Cars and Guitars
It's a long weekend this weekend, both in the sense that we have an extra day off work for the US holiday, Labor Day, and the fact that I have been kind of busy. The band played both nights this week, and I went up to Noblesville to visit my folks and my sister who was in town with her kids for the weekend. Of course, I've been taking pictures.
Up in Noblesville there is a local tradition on Fridays for folks to bring their old and/or interesting vehicles down to the town square for a few hours around dinner time. We went over in dad's 1927 Ford and checked out a bunch of the cars. The car above is an Austin Healey, a British sports car.
This is the grille emblem off of a vintage Brockway truck. It was so badass to see this old guy pull up to the town square and parallel park an antique semi! He acted like he had just parked a Honda or something instead of a massive truck. Air brakes and everything. Friggin' awesome.
Here's a fantastically flamed '48 Chevy pickup. I just liked the colors on this one. My nephew, who is three years old, loves flames. Apparently, I haven't grown much older than three years old in my head. I still like flames. And as my nephew says, yes, it does mean they're faster if they have flames!
After my visit, I headed down south to do a gig. We had our upright bass player with us this time, which was pretty damn cool. When he solos he scats every note he plays. He's weird, but he's nice, and he's really friggin' good!
At any rate, when we took a break I was looking at all the crap on the stage, and the boss' guitars were sitting there. One of my Most Awesome Readers here has been asking about guitar stuff lately, so I thought I'd get a shot of them. I got bossman to line them all up for me and snapped 'em real quick. How's about a little needless detail? Coming right up!
The off-white one on the left is a Fender Telecaster. It's a reproduction of one of the earliest Telecasters, what has come to be called a NoCaster. When they were first created, Fender named their guitars Broadcasters. Unfortunately, the Gretsch drum company had a line of drums called Broadcasters, and they sued Fender for copyright infringement. Fender didn't have a problem with changing the name, but they couldn't get it renamed immediately, especially for labels and catalogs and stuff, so for one year Fender just cut the word "Broadcaster" off the headstock decal, and it said simply "Fender," as this one does. The next year they renamed the guitar Telecaster, and had new labels made for them. The NoCaster only existed for one year, and there's something like only 400 of them in existence. They bring huge money on the collector market. Mainly the reason my boss has this one is because it sound friggin' awesome, not because it looks like a beat-up old guitar, although that certainly gives it a nice vibe. It was sounding fan-fucking-tastic Saturday night, I must say. Then again, I'm a little biased. I think my guitarist/bandleader has the best damn guitar tone in the entire state.
The middle guitar, the red one, is a 1965 Gibson ES330. You could still buy these things in the early 90s for around 700 bucks, which totally blows my mind. Now they cost around $5000. Still a pretty damn affordable guitar for vintage stuff, but they sure have appreciated in value in just a couple decades. Apparently The Edge started playing them in U2 (they distort really great thanks to the P90 pickups), and that drove prices up. We're not a big distortion band, but bossman makes this thing sing. It's a hollow body guitar, which means exactly what the name says - the body of the guitar is not a solid piece of wood. You can see the F-holes on each side of the strings there. This gives it a lot of resonance, but because of that it also is prone to feedback at higher volumes, as pointed out earlier. Huge tone on these things, though. I've known a few other guys around town who have used these at one time or another. It's an old Gibson, what could possibly be bad about it?
The third guitar on the far right is a reproduction of a vintage Stratocaster. The Strat was introduced after the Telecaster. Hendrix was one of the guitarists who made the Strat so damn popular, but tons of people were using them long before he lit one one fire (literally). Along with Fender's Tele, and Gibson's Les Paul (RIP, Les Paul, by the way), these three guitars form the mainstays of gigging and non-gigging musicians the world over. They're just good quality workhorse pieces of sonic art. The quality varies depending on year and country of origin (some are manufactured outside the US), but unless you buy a used one that's been abused beyond all reason, it's nearly impossible to find one that is unplayable. They go and go and go, and they make a zillion pickups for them, so you can make the thing do just about anything you want to sound-wise. They've been used for everything from country, to blues, to rock, to jazz and every genre and sub-genre in between.
Oh, I almost forgot - the amp sitting behind the Stratocaster is the historic and awesome Super Reverb. Probably not the choice of rock guitarists these days, but someone somewhere is playing one of these every second of the damn day. They're tone machines. This one is a blackface model, made before CBS bought Fender and proceeded to screw things up for several years in the late sixties and seventies. It's got four 10-inch speakers and something like 50 watts. That's not very loud compared to your average Marshall (or Fender, for that matter) these days, but it's plenty loud for an average club gig for our band. Mostly the thing is the tone. This one in particular has a very "dark" sound to it. It's the bass-iest Super I've ever heard, and bossman says the same thing. It's my favorite amp of his, and I kind of freaked out a couple of years ago when he sold it to a close friend. I told him he was nuts. I thought in my head that he would buy it back sooner or later. When he bought it back he said he'd been crazy to sell it. I reminded him that I told him that, and that I figured he would buy it back.
