This week’s Hot Gear Friday – done with a nod, as always, toward Anti-Strib’s “Hot Chick Friday” – focuses on the “Speed Racer” of guitar gear, the Supro Thunderbolt.

When you were a kid, did you ever dream about finding a bunch of parts in a second-hand-parts store, tossing them together, and – via an improbable series of empricial vicissitudes – accidentally build a go-cart that could go 200 mph? Or do the neighborhood show or skit that would get seen, randomly, by some Hollywood agent?

The Supro amp was sorta like that.

Supro was a budget-model line of guitars and amps, just a couple of steps above the makes you’d find in Penneys and Sears catalogs of the day, but nowhere near the A-list amps of the day, the Fenders and Ampegs and Marshalls and Hiwatts. They were priced accordingly, when they were new – outside the catalog range, but toward the lower end of the music-store brand range.

But what you got…

…was a value priced piece of equipment with a tone that’d strip the chrome off a trailer hitch. With a good, high-output guitar, the Supro would get the perfect overdrive. It was like that mythical, fictional, fantasy go-kart built out of odds and sods that just happened to work better than the sum of their parts.
Jimmy Page reportedly used a Thud on Led Zeppelin I, II, III and/or IV, depending on the legend you choose to believe. This introduces a chicken/egg question; would people have noticed this humble, budget amp without the Jimmy Page history/legend, or would that legend/history have ever existed had the Supro not been a diamond in the rought?

Who cares?

All I know is, I got to play one in college; when my Fender Deluxe Reverb was in the shop (a long, gruelling process in rural North Dakota at the time), I borrowed a Thud from a friend of mine.

And until the dawn of amps with “modeling” processors (subject of an upcoming HGF) I’ve never played an amp that just felt so perfect, before or since (short, perhaps, of the occasional Mesa/Boogie that, at that time of my life, would have cost a couple months’ salary). And apparently others think so, too – once humble Thuds seem to go for princely ransoms on EBay these days.

If you get the impression that I could burn through a Powerball purse on guitar gear, you’re probably not all wrong…