The History of My Amps

I was about 13 when I bought my first electric guitar with Confirmation money. It was a Lotus Strat Copy with a white body and a black pickguard from Johnny B Goods, the used department on the second floor of Hollowood Music in McKee’s Rocks, where I took lessons. I paid $100 for it, and the dude that sold it to me still works there, I think, and he threw in a guitar cable and a softshell case for free.

My first amp was my parents’ stereo, a big old coffin-like piece of furniture, with a lid and golden drapes over the speakers. It sat in the hallway at the bottom of the steps. I thought Dracula was going to pop out of that stereo and suck my blood. Under the lid (a 6’x2’ piece of plywood with cherrywood print paper glued to it to make you feel rich) was an 8-track and record player, space to put about 10 albums, a ¼ inch headphone jack and an input the same size, and behind the drapes were some crappy 8-inch speakers. It was bulky for no reason, other than to allow Sears to sell toy boxes for 5 times the value and call them stereos because they have some second-rate electronics in them.

So I came home with my Strat imitation, opened the lid and plugged my cable into the input, and the family was standing around, and zow! that was my first taste of electrified guitar sounds after playing only acoustic for a couple years. I sat in the hallway with the stereo lid open and the cable running down the yellow speaker drapes, and played for hours.

Then after a while I blew out the speakers in the old stereo. My dad was pissed he couldn’t listen to his Clancy Brothers and Kingston Trio albums, but knew that old wooden beast had to be buried some day. I remember the day it was put out on the curb for the garbagemen, and me and a friend of mine got to smash it to bits. And I remember how small the speakers looked when I tore them out, and how the cones were ripped to shreds from a sound I created. So you could say I blew up and smashed my first amp.

My next amp was a little $30 Gorilla amp that I got for Christmas, with a little speaker, and it rocked for a while because I hadn’t had an amp since the stereo was put on the curb, and so had to practice on my acoustic. Eventually I bought a cheapy distortion pedal for it, and cranked the volume on the pedal all the time. I tried to jam with a drummer up the street with the Gorilla, but the drums drowned me out completely, and I knew I needed more power.

So I got my hands on a used Crate combo with a 12 inch speaker. Crates were cheap, but they were tubeless transistor amps, but I didn’t care, because the thing had a distortion button on it, and combine that with my pedal and I could get feedback like goddamn Jimi Hendrix.

So I was set for a while. I could turn the Crate up and you could hear it with the drums.

When I was about 16 a high school friend of mine said he had this amp at his house that was his dad’s, and his dad hadn’t played in years, and he’d sell it to me for ten bucks. He didn’t know what brand it was, how powerful it was, anything, but ten bucks for any amp is a steal, and I told him I’d be over after school to pick the thing up.

It was an old looking beast, with silver grillcloth, looking like amps I’d seen in pictures of Hendrix and Zeppelin. The knobs looked more like oven knobs than amp knobs. Four big knobs: volume, treble, middle, bass. The power switch was a fat, plastic lightswitch, and the two other switches were like something out of the cockpit of a B-29. A no frills piece of machinery. It’s logo was four capital letters in plain, typewriter font: WEST. I grabbed the two rubber straps on the top and leaned the beast forward, looking down at the back. In there was a speaker with a square magnet, which I was later told was a black widow, and these glass and metal tubes hanging down, and it had a smell that’s still in there today. A smell like raw electric power.

I don’t remember how I got the thing home. I might’ve wheeled it home in a shopping cart. When I did get it home I lugged it down to the basement and plugged the two-prong cord into the power strip. I switched the thing on and it hummed. I peeked into the back and saw those tubes firing up. I played a chord and from my hands into the pickups and through the cable and amp and out the black widow speaker came the sweetest, most pure tone I’d ever heard – free from any effects. A far cry from the folks’ old stereo or the electronic robot sounds of the Crate. I plugged straight in - didn’t want to soil it with my crappo distortion pedal. I turned it up and that thing got LOUD with natural overdrive. My mom yelled down at me to turn it down.

Eventually I got a real Fender Strat and was in a “hard rock/metal” band called Strike II (great name), trying to amass a PA system – me and a dude I was jamming with went halfsies on an old Peavey head (and the reverd worked), my Irish folksinger uncle gave me a PA cabinet with an old 15” in it he wasn’t using anymore, and I bought a 2x15 Peavey cabinet, along with a couple of Radio Shack mics and stands. I did a lot of shit I shouldn’t have, trying to hook the West amp directly into the PA, unknowingly risking my life experimenting with sounds and shit in my basement, hooking everything up all wrong, and during one of those experiments I completely fried the Crate. The West started blowing fuses and wouldn’t power on half the time, and was shocking me when it did come on, and I didn’t know why, so I unscrewed it and took it out of the chassis. I didn’t realize you had to let the power drain out after you unplugged it, and so when I went in there and tried to screw around with the switch and I got the shit shocked out of me. I’m really lucky to be alive, come to think of it. Once I switched the thing on and it was shooting green sparks out of it. And even though it was my own stupidity, everyone in the band started calling it the “Evil Amp”.

In college we did the surf band thing, and for a while I was just using the Peavy head with the reverb cranked and the 2x15 cabinet, and I put leopard print on it, which was ridiculous. I couldn’t afford a vintage Fender reverb amp so I got the less desireable but not-too-bad Ampeg Reverberocket, which sits in need of repair in my bedroom today. The Ampeg is a reissue – looks old like the West but with new guts – so you only get the appearance of authenticity and not the quality of the real deal.

I got sick of the dinky little Ampeg and so decided to go all out and buy a Marshall JCM 900 half stack brand new through a catalogue on a credit card, which was stupid now that I look back, because I was already in big time debt, and living in a high-rent house (on the edge of the hood, no less, but that’s Chapel Hill for you) and not making enough cash at my job, so sometimes I had to pay rent with cash advances, which is a bad place to be. I should have shopped around for a JCM 800 and bought a used cab with 25 watt greenbacks and for less money than a brand new, off-the-assembly-line half stack. But by that time I was fed up with amps always breaking down, so I thought I was making an investment, and Marshalls do indeed rock.

But I’m not too attached to Marshalls, and I’m selling the whole shebang now, the whole half stack, and I’ve been paying down my debt like a madman, finally winning some battles in my War on Debt against my two real enemies in this world - the credit card mammoths and the federal government.

And then I’m wondering what I’m gonna do next, and I look in the corner and there’s that medicore Ampeg, in need of repair but the best repair guy in town is also a drunk who takes way too long and owes his employees thousands of dollars. But I just want to get it repaired and get rid of that thing. And all I’ll be left with is that beast, the evil amp, the West Mini 1, sitting over there still with the stench of raw electric power lingering around it.

So I look around online and find the company, Westlabs, is still functioning. It turns out that Dave West from Flint, Michigan sold hi-fi amp componants in the mid-sixties, and in walks Dick Wagner from the Bossmen wanting JBL speakers, and one thing leads to another, and soon he’s making his own West Amps, and they’re used by Grand Funk Railroad. And now he’s doing factory upgrades on the old amps, like putting three-prong plugs on them so you don’t get electrocuted, and all I gotta do is ship him my amp and I’ll have a fully functioning vintage 50 watt West Mini I, and I’m the only person I know who has one. So far, on the entire World Wide Web, I’ve found only two others on a Japanese Grand Funk Railroad fan site. I’m trying to get ahold of Dave to find out more about my amp – like how old the thing is, etc..

But after my amp is upgraded, I’ll buy a new speaker to put in there and another 12” cabinet, and I’ll have myself the best sounding set-up I’ve ever had. I’ll try not to blow it up this time.

What are amps? When considering the whole vast configuration of things, there is a very insignificant difference between an amp and larynx, and my mouth and tongue and lips are the guitar – flesh wires connecting everything. My brain holds languages I imput into speaking and guitar playing. I speak without thinking about it – my brain, larynx,and mouth – all seem to work simultaniously, just like brain, guitar and amp.

Flesh wires.

But there is a deeper mind at work, an egoless mind, and if you can get that to work simultaniously with the body – which includes the data stored in the brain, the fingers, the guitar/mouth, the amp/larynx – you reach a state where segregation between all things - mind, body, fingers, amp, guitar, self and sound – dissolves and ceases to exist, and separate entities become one life form. Only a few times I’ve tapped into that mind while playing, so that all was connected, and there was no difference between guitar, amp, and mind. I was jamming up in my bedroom with a drummer (the guy from Weapons of Violence) and another guitar player once about 11 years ago. All was connected – I was just a living piece of music – guitar, cable, amp were just an extension of myself, no different than body parts. My thoughts were music, the back of my brain was connected to the fingers and oozing out of the West amp, so that I could not play a wrong note, because all worry and self-doubt and the follies of ego ceased, for a moment. Zow!

And it was shortly after that happened that I quit Strike II. We weren’t gigging or practicing much at all anyway, but the drummer told me my problem was I was “listening to too much jazz,” and to which I replied, jokingly, that maybe he wasn’t listening to enough. But there was no way to explain it to him – how could he know what I knew? There is no learning, only experience. How could he begin to take me seriously when I’d tell him that it wasn’t about style or genre, it wasn’t about jazz or metal or rocknroll, or songs or structure? But that I was making music with a heavy metal drummer and a guitarist that didn’t know much more than power chords and I experienced the complete dissolution of the ego? He’d laugh and tell me to put down the weed pipe.

To go along with the idea of the gear being an extension of the self, I can probably trace where my mind was by the amp I owned. The coffin-stereo was the umbillical cord to my folks and I’d only been playing for 3 years then, then the Gorilla was the toddler, and it grew into the Crate – loud but sophomoric in its design, then I got the West and I was starting to really be able to rock out and reach mental pinnacles beyond the ego through playing, and that was the shit. Then I went to college and became diseased with ego, mainly because of prolonged unrequited horniness, and I went insane and part of me became an egomaniac doing bogus bullshit like stapling leopard print to my cabinets trying to draw attention to myself, and buying fakey amps like the Ampeg although another part of me was making music that wasn’t bad at all, adapting some different styles and discovering new bands and music and making some friends. Then we moved down to Chapel Hill and transformed into a rock band, and I always wanted to have a loud rockin Marshall stack, and so I bought one, and it indeed did rock, as did I, but stupidly, because I was surrendering to my enemy and a manifestation of collective ego, the credit card companies.

Now I’m in limbo, amp limbo, music limbo, conducting a War on Debt on two fronts – the credit card giants and the fed, selling off my Marshalls and building up the West Mini 1, the amp most like me, an extension of myself – unembellished with effects, old-school, loud, fat-toned, weighs a lot for a “mini”, has almost killed me, and it drinks too much sometimes (maybe I’m over-projecting here), but it knows the depths of my mind, and knows what it tastes like when ego is conquered.

Like electric chocolate milkshakes.