A Tragic Tale
Posted: Sun Jan 08, 2012 6:36 pm
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!
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!
