Steve Melkisethian – the no-nonsense, analog-obsessed founder of Angela Instruments – passed away on September 8. The news was confirmed by his wife, Susan Melkisethian.
Steve was a lifelong resident of the Washington, D.C. area. When he realized he wouldn’t be a professional musician, he turned to selling instruments and, eventually, vintage tube amplifiers and their parts. He officially started Angela Instruments in 1977, naming his company after his newborn daughter. Over the years, the Angela mail-order business expanded into an unforgettable annual newsprint catalog that, for tube amp lovers, was equal parts DIY punk zine and Whole Earth Catalog.
In addition to ads for vintage electronics books, military-grade components, and Fender parts that Steve had amassed in his warehouse, you’d find specs on capacitors, tube-buying tips, and even the occasional schematic or amp build. In the pre-internet era, even the descriptions of the items he had for sale were filled with priceless knowledge and insights. The Angela catalog was invaluable: Perusing it, you learned something, even if had no intention of buying anything.
And, if you did attempt to buy something, Steve could be a bit prickly.
In the introduction to his 1996 catalog, he explained:
WE RESERVE THE RIGHT TO REFUSE ANY ORDER WE FIND UNREWARDING, FINANCIALLY OR OTHERWISE! Mail order shopping is for SMART PEOPLE who know what they want, or for those willing to take a chance.. If you need lots of guidance/advice/handholding about what to buy, or Steve’s GONZO BULLSHIT descriptions don’t make much sense to you, then you’re probably far better off working with a local retailer; that’s what they’re supposed to be there for! Honestly, if you’re looking for an AUDIO GURU to follow, or for flowery High End press style – descriptions of sonic phenomena, it ain’t me you’re lookin’ for, babe!
His phone presence was just as daunting as his writing. Countless musicians, customers and techs have unforgettable – and often difficult – memories of Steve fielding (or not) their questions.
In the late ‘90s, Steve saw the internet writing on the wall and moved away from his famous newsprint catalog and towards a web store. Though the military surplus tube deals are long gone, you can still buy guitar parts from angelainstruments.com to this day.
Steve had a rich life beyond Angela. He was a family man, a gardener, an avid photographer, politically active, and – as we learned in the Fretboard Journal’s second Electric Guitar Annual – the tech who quietly helped keep the battered white SG owned by Fugazi’s Ian MacKaye road-worthy.
Skip Simmons and I were lucky enough to interview Steve three times for the Truth About Vintage Amps Podcast. You can listen to the interviews here, here and here.
Given his intimidating persona, we were bracing for the gruff, “Soup Nazi” of tube amps Steve Melkisethian. On the contrary, the Steve Melkisethian we heard on those three podcasts was an absolute joy. (I believe I even described him as “jolly” in one of the show descriptions.) He had stories galore to share, he laughed about his past amp-collecting tales (many of which involved traveling to the UK and buying used Marshalls and Vox amps in bulk), and shared plenty of tech tips.
He booked his subsequent interviews with us around tending to his tomato garden.
We even distributed reprints of his Angela Super Single Ended amp project as downloads on fretboardjournal.com and plotted a global group build of his creation.
Here are just a few priceless stories that he shared over those conversations. Check out the podcasts for even more. We’ll never forget you, Steve.
The Accidental Electric Guitar Dealer
“My plan was to be an acoustic guitarist,” he told us about his early days reselling gear. “I’d been in garage bands, but I saw that not going anywhere for me. I was infatuated with fingerstyle acoustic guitar. I actually knew John Fahey a little bit when I was a kid. He worked at the Esso station on New Hampshire Avenue and was supposedly one of the best guitarists ever. So I wanted to learn that style. [But] he wouldn’t take me on as a student. He suggested a friend of his and, at the appointed time, I think we were going to meet in a public park or something. I showed up with my Martin and waited there for about half an hour but the guy never showed up. So I started looking for other ways to maybe get into that music. I made an appointment at a music store to take lessons and, at the appointed time, I showed up with my guitar and the door was locked and nobody was in there.
“I waited for a time and said, ‘Well, this isn’t going to happen and maybe the world doesn’t want me to do this.’ So I got back into electric guitar.
“I was also looking about for a way to make a living. I said, ‘God, it would be really cool if I knew how to do something.’ So at one of the Smithsonian Folk Festivals, I happened to pick up a magazine and there was an article by Matt Umanov about how to fix guitars. I said, ‘Wow, that’s really cool. This guy knows a lot.’ If I could figure out how to do that, I could probably make a living. At the same time, I was also interested in buying and selling guitars.
“And then something really amazing happened around the same time: A friend of mine had a little band and they got a gig at a disreputable strip club in D.C. called The Butterfly. He invited me down to hear their band play. I went down there and they had these huge Sunn amps with red and white coil chords going everywhere, and they played their set. They sounded like Cream. After they finished up, I asked the guitar player if I could fool around with his guitar. It was the most beat-up guitar I’d ever seen in my life. It looked more like a farm implement than a guitar.
To me, a guitar was this object of desire that looked like it fell from a flying saucer, like a red Stratocaster. This thing was like some ugly butterscotch color and the neck was all worn with black marks on it. So I’m sitting there plunking out a Rolling Stones song and this guy comes walking up to me. He grabs the guitar out of my hands, jumps up on the stage, plugs in and just blows everybody’s mind. He knew every damn trick in the book.”
The guitarist was Roy Buchanan.
“That changed my life,” Steve said. “I was off to the races.”
Becoming an Amp Specialist
“I [had] to go find old guitars. At that time, though, there were other people who had the same idea. Something that you could get when you went looking for old guitars that most people weren’t interested in was old amps. Most people thought an amp was something like a television set. When it broke, you kicked it.
“If you could get [the amp] going, great. If you couldn’t, you just threw it away and bought a new one. So there were lots of old amps laying around and you could buy them for a song, especially if they were broken. At the time, I had some of the biggest vintage guitar dealers in the country calling me up saying, “I wanted to buy this guy’s Strat or Les Paul, and he had this old fucked up amplifier. Will you buy it for me? I don’t want to have this thing.” So I had people shipping me 4×10 Bassmans and Deluxes and everything you would ever want for practically nothing.
“I just started doing it and people got to know who I was. In 1977, I think I actually came out with our first mimeograph catalog. I was aware of GTR Guitars in Nashville at the time. He had a list that he sent around that was professionally printed. I just did the next best thing I possibly could. I had no writing skills really and no graphic art skills. It was like learn-on-the-job kind of thing. That was the first Angela catalog.
“We just kept soldiering on and getting more stuff. So I had to learn how to write a bit and how to take photographs and get them into print. It’s just been an ongoing process.”
Finding Joy in Tube Circuits
“One of the most fun things when I started this, was just the whole discovery aspect of it…if you just went out and bought every tube amp in a pawn shop and took them home and started playing through them. To discover Supros, Oahus, and Valcos and stuff like that, and realize how some of the models just kick the ass of the equivalent Fender. I think the best ‘Champ’ I’ve ever heard was really a Valco. I wish I still had some of those around.”
Importing Marshalls
“I asked Mike Doyle, what does an old Marshall cost [in the UK]? He said, ‘about a hundred quid.’
“I said, ‘What’s a quid?’ I had no idea! We finally figured that out and got it together and jumped on an airplane and ended up meeting in London. I think I was there about 10 minutes, just barely checked into the hotel, when I jumped into a cab and said, ‘Take me to Denmark Street.’ I think I either ended up there or on Tottenham Court Road and walked into the first shop.
“There was a pile of Marshalls. It was about 10 feet high just head after head stacked up. So I walked up to a salesman and said, ‘I want to buy all of these.’ The guy looked at me and said, ‘We haven’t even fixed them yet.’
I said, ‘I don’t care. I’ll take ’em all. How much?’ I think it was a few thousand dollars – and I don’t remember how many amps I actually walked out with – but it was the maximum amount you could put into a taxi cab. So I got the amps, went back to my hotel, unloaded them all…and that’s how I went to England and that’s how it got started.”
Even More Marshalls and Voxs
“We were shipping and so much stuff [from the UK]. I got really familiar with the sea routes and the names of the ships and things like that. It seemed like we always had a container coming over from Liverpool. It was a slow way to get the stuff, but it was super cheap.
“Back then, in 1990, I had to pack up all this stuff in cardboard. There was a music store near Birmingham that put up with me. [They] let me store my stuff there and pack it up in cardboard and tape it all together and then have a truck pick it up. Basically, I would run around England for a week, 10 days, something like that, buying stuff, truck it down to the Midlands, put it in this guy’s warehouse, and then I would have to spend two to three days or maybe even a week packing everything up to get it on the boat.
“Generally, after I got it all packed up, a truck would show up, just an open truck, and we put all the boxes on there and he’d go up to Liverpool and deliver it to the freight company and then it went on a boat and then I’d collect it when it got to Baltimore. I got to know the port in Baltimore really well. That was no pleasure. The teamsters up there were crazy. I went in there one day to get my freight and it was this dark warehouse and there are two guys smoking joints riding around in forklifts, racing. I said, ‘Jesus, I hope don’t get near my cargo.’
“You had to bribe everybody to get anything to move every step of the way, someone would put their hand out, expecting a bribe. It was like a third-world country.
“It seemed like the rules were always changing. Sometimes you’d be in and out of there in 10 minutes. Other times it would be all day. They just kept refusing your paperwork. There were people you could pay to do the customs clearance, but they wanted a lot of money. So I became fairly expert at filling out useless paperwork; that was my job for 10 years.”
Recommended Reading
“Here’s some advice for people about books. Don’t buy a Radiotron Designer’s Handbook, Fourth Edition. You don’t need it unless you’re going to start a manufacturing company. The level of knowledge there is really written for an engineer. It’s not written for somebody who’s going to be making a few amps in their basement. The stuff is just not that fundamental and that’s what I’ve learned about most of the books that I’ve had in my collection. I’ve had hundreds and hundreds of books about electronics that only have a couple little tidbits that are going to help you fix guitar amps or work on your hi-fi system.
“Here’s another book that I was going to mention, Tu-be or Not Tu-be: An Audio Modification Manual by a guy named H.L. Eisenson. Basically, there were only two things in the book that were of use to me.
“One is his description of how a tube works, and I think it really is superb. The second thing in there – money shot – is that he has a description of how to reform old electrolytic capacitors. At the time I bought this book, I happened to buy almost a warehouse full of old twist locks. It was really great to see even a little diagram and a description of the process of reforming them. I was able to save like 90% of the capacitors I bought.
“When I got them, I was really conflicted about how safe they would be to use. But if you formed them up according to his directions, it works like a champ. And this would also be a good thing to have around, if you’ve got an old amp that’s fragile and you want to be really careful and preserve the old electrolytics, you could take them out of the circuit one at a time, put ’em in this little circuit, see if they’re properly formed according to his instructions, and then put the amp back together and off you go. You’ve got an original amp.”
A Pile of Tubes
“In 1989, I wrote an article for a hi-fi magazine called Absolute Sound titled ‘Where the Tubes Are.’ I could see the tube era ending, and I thought I wanted to try my hand at writing for a magazine.
“The best thing in the article was some advice that I actually took for myself. That was that maybe you could find some tubes if you signed up to get these alerts from the government when they wanted to sell stuff. So I did and the Department of Defense actually started sending me these booklets with stuff they had for auction. At the end of the Cold War, someone decided that we don’t need this huge national stockpile of vacuum tubes. So they put them up for auction and hardly anybody knew about it. I think it was me and Mike Matthews and New Sensor and maybe a couple of other guys who were bidding. At first, they were hardly even active and then they would put out like 70,000 12AX7s or a whole warehouse full of 807s…that was the craziest bid I ever saw.
“It took me about three minutes to walk around the pile of tubes. It was so huge. So I started becoming a little big shot, jumping on airplanes and flying here, there and everywhere to look at this stuff. Sometimes it was as described and sometimes it wasn’t. You had to be really careful and they were such large lots. It was scary amounts of money that I had to bid; I just wasn’t used to that league of business. But we made it work. For about the first two years they were putting that stuff out for auction, it was just stealing. Then it got more really competitive. At the end, it was like this isn’t worth it anymore.
But I ended up with a 3,000 square foot warehouse almost full of tubes. It took a number of years, but eventually it all disappeared. I don’t have anything left.”