And that's it for our little tour today, kids. Enjoy the rest of your weekend!
Up in Noblesville there is a local tradition on Fridays for folks to bring their old and/or interesting vehicles down to the town square for a few hours around dinner time. We went over in dad's 1927 Ford and checked out a bunch of the cars. The car above is an Austin Healey, a British sports car.
This is the grille emblem off of a vintage Brockway truck. It was so badass to see this old guy pull up to the town square and parallel park an antique semi! He acted like he had just parked a Honda or something instead of a massive truck. Air brakes and everything. Friggin' awesome.
Here's a fantastically flamed '48 Chevy pickup. I just liked the colors on this one. My nephew, who is three years old, loves flames. Apparently, I haven't grown much older than three years old in my head. I still like flames. And as my nephew says, yes, it does mean they're faster if they have flames!
After my visit, I headed down south to do a gig. We had our upright bass player with us this time, which was pretty damn cool. When he solos he scats every note he plays. He's weird, but he's nice, and he's really friggin' good!
At any rate, when we took a break I was looking at all the crap on the stage, and the boss' guitars were sitting there. One of my Most Awesome Readers here has been asking about guitar stuff lately, so I thought I'd get a shot of them. I got bossman to line them all up for me and snapped 'em real quick. How's about a little needless detail? Coming right up!
The off-white one on the left is a Fender Telecaster. It's a reproduction of one of the earliest Telecasters, what has come to be called a NoCaster. When they were first created, Fender named their guitars Broadcasters. Unfortunately, the Gretsch drum company had a line of drums called Broadcasters, and they sued Fender for copyright infringement. Fender didn't have a problem with changing the name, but they couldn't get it renamed immediately, especially for labels and catalogs and stuff, so for one year Fender just cut the word "Broadcaster" off the headstock decal, and it said simply "Fender," as this one does. The next year they renamed the guitar Telecaster, and had new labels made for them. The NoCaster only existed for one year, and there's something like only 400 of them in existence. They bring huge money on the collector market. Mainly the reason my boss has this one is because it sound friggin' awesome, not because it looks like a beat-up old guitar, although that certainly gives it a nice vibe. It was sounding fan-fucking-tastic Saturday night, I must say. Then again, I'm a little biased. I think my guitarist/bandleader has the best damn guitar tone in the entire state.
The middle guitar, the red one, is a 1965 Gibson ES330. You could still buy these things in the early 90s for around 700 bucks, which totally blows my mind. Now they cost around $5000. Still a pretty damn affordable guitar for vintage stuff, but they sure have appreciated in value in just a couple decades. Apparently The Edge started playing them in U2 (they distort really great thanks to the P90 pickups), and that drove prices up. We're not a big distortion band, but bossman makes this thing sing. It's a hollow body guitar, which means exactly what the name says - the body of the guitar is not a solid piece of wood. You can see the F-holes on each side of the strings there. This gives it a lot of resonance, but because of that it also is prone to feedback at higher volumes, as pointed out earlier. Huge tone on these things, though. I've known a few other guys around town who have used these at one time or another. It's an old Gibson, what could possibly be bad about it?
The third guitar on the far right is a reproduction of a vintage Stratocaster. The Strat was introduced after the Telecaster. Hendrix was one of the guitarists who made the Strat so damn popular, but tons of people were using them long before he lit one one fire (literally). Along with Fender's Tele, and Gibson's Les Paul (RIP, Les Paul, by the way), these three guitars form the mainstays of gigging and non-gigging musicians the world over. They're just good quality workhorse pieces of sonic art. The quality varies depending on year and country of origin (some are manufactured outside the US), but unless you buy a used one that's been abused beyond all reason, it's nearly impossible to find one that is unplayable. They go and go and go, and they make a zillion pickups for them, so you can make the thing do just about anything you want to sound-wise. They've been used for everything from country, to blues, to rock, to jazz and every genre and sub-genre in between.
Oh, I almost forgot - the amp sitting behind the Stratocaster is the historic and awesome Super Reverb. Probably not the choice of rock guitarists these days, but someone somewhere is playing one of these every second of the damn day. They're tone machines. This one is a blackface model, made before CBS bought Fender and proceeded to screw things up for several years in the late sixties and seventies. It's got four 10-inch speakers and something like 50 watts. That's not very loud compared to your average Marshall (or Fender, for that matter) these days, but it's plenty loud for an average club gig for our band. Mostly the thing is the tone. This one in particular has a very "dark" sound to it. It's the bass-iest Super I've ever heard, and bossman says the same thing. It's my favorite amp of his, and I kind of freaked out a couple of years ago when he sold it to a close friend. I told him he was nuts. I thought in my head that he would buy it back sooner or later. When he bought it back he said he'd been crazy to sell it. I reminded him that I told him that, and that I figured he would buy it back.
And that's it for our little tour today, kids. Enjoy the rest of your weekend!