Rickresource Rickenbacker Forum

Paul's first amp was an Elpico. A small green and white amp which he bought sometime between the Johnny Gentle Scotland tour and the first Hamburg trip.

I've found that Elpico amps were distributed in England by J P Lee & Company of Leeds, and I suspect that Elpico was an anagram of the company name (L P Co). I believe that the amps were made in Italy, where record players, radios, tape recorders and the like were also made under the Elpico brand. Also that Paul's Elpico was manufactured as an early form of disco equipment rather than a guitar amp : it had microphone and gramophone inputs, so you could plug in your record player and microphone and play DJ at a house party - provided it was a quiet one, with all of 6 watts to annoy parents with !

What else is known ?

Paul still owns this little amp - there is a photo of it in his first world tour program magazine which I have somewhere

Yes, in the Anthology book he mentions that he still has it.

Dave Davies of the Kinks has referred to an Elpico amplifier as being the one that led to the distorted tone of "You Really Got Me." Dave indicated that: Quote:"The (distorted) sound came out of this frustration of not being happy with the guitar sound," he explained. "In the end, I was messing around with a little amplifier I had (a 10-watt Elpico), and I got so frustrated with the plainness, the ordinariness of the sound that I cut the speaker (cone) with a razor blade. I didn't even think that it would work. I thought I would torture it. In the end when I plugged (the amplifier) in, I was astonished that it even worked. That's how that sound was born -- that ripping kind of raunchy, fuzzy sound."

This quote was taken from a in a Chris Macias article written for the Bee Pop Music Writer published in March 28, 1999.