When men were men and amps were AMPs.

equalsql

Good Lord!.. Look at the size of Jan Akkerman's Fender stack.

You'd need a step-ladder just to plug the lead in.

Any Fender gurus know what this rig is?

Babones

Is that all?

Babones

I mean...

ICBM

Jan Akkerman's amp is a Super Showman - solid state, from 1968-69. It was a very advanced concept for its day, with a head and powered cabinets so it could be expanded more or less indefinitely.

HAL9000

Fancy lugging some of those upstairs after a gig! Did guitarists and roadies all end up with bad backs back then? And to think I complain about shifting amps weighing around the 45lb mark.

JezWynd

ICBM said:

Jan Akkerman's amp is a Super Showman - solid state, from 1968-69. It was a very advanced concept for its day, with a head and powered cabinets so it could be expanded more or less indefinitely.

Not many amps have 4th Dimension control. Some kind of chorusing effect?

ICBM

JezWynd said:

Not many amps have 4th Dimension control. Some kind of chorusing effect?

It's apparently a variety of oil-drum reverb that creates a chorus/vibrato/reverb effect! I've never heard one, but I'm guessing it sounds a bit like the 'Flerb' on a EH Holy Grail, or the modulated reverb on a Boss RV-5.

OilCityPickups

HAL9000 said:

Fancy lugging some of those upstairs after a gig! Did guitarists and roadies all end up with bad backs back then? And to think I complain about shifting amps weighing around the 45lb mark.

I wound up with a double hernia and disc problems from my huge rigs days ...

ICBM

OilCityPickups said:

I wound up with a double hernia and disc problems from my huge rigs days ... 

I sold both my Mesa Trem-o-verbs because - after years of saying that they weren't really a problem when you got used to how to move them - I had some medical advice about a possible hernia, and even though it wasn't conclusive I decided that it wasn't worth it any more. (And the unexplained pains have largely gone away.)

I'm now no longer really interested in owning gear I can't easily lift - which given the low volume levels usually required on stage now, and the power-to-weight ratio of a lot of modern gear, is not a problem at all... especially as a bass player - I have a 500W bass combo that weighs less than a typical valve guitar head.

brucegill

All you really need is a Katana.....

Branshen

equalsql said:

Good Lord!.. Look at the size of Jan Akkerman's Fender stack.

You'd need a step-ladder just to plug the lead in.

Any Fender gurus know what this rig is?

Great song and performance. This is new to me. Thanks for sharing!

crunchman

The worst thing I had to lift was a Fender-Rhodes electric piano that belonged to a keyboard playing friend.  Still not convinced that the digital ones have totally nailed that sound though.

ESBlonde

Ha!

In the bad old days the Hammond player had a van because...and all the rest of the gear was packed around in the space that was left after the organ and leslie were loaded.

Canny players had thier organ cut in half to make it manageable!

Real men had Fender twins with a pair of JBLs.

The only reason we had 4x12"s was because the cab Jim marshall made to handle his 100w Plexi for Pete Townsend was an 8x12" with 8 20w celestions. It was too big to get in and out of some of the celler gigs the who were doing, so they got Jim to cut it in two and make 2  4x12" cabs.

Of course Rock n' Roll was a young mans game, and many of those young men had proper jobs and eat proper meals and thought nothing of lifting stuff. These days H&S won't let you turn a page unless there has been a feasability study done first. Then you need an assisted lifting device.

Now rock n roll is predominantly an old mans game, half of them are deaf and the other half have arthritis or whatever.

JezWynd

At the start of the Focus clip, he's putting on  what looks like a (modded?) LP Recording model but then he's playing his usual LP.

ICBM

That's a Les Paul Personal - similar to the Recording, but with a top bout microphone socket and volume control so Les could fit a short gooseneck mic to it and speak through the guitar amp. I'm not kidding . Why Gibson ever put such a bizarre and very 'personal' (indeed!) instrument into production, I have no idea...

JezWynd

Thanks @ICBM, interesting info. He mentions it on his website -

The Gibson Personal"I bought the Gibson Personal back in the seventies. I didn't like the pickups. I met Paul Hamer and I asked him to get the bloody pick-ups off and make me a maple top and put my old humbuckers back on there so I would have my old sound. Because the body is a little wider and longer it has even more sustain than the black Les Paul Custom, and it was lighter as well. So Paul refurbished it for