1965 Supro Thunderbolt 1X15 Combo

Description

Beautiful shape for this model – cleanest one I’ve seen. Very highly sought after amp both for the cool tone and the Jimi Hendrix association, who used this model exclusively during his days on the chitlin’ circuit. Jimmy Page also used one on early Zep records. The Thunderbolt, built by Valco for Supro, was introduced in 1964, originally designed to be a bass amp, thus the 15″ speaker and minimal controls, but like the Fender Bassman, it was much more well received as a guitar amp. The original Hendrix amp was raffled off by Guitar World magazine (advertisement) in 1992, back when such memorabilia reached astronomical prices. The features were very simple: 15″ Jensen speaker, volume and tone, controlled by RCA tubes with a pair 6L6CG power tubes putting out around 50 watts, a pair of 12AX7 preamp tubes in the preamp, and a 5U4 rectifier tube. All the tubes in this amp are RCA. It is covered in Supro’s traditional blue ‘rhino hide’ tolex with horizontally striped gray grill cloth. In ’67 they changed to black tolex to be more competitive with Fender. Bassists complained about the distorted tone when it was cranked up so in attempt to make them happy they also changed to a solid state rectifier and added wooden bracing across the speaker hole and another on the baffle board back. The thing that bassists hated, made it an excellent guitar amp. At 50 watts it has a bit of clean headroom, but a really nice breakup when cranked plus the 15″ Jensen made it sound huge. Appears to be all original other the an older, but correct, ’62 Jensen speaker. It still has the two-prong cord; covering is in nice shape on all sides, panel has minimal corrosion and intact lettering, no snags in grill, etc. I even suspect the tubes are original. It has no snap-crackle-pop, is well tuned, and needs nothing. If you follow these, you probably know most of these are well used and rarely are found below $1K, even in road warrior condition. While this isn’t quite the cheapest one on the market, I’m sure, for a nice example, it’s the cheapest one around. $1199.