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Retrospective: The Real Good Old Days - No Names, Danelectro Coral Bellzouki 12 and Aria 6814 Acoustic 12
One of the most common stories born from the success of some guitar player or musician is the stock horror story of an earlier cheap guitar. There's no doubt that for many players that's probably the case but quite a few of those old war stories are just modern attitudes being projected on to a different time and place.
For example, my father bought a guitar for everybody when I was in 4th grade. It was an extremely cheap guitar and it didn't last very long but the action was fairly low and it was quite playable. It fell apart because of the cheapness of the construction but during its short life, it could be played and produced some music.
Later on when I was in 6th grade, my father bought another guitar, this time a no name classical and again, perhaps by sheer luck, it had decent action and it stayed in the front room well into the 90s until it was taken by an in-law (and it's still being played today).
That’s one good thing about nylon string guitars; they tend to last. My point though is that nobody ever developed an attitude that it was a piece of crap and that we were lucky to do better later on. That no name classical did what a good guitar should; it stuck around and gave people a lot of fun and pleasure. I remember more than a few evenings watching a boring TV show and just playing it while watching.
Later on in the early seventies came a pair of, shall we say, name guitars? Those were an Aria 12 string and an odd Bell shaped Danelectro 12, both strung like sixes, the latter of which turned out to be quite the collectors item. Both were what one could fondly call a “dual purpose” 12 string guitar.
I remember open chords on the Danelectro having an absolutely beautiful chime and later on, after getting my first “real guitar,” I would think back about that Danelectro and realize that it probably was my first real guitar, not the Gibson.
Later on I went back and identified some of those guitars like the Aria; I got the model number through a lot of research, by checking eBay ads, that sort of thing and eventually finding the Aria that I used.
The same with the Danelectro, which was a lot harder because the original model was a sunburst and with the one I had, somebody had painted it brown with what looked like fence paint or something and had begun using it as a 6-string. I only knew it was a Danelectro from the headstock and had to go by the body shape. I was eventually able to find the model which was a mid-60s Coral Bellzouki Sunburst Solid Body Electric 12 String.
There's no denying that Fenders and Gibsons had better construction and workmanship but frankly my first tele took a lot of work to make it playable. There was no automatic superiority with that particular telecaster compared to the earlier Bellzouki which was playable right from the start.
In fact, that first Tele was where I first learned the concept of a “guitar that had to be set up first,” as opposed to many used guitars like the Danelectro which had survived careless treatment, were well played and considered good enough. The guitars that were crummy were quickly pushed out of sight, languishing in pawn shops, thrift stores and elsewhere. A lot of the guitars that circulated tended to be good, perhaps a survival of the fittest type thing.
The idea that you had to take this or that guitar to a shop to make it playable was a novel idea in the early 70s. Many of those budget guitars did play well enough at first when new and if you could get one, the attitude wasn't that it was something lousy. Particularly when you were a young person like me at the time, a teenager who was happy to get a playable electric guitar.
Whether such instruments were good or bad, pieces of junk, or whatever are labels reflecting modern attitudes projected back into the past, often influenced by their later worth or lack of, in the vintage market.
My memories of the Danelectro and Aria have always been good, which I looked on as first steps and in the case of the former, I've never heard a Danelectro reissue since that sounded as good as that Bellzouki.
These days a person might take a look at that now classic Dano and think, wow, I wish I had it now because I could sell it for a lot of money, or it would be a great collectors item. That thought ran through my mind later on but I always recognized that it was an attitude from a later era when many of those guitars became expensive collectors items.
A good example are mid-70s Fender Telecasters; at the time those were often called “icepick guitars” for the type of sound produced at a higher gain setting and one of many complaints about the CBS era Fenders.
In 2026? Those Fenders are now highly sought after as vintage treasures worth thousands of dollars. That doesn't tell me that the guitars may have been misunderstood or unappreciated, but that perception is often more important than reality when it comes to guitars. Just like what happens when a celebrity endorses an instrument.
Also, my point isn't that many of those beginner guitars were superior to guitars made today. But, perhaps many of them, in their prime, were cherished instruments that made playing music possible for a young musician and deserved better fate than becoming sad and neglected hulks and twisted pieces of neglected wood.
Probably the best thing that could have happened to many of these old cheap and no name brands was the rise of a secondary vintage market. They may not have the aura of prestige brands like Gibson but a little nostalgia combined with capitalism often restored a sense of appreciation for what they were and the memories associated with them, which as a rule were always a lot more good than bad.
Al Handa
July 21, 2026
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