Ain't Bad for a Pink (39 page)

Speaking of indecisiveness
:
a man with an uncertain air about him brought in a Marshall amp and speaker. He asked what the cash deal would be.

“£400. The deal would be worth more if you took a guitar.” There was much silent pondering and things were being weighed up. It wasn’t clear what the man wanted though he hadn’t said no to the guitar offer.

“Acoustic or electric?”

“Electric.”

“Anything in particular?”

“I’ve already got a Fender and a Strat.” He didn’t seem to be drawn to anything in particular and the uneasy silence continued. Then he indicated one.

“What about that one? How much is that?” This was a black Les Paul Studio.

“I could do you that one for £400. You see them from £395 to £495.”

“What’s it sound like?” I couldn’t get to it without climbing on the amps. And while I weighed it up the man switched his attention to another one: a Gibson Sonex. So I climbed on the amp to get that one down and the man plugged it into his own amp and tuned it. It sounded mellow. He turned it over and over, looking the length of it. Then he asked to look at the previous one: the black Les Paul Studio. So I got that down.

“There’s some weight in this one!” He crouched down to tune it, play it. He looked at the head. There was a deep sigh. I switched an extra light on.

“It’s had a bit of use, this.”

“It’s twenty-five years old, innit?” The man with the shaved head and the earring looked along the body to the head as he did with the previous one.

“Any case for it?” I brought a case and the man put the guitar into it.

“Give us a swap for that.” He had made a decision. I took the hanger off it, closed the box and snapped the catches.

“That can only go up,” I assured him.

The man lingered to buy plectrums and strings and then showed interest in another guitar: a white guitar with a satin finish. This was a Washburn that was made in the US. I got that down for him and he was very drawn to it and I knew this; I understood this air of uncertainty I’ve witnessed so many times.

“I’m shut till Thursday. See how you get on with that Les Paul for a couple of days then you can swap it if you want.”

“Might see you on Thursday. Might do.” But he still didn’t go. Something in the window caught his eye: an Effect Processor.

“It does everything but make tea,” I told him. “If you don’t know anything about pedals, this is what you have until you do.”

“I need a really good all-round amp for the guitars I’ve got. It’s the sound I’m after – like AC/DC.”

“Well – start by sussing out what sounds you actually use then you can get pedals that do that. Buy it, take it home, try it, swap it or have your money back if it won’t do.”

“I’ll see how I get on with this.”

And off he went, the man whose heart responded to a guitar he didn’t take with him but who might be back. He had actually taken the guitar he first asked about: the black Les Paul Studio but his heart went out to the third one: the Washburn. He could have had that plus a hundred quid in exchange for the amp and speaker. I was pleased with the Marshall amp. It was light enough to go on an aeroplane; you could probably take the speaker as well. And it was equipment from the late Sixties which is like hens’ teeth to get hold of.

The indecisive man came back several times to change his guitar. “That’s why I’ve got no tattoos – I can’t decide!” He ended up with a copper top Les Paul Studio. I think he should forget about tattoos. It’s a slippery slope!

My hero is Ritchie Blackmore of Deep Purple. I named one of my sons after him and had his name tattooed on my arm. If you look closely there is only a black area where the name should be. I had to have the name blacked out because the tattooist had spelt it, “Blackmoor”.

Wayne Davies (Slim).
(8)

Presumably the same level of scholarship that produced “Hendricks” on another unfortunate arm.

Sometimes you just don’t know what the agenda is because it looks as if no-one is sticking to one – they’re all over the place. You don’t know if people intend to buy anything or just want a browse; you don’t know if they want to buy what they say they want to buy. You don’t know which transactions are about necessity and which are about love. There’s usually a blend of reality and fantasy and prejudice when people buy musical instruments. It’s like a courtship ritual: it can’t be hurried; you shouldn’t interfere and the choice is often incomprehensible to a third party!

