A Tragic Tale

[Legion]

A long time ago in a galaxy far far away, back when I was an itty bitty teen my mother remarried and we moved to a different country. The first thing I did was find the cool record stores and the second was find a bulletin board and put up an ad to form a band. At the time I played nothing and was looking to be the vocalist. I had a few hits but the one that stuck was this guy who been playing for a few years and moved through the standard progression of Beatles to Hendrix to Punk.

We jammed every week...in a tiny back room of his fathers workplace. His rig consisted of a beautiful Ibanez 335 clone, an old generic 100 watt tube amp and a few cheaper pedals he had acquired as well as a Watkins Copycat. Our standard routine was to meet on the weekend, play for an hour or so, take a break and go get some cheap booze from the place that would sell to us, wander around the local market drinking then head back and jam for a bit more. I lived way off on the edge of the city so usually I came in on a Sat morn and stayed at his place till Sunday night. Eventually I moved out of home into an inner city dive filled with socialists and crabs and got a mohawk...yeah teen rebellious me!

After I moved and we were both about done with school we walked around the city quite a bit, causing trouble, being silly young punks and talking about music and our plans....and of course hitting up every music store in town to check out their wares. This, being the mid 80's, was the epoch of the compact pedal and the dawn of digital. All the new stores carried Boss and Ibanez and not much else. but the second hand stores.....a treasure trove!! Since everyone wanted to play and sound like Steve Vai or the like they were all buying up Boss delays and the like and selling off all there older stuff...and the stores were full of it. Old Muffs, Colorsounds, Fuzzfaces, giant Electric Mistress', beaten up Small Stones and a sundry of other lesser known oddball devices, wahs and such. And the best part of it all? They averaged about $10 to $20 dollars a pop!

Over the course of time he picked up a handful of fuzzboxes, some kind early flanger, a few different wahs and some other bit's and bobs. He'd play with them until a battery connection broke or the jacks got noisy or what ever then toss them in the corner of his room and pick up something else. He never was very into fixing or maintaining them and since they were cheap and abundant at the time it was easy enough to replace them.

Time passes and he moved on to funk and jazz, we drifted apart a bit as I went onto another band but we maintained intermittent contact. During the next band I started playing guitar myself...not in the band but just to learn.Being a few years behind him in this he was very judgmental of my playing and being immersed in jazz studies even more so of my taste which put a further rift in our relationship but I did my best to let it go and kept playing. I traveled a bit, became a junkie for a while, reconnecting with him every few years, learned to play better, studied audio engineering, eventually wrote and recorded a ton of my own stuff...mostly alt indie pop type shit.

More recently I caught up with him again and, since he had started playing again and moved on from jazz to Japanese noise and I was more interested in playing something heavier and in a non solo group effort we decided to start playing together again. Well...that didn't work out...mostly due to personal stuff I won't get into...but while we were talking I asked him what had happened to all those pedals (since I had always had a dream of seeing that collection restored and either used by him or bought by me) and he told me that during a rough period of his life his stuff had been in storage at a family place or something and his brother had thrown them out!!

They cost him maybe $200 all up...but at current rates I am estimating at least 5 grand....priceless though in the right hands...irreplaceable tools and toys sitting in a rotten bag somewhere in a landfill...breaks my heart.

The moral to this tale of tragic woe is look after your gear, even if it is cheap and plentiful, keep it safe and loved and don't let your brother anywhere near it!

[Toonster]

A very sad story indeed! Most of the times I like bad endings in fiction, but this

[alexa.]

ohmigod :(:(

[Legion]

A very sad story indeed! Most of the times I like bad endings in fiction, but this

If only it was fiction....

[Fuzz_Pi]

Cool story man. Sad but you kno

If only all thos pedals were still only 10-20 bucks

[Legion]

If only all thos pedals were still only 10-20 bucks

Oh I know...

First house in when I moved out, with the socialists and the crabs, one of the roomies was a bassplayer and had a 303 and a 606 laying in a corner gathering dust. I ended up appropriating them and fiddling with them for hours. I had em for months until he decided to sell them to buy to help pay for food or something. This was long before rave or acid house....he got maybe $35 for the two...

[Fuzz_Pi]

If only all thos pedals were still only 10-20 bucks

Oh I know...

First house in when I moved out, with the socialists and the crabs, one of the roomies was a bassplayer and had a 303 and a 606 laying in a corner gathering dust. I ended up appropriating them and fiddling with them for hours. I had em for months until he decided to sell them to buy to help pay for food or something. This was long before rave or acid house....he got maybe $35 for the two...

Damn dude yer making me wish i was old lol

[Legion]

Just makes me wish I had a time machine...

[Legion]

So I guess I shouldn't tell you about the Vox Satellite i had for a month before I traded in in on something else. In those early days when I could barely play, used gear was cheap and I had too much money I bought, sold and traded on a weekly basis...looking for the elusive bit of kit that would make me sound great..took me a while to realize it's in the fingers...now I hoard everything and sell nothing...

[nightraven]

:'(

i hate thinking about how much classic fuzz is sitting at the bottom of landfills around the UK

[Legion]

We should arrange an expidition to rescue them!!!

[Bassus Sanguinis]

You know, in the early 90's in Finland, Ibanez Standard Fuzz and the collectable Russian Big Muffs were laughed as a joke. Young generation just didn't understand metal if it wasn't thrash metal, and the old geezers they had always been too rough

I almost got my first Ibanez STD fuzz back then, painted black and full of stickers, both sliders totally crapped out... but sounded wonderful. Loved it hard and tried to get to buy it from the owner. The owner however had offered it for about 30 US$ to somebody else and modded it for him. No more that obscene gating, no more octave, no more blistering fuzz... nothing cool. Didn't buy when the guy offered it back to me.

[dubkitty]

don't even get me started on how you could get stuff that's now incredibly desireable for NOTHING in the 1970s...Guild Starfires and Gibson 335s were $200, and you could get Melody Makers or those little LG-0 mahogany Gibson acoustics that go for $1000 now for $125. Twin Reverbs? $200 all day long. the Gibson tweeds that go for $1200 now? NOBODY EVEN WANTED THEM. same thing with Jazzmasters and Jaguars. you could go back to 1972 with $10,000 of capital, bring the stuff you bought back to the present day, and retire on the profits from selling the stuff off. or just be the happiest player in your town.

[bigchiefbc]

don't even get me started on how you could get stuff that's now incredibly desireable for NOTHING in the 1970s...Guild Starfires and Gibson 335s were $200, and you could get Melody Makers or those little LG-0 mahogany Gibson acoustics that go for $1000 now for $125. Twin Reverbs? $200 all day long. the Gibson tweeds that go for $1200 now? NOBODY EVEN WANTED THEM. same thing with Jazzmasters and Jaguars. you could go back to 1972 with $10,000 of capital, bring the stuff you bought back to the present day, and retire on the profits from selling the stuff off. or just be the happiest player in your town.

You don't even have to go back that far. In the late 90's/early 00's when they were being discontinued, Digitech Bass Whammys and Akai Deep Impacts were being blown out of stores for like $79 just so they could kill off their inventory. Now they're both going for about a grand each.

[dubkitty]

or the DeArmond Starfire basses from that era that are now going for almost as much as a player-grade vintage Guild Starfire.