1964 Gibson Mercury II discovered in an old storage facility

[ibanezspazz]

Hi everyone. I was shocked by a friend working in a storage facility. He found a dead mint 1964 Gibson Mercury II head and cab. I mean this thing looks untouched. Freaky. ANY info on this would be very helpfull.

 

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[L5Larry]

I owned one of these back in the "day". It was a pretty neat amp powered by two 6L6GC tubes. Within the preamp/rectifier/tremolo sections it had some pretty odd tubes, and would be very expensive to retube today. I came into the early 70's with mine and it just didn't have enough power or overdrive for what was happening at the time in R&R. It DID have "tone to the bone", and had a very clean output all the way through the volume knob range.

 

What made this amp very unique was the speaker cabinet. It contained a 15" woofer and a sealed back 8 or 10" midrange, so the cabinet design was more like a hi-fi speaker than a musical instrument cabinet. The built-in tilt back leg on the cab was also very useful, and the fact that the head mechanically clamped to the cabinet meant you could tilt the whole thing back. Tiliting it back with or without the removable castors in place would give you two different angles.

 

There were a few problems with this design as I see it, the lack of power, the size, and no reverb. Even at the time a Twin Reverb was twice the power and half the size (although a COMPLETELY different tone).

 

I sold mine to a bass player who coverted the cabinet to two 15's. When he was done with it I bought it back and converted it to two 12's. I finally sold it to a collector who had a thing for old Gibson amps. I haven't seen another since.