One scenario involved two men in black hats, rival banjos, an elusive acoustic amp and two twelve strings – one of them derelict. The men came into the shop on a fresh spring morning in April.

“Do you have any banjos about?” asked Desperado Number One.

“Only the cheap one in the window and this one here.” I showed him the pewter Bombay banjo and both men were immediately impressed by it.

“I’ll tell you what I’m after; I want a decent acoustic amp.” It was Desperado Number Two. I shook my head.

“Do you know any place I can get one? I’ve got two gigs coming up.”

“It’s a brilliant place, isn’t it?” said the other. He was having a good look round.

“What I’d really like is an Ashdown amp.”

“They’re all made in China these days.”

“But the Ashdown’s a British amp.”

“Yes but it’s made in China for a British company. Peavey and Marshall ones are the best, but dear.”

“I didn’t get on with the Marshall but I did OK with an Ashdown. Can I just try that banjo?” The man who wanted an amp tuned and played the Bombay banjo. I showed them the case. They were both impressed by it being a gun case.

“It was worth the trip just to see that. I wish you’d got an amp though.”

And this is how things meander. But it was interesting as an example of how people do know exactly what they want in spite of their butterfly minds, and in spite of my attempts to find what I think they want or what would be better for them. I thought we were talking banjos and acoustic amps and we were but only on the surface. Neither of the banjos I had in could come up to the imagined excellence of a Mastertone played in Winsford and I had, moreover, failed to have an Ashdown amp.

There was another agenda, hidden at first: a cheap guitar to renovate. The man I thought was most interested in a banjo wanted to buy the Montana twelve string acoustic – presently a heap of junk belonging to someone else and waiting to be mended – in preference to the Framus twelve string acoustic which at forty quid was a better proposition.

And we still kept coming back to the Ashdown amp I didn’t have.

Through the barter system unusual instruments find their way into my possession and I often have a cluster of a certain type accumulating in the same week.

I traded a steel guitar for a hand-made lap steel currently worth about £500. I think its owner probably didn’t like it; there’s something cold about it but people do find lap steels bizarre in the way the body, though curved, is small and it also has to be played horizontally. The strings are high above the fretless finger board and you press hard down with a metal bar and there it is: the unmistakeable Hawaiian sound.

I had another one up my sleeve: a 1937 Gibson lap steel. It’s a nicer looking instrument made from a solid piece of mahogany and sounds altogether sweeter than the 1947 instrument. Again, there are no frets because you don’t press as far down as the finger board but the finger board is marked so the musician knows where to put the slide. This one is worth about £600. People are surprised that such old instruments are not worth more but few people want them.

In early spring 2007 I acquired, by a circuitous route, a1972 Dobro Hound Dog which will retail at £800. In some circumstances it could fetch £1,200 and to the right person it’s worth the money. Dixie had phoned to tell me about it being in Route 66, Hanley. I turned it down. Then Reg from R&B on Nantwich Road phoned me saying he had it and was I interested? Like Dixie, Reg knew my tastes and this time I succumbed and did a deal. He relied on me to know the going price for the instrument. I gave him a little Washburn plus £200. This gives an insight into the inner workings of the trade: people having knowledge of other people’s specialist interests, the existence of some trust in fair price-setting and a system of bartering.

The Dobro Hound Dog is a lap guitar with a square neck and very high action. Everything about this instrument is associated with dogs – the bar I use is called a “Lap Dawg” and you’ve just gotta play country, not blues on it. I decided to treat it as a toy for a while – all I had to do was develop a liking for bluegrass!

Lap Dobros were developed as long ago as the 1920s for the Hawaiian music
aficionado.
It’s easy to produce the echoing Hawaiian refrain: melodious and resonant and warm, through complicated picking and key changing. The sweet tones and volume levels were just right for this music, which is produced using a bar to alter the pitch of the notes by applying pressure on the strings. The strings do not touch the frets and the ‘wobble’ or tremolo effect is only achieved by pressurising the strings with the bar. It is possible to get a similar effect using a slide but it’s never the same.

The Dobro Hound Dog resembles the ordinary Dobro in having the trademark resonator which meant it would easily stand up to other instruments on single notes. Before the resonator it was impossible for single lap guitar notes to be heard above the sound of the other instruments, hence its popularity until the advent of electrical amplification.

The steel resonator has fan shapes and openings for the sound. The curvilinear shape of the wooden body is a little flattened across the top and there are two holes with steel mesh for sound to come through. It works on the same principle as a wind-up gramophone. With the Hound Dog the bridge acts the same as the stylus and the web takes the weight of the strings, transferring the energy from the strings to the resonator whilst at the same time supporting the strings. The sound comes out of the body of the guitar, which acts as a ‘horn’. Some have more holes, thus greater volume and tone than others.

The Hawaiian equivalent of the Dobro lap guitar does not use the same principle to produce volume. For example, the Weissenborn Style has a hollow neck, tapered to the top to maximise sound. There are some examples in
Acoustic Guitars
by George Gruhn and Walter Carter. The photographs show beautifully made guitars: decorated and carved, not by computer but by hand: an art form in their own right.

I have an extraordinary piece of equipment: a single string violin. The bridge acts as a stylus and the string sound, played by a bow, is amplified by the metal horn which has a small resonator or diaphragm where it is joined to the rest of the instrument. With a wind-up gramophone, vibrations are picked up from the needle onto a diaphragm and into the horn, which amplifies it. Then, in the cupboard there’s an extension of this horn effect whose volume is controlled by the opening and closing of the cupboard doors.

My innovations in sound amplification in the Seventies were based on the same principle.

Sometimes the form an instrument takes is to do with technical innovation; sometimes it’s about image – there are fashions in musical equipment as in anything else. For speakers and amplifiers the conventional colour is black – the colour most associated with power – so amps that are not this colour stand out. When I serviced Des’ two Sherwood acoustic amps and a Laney acoustic amp, people noticed them. Apparently, brown amps are produced for the acoustic market; wooden ones are currently in vogue as it looks a bit more folkie.

I also have a Marshall amp, unusual in that it is covered in blue – French navy – to be exact. Every now and again Marshall produces limited edition coloured amps. This one is four years old and worth about £295.

Orange amps originally built by Matt Matthias are worth a lot of money now and are still being made. Orange was actually a shop in Denmark Street, London and it was painted orange, hence the amps were called Orange Matt amps and the orange was the company logo perhaps to parody Apple.

Me and Dunc were looking in the window – we’d be thirteen/fourteen – and saw a great big orange thing, a great big bright orange thing with a white front. It was called “Orange” and there was no writing: just symbols. Size of a microwave: tall and fat – not like Marshalls which are long. We honestly didn’t know what to make of it because it was so strange and we didn’t like to go in and ask because the place was always steeped in mystery – like one of those shops that kids pass and it’s full of cobwebs and the beginning of some adventure and we didn’t like to ask as well because Pete would say, sternly or grumpily, “It’s an Orange…” whatever and we’d have to cover our ignorance and slink out saying, “Yeah, we thought so…”

Jim Farmer.
(9)

There isn’t very much you can do about speakers: they’re just big black boxes but the manufacturers do try to make them distinctive. In a corner near the back of the shop stands a tall tower of a speaker, rather
art deco
in design. This is a WEM as used by Pink Floyd: and can be seen on the
Ummagumma
album cover.

The shop is frequently dominated by monolithic bass bins and horns. Each set would have cost £800 plus new but will fetch only £100 a set these days because everything is being scaled down in size.

The Zob stick I have is a piece of rough-hewn wood, four feet long with piles of bottle tops attached by nails and a biker’s boot at the end. The top of this rhythm stick is carved as a phallus – originally embellished with a pair of red PVC balls which fell off at an exuberant moment. The Skunk Band made good use of it: it’s an effective percussion instrument and makes people laugh.