified, focusing his energies and his hopes on being a successful boutique guitar maker instead of just a struggling guitar player and bandleader in a limited local market for live music.
“To be honest, it's almost a relief to not have to deal with it anymore (playing live) because I was burnt out even before the pandemic,” he says. “Now I can sit in my house and spend 20 hours building a guitar. Every hole is drilled by me and every screw is put in by hand. There's no factory. I don't have investors I don't have a team. It's just me. So I'm going to take my time and I'm going to do it right.”
To learn more, go to dannyclick.com.