A legacy of my idiocy.

What’s strange is that it’s probably the column I have received the most mail on. People from all over the world wrote me about equipment they’d lost and the interesting ways they lost their stuff. They were all GREAT letters. Sad yet entertaining. We all had a story or two or twenty. It was like a gear geek AA meeting. ‘My name is so and so and I lost a FILL IN THE BLANK.’

If you put us in a room, I’m sure we’d wince at the equipment and the amazingly low price our brothers and sisters lost it for. We’d hug each other and pat backs and shake heads and bond over how dumb we could be. (Maybe we SHOULD start a ‘lost gear’ support group.)

The funny thing is, while I can go on and on about great gear I’ve lost, I rarely tell the stories of how lucky I am to have the gear I do have (especially now that I don’t sell AC30’s for a zip lock bag with what are SUPPOSED TO BE 20 Percocets!!! It’s bad enough to be dumb…but to be dumb and ripped off…wow.) But people who trade AC 30’s for disguised stool softener pills get what they deserve, I suppose. But back to the topic at hand: Lost cool gear.

Until VERY recently, I had a fond memory for this very cool multi-effects unit I bought at a yard sale back in the early 80’s in Connecticut. For those of you unfamiliar with the term ‘yard sale,’ it’s the same as a ‘tag sale’ or a ‘garage sale’ depending on where you live. It is a low rent estate sale. Without the dead people and with crappier stuff, mostly.

The thing I bought (and I had NO idea or memory what it was called) was about the size of a small suitcase. It had a handle on top and the case was a sort of brushed aluminum. When you set it down and touched a button on the top, one side of it opened to a floorboard with what looked like a wah-wah or volume pedal in the middle and three or four mushroom cloud-looking foot buttons that would turn various effects on and off. When plugged in, it had SEVERAL cool clear switches that looked like clear light switches with a wild array of colors shining through the control panel.

It looked like something out of the original Star Trek series and it was 10 bucks and I bought it.

And for the next 7-8 years, whenever another guitar player came to my house or apartment, I would show him or her this ridiculous box (Named ‘the box’ by me) I had that made a series of astounding (and yet pretty unusable) noises all while shining various great colors in the dark.

One of my friends and mine’s favorite applications for this thing was to take a hit of acid, turn the lights out and play this thing as loud as possible through my mid 70’s Twin Reverb (sold, as I recall, for 100 bucks in gas money in the late 80’s…’arrrrghhhh!’ as Charlie Brown would say). We’d rotate…the unlucky people would play bass or drums…the lucky one in the rotation got to play the light-up suitcase with all the lights and weird noises. Ah, ‘the box.’

Then, I feel deep under the influence of Glen Branca and a guitar player named Glenn Phillips, best known as the guitar player for the obscure Hampton Grease Band. By the 80’s, however, he was deep into his solo career (he still plays…catch him if you can) as one of the oddest, most wonderful and interesting instrumental rock musicians. His album Razor Pocket is one of the truly great instrumental rock guitar albums. FIND IT, if you care about great guitar players. Someone at ‘Guitar Player’ in those days dubbed him ‘Mahavishnu Johnny Ramone’ which is actually kind of accurate. His has the chops and improvisational skills of a Jazz horn player, with the energy and velocity of a raging punk guitar player. A proto Nels Cline. He’s astounding. Find Razor Pocket or any of his other solo outings. He has the rare gift of writing catchy, melodic guitar instrumentals with monster chops and cool noises.

Anyway, I had fallen deeply under the spell of great guitar noisemakers. So, I started using ‘the box’ in a new band, at gigs, not just at acid parties at the apartment. During free form noise shows with my ‘art’ punk band of the time, I would use ‘the box’ and I now realized it had SEVERAL usable noises and settings. It had a VERY weird and thin sounding fuzz-type effect that would cause huge, annoying overtones and octaves and harmonic swirls when turned up (and we were nothing, if not VERY turned up, volume wise). We had another ‘guitar’ player who would tune all his strings to one note and repeatedly drop his guitar for his ‘solo’. It was a happening, man. ‘The box’ also had a sort of tremolo effect. A pulsing noise to add to the Fizzle effect. And then there was this odd filter/compression sound. When they were all on together, along with a Big Muff and the amps on 10…well, it sort of didn’t matter what you played note-wise, as the whole guitar was swallowed by these effects that would create this Niagara Falls of noise that just took your body over—it wasn’t really music, but it was astoundingly inside you when ‘the box’ really got going.

After that band was banned from most clubs in Boston, I moved, and ‘the box’ was retired as I played in more conventional bands. And all I know is, years later, I don’t have it. I may have given it away. I may have left it in an apartment when I moved. I may have sold it for a few bucks. But, by the time I was sober and had moved west, ‘the box’ was a thing of my past.

I really had nothing but fond memories for this weird effect until very recently, when I was reading Analog Man’s Guide to Vintage Effects. It’s a great book—one, along with Dave Hunter’s Guitar Effects Pedals: The Practical Handbook that any fan of effects should check out.

However there is one terrible thing about Analog Man’s book. One horrifying, crappy, sad, awful thing about the book.

What is this terrible thing about the Analog Man book?

It identified ‘the box’ for me. There were two pictures, so that I could point to it and tell my wife, ‘That’s IT. That’s THE BOX!’ While she nodded patiently at my insanity with what seemed to me to be not nearly enough interest.

1970 Ludwig Phase II Guitar Synthesizer

It turns out ‘the box’ was a Ludwig Phase II Synthesizer. The tremolo effect was called ‘Animation.’ The weird filter thing was called ‘Formant Trajectories.’ The fuzz was, well, fuzz. There are 4 sliders on the top, four mushroom cloud foot switches. A pedal for wah-esque effects. And seven light up switches on the top.

So, what’s so terrible about this news? Knowledge is good, no? Well, no, it turns out. Not this time, anyway.

I learned they go for 3-4 THOUSAND dollars on eBay. Not a misprint. Three to four thousand dollars. The box was cool. VERY cool. But it was not a 4 thousand dollar effect (I don’t know if I think there is such a thing…well, I believe there is such a thing when I’m selling, but not when I’m buying).

But, I keep trying to remind myself, if I hadn’t lost it in whatever forgettable way it was that I lost it, I would probably have lost it in such a really stupid way that I would have regretted it every day of my life and all I would have to show for it would be a column about how dumb I was that I lost ‘the box.’

Lost Gear Therapy from MyRareGuitars.com

Even as a high-schooler with long hair, no understanding that a volume knob could be turned down and a frighteningly bad technique with a whammy bar, I seemed to be able to find rare, odd and, in general, cool equipment. I got my ability to spot gold among the trash probably from my dad, who was a gear-head and many of the best times we spent together were running through junkyards looking for a treasure someone else had tossed away (this led, however, to the abject horror of holding a flashlight in the garage while he screamed “That’s great, now how about holding it where I’m looking?” But that is another story).

So, I found guitars. While my Metallica and Black Sabbath-loving brethren were finding the newest pointy-headed Super-Strat monster, I found a 1979 Travis Bean metal neck at a yard sale. I found a 1963 Burgundy Melody Maker. A 1983 “The Strat” in Lake Placid Blue with a maple fretboard. A 1935 Martin R-17 Archtop I bought from the original owner (a, as one might guess, very old man). A 1969 Telecaster (in its original case that came with a very dry crinkly stale bag of dope) for $250.00.

This was all in high school.

By college, I’d dumbed my way into a mid-60’s Fender Twin reverb (traded for a Washburn (!?) acoustic). In 1987, I traded a diamond earring (which my grandmother had given to me to have set in a ring when I met that “special someone”) for a 1966 Harmony H72 (with factory Bigsby!) at a Philadelphia pawnshop when my band was in town for a show. It came with a brown vinyl gig bag, too – a steal.

So what went wrong?

I got drunk. A lot. A warning. For the true gear-heads/guitar lovers out there, this will be painful and graphic – as my stupidity knew no bounds for a while. Let’s get started….

At a show at some motel with a swimming pool, I ran into said pool without taking my ?69 Tele off. So, new electronics were in order. Later, I decided a fret job couldn’t be so hard, so I went with the low bidder. A tip. NEVER go with the low bidder on your guitar neck. Not a 69 Tele, anyway. Trust me.

The ’63 Melody Maker? It was a beefy monster of a little guitar and I used it in both punk and blues-based Stones/Faces type bands, until I fell in love with a woman. One who lived in Florida. I was in Boston. I was at a bar off Boylston, convinced that if I could sit her down and talk face-to-face, she’d be convinced of my greatness as a young sensitive singer-songwriter and see her way clear to letting me sleep with her, at the very least.

The ’63 Melody Maker went for a hundred bucks in gas money to a guy named “Ducky” at Daddy’s Junky Music in Boston. The woman in question had the good sense to avoid any and all advances and left me for what I’m certain were greener pastures. So, the Melody Maker was gone without any evidence of it ever existing, save some foggy memories and a few of the fireworks I bought with the gas money at South of the Border.

Next? The Fender Twin. This was the 80’s, you have to remember. And I was 20. A dumb decade and a dumb age for guitars and guitar players. And while a Fender Twin was a cool sounding amp, it was – well, old. And it wasn’t super loud. So, the plan was to sell the Twin and/or trade it for a Marshall Stack (I was in a cow punk band at the time and, looking back, the Twin would have been fine). But the bass player knew a coke dealer who could get us a deal.

The Fender Twin went for an 8-ball of cocaine to a guy named Mel who said he was doing me a favor taking “this old thing” off my hands for his fine drugs. Not enough painkillers in the world to make me numb, to this day, about that one. I had to get a Peavey 2X12 and my tone was very lousy for quite a while.

The Lake Placid Blue Strat was traded for an Ovation cutaway acoustic that melted in the trunk of a car driving through the Mohave.

The Travis Bean? A junky roommate named Ray stole it. I have no idea what he got for it. He was going bald and sang in a heavy metal band and was the first guy I ever heard say Rogaine which was supposed to help him maintain, as he called them, his “locks.”

Given away to a guy named Skeeter who ran our rehearsal space: An early 80’s Ibanez Tube Screamer.

Lost in one of the 11 apartment moves in 5 years and/or on the road: An Ibanez Flanger, an early 70’s Envelope Filter, and Echoplex tape delay and a late 60’s Big Muff and Cry Baby Wah Pedal.

Lost in a fire when earlier-mentioned rehearsal space was deluged in water damage when the falafel hut next door caught on fire (after hours – no one hurt): 1971 Stratocaster, natural, maple three-bolt neck with the bullet truss rod.

Left in an apartment in Sarasota, Florida: a lawsuit-era Hummingbird copy. I left it with a summer sub-letter and never went back to town (also lost in that mishap was a 1963 Bob Dylan live at Syracuse framed poster and all my Chess records ^%@$ argh).

And, the topper. My buddy Jeff had a wife who I was convinced didn’t like me and one night, they were visiting and we were all drunk and she’d said, “I want to learn to play guitar.” Now, Jeff had (and has) plenty of guitars. This is a man who’d found (and kept!) a Gretsch at a yard sale that the guy wanted 20 bucks for and Jeff talked him down to 12. Jeff sells guitars for profit. Not a fool like me. But anyway, I thought some grand gesture was called for so I insisted that the wife who hated me take my Harmony H-72.

I missed it all the time. It made me sick how I’d squandered so much cool guitar stuff over the years. When I finally sobered up, I had (oddly enough) my ’69 Tele, my 1935 Martin R-17 (a total Edsel of a Martin (quite possibly the only non-collectable guitar they ever made) and a cheesy little Gorilla Amp.

Then, newly sober (for quite a few years now) and with a real job (or a sort of real one – I was a musician and writer), I started getting funky old guitars again. This time actually holding on to them and/or selling them. For real prices. Not gas and cocaine money from guys named Ducky and Mel. I play and record with mostly a couple of Harmonys (a 3 pickup Rocket and a Sovereign), a Jazzmaster, A Danelectro, an Eastwood Delta 6 (thanks Mike!), and a rotating crop of oddballs that come and go (in a good way).

Jeff came to visit many years and many cities and states (for both of us) later. He was divorced and now getting remarried. I asked him if the ex still had my Harmony H72. “Are you crazy?” he said. “I wouldn’t leave that nice a guitar with her.”

Then he told me, in the truest spirit of friendship only a fellow guitar nut could understand, “I’ve been saving it for you. It’s under the bed. Just let me know when you’re ready.” This is 12 years later. He brought it from Hawaii to Seattle and mailed it to me. My guitar was back. He’d saved me from myself. I offered him one of my guitars as a thank you, but he shrugged it off.

I play that Harmony H-72 on stage now all the time. Jeff plays in a band in Seattle – this is my bid to get him the Eastwood Stormbird giveaway. I play the Eastwood I have all the time and it’s a killer guitar and I think it would be a really cool way to thank Jeff if he won the Eastwood Stormbird. It would go to a great musician, a cool guy and someone who clearly understands the value of an instrument beyond the dollar sign.

Life Lacking Harmony: The Close Relationship Between Booze & Lost Gear from MyRareGuitars.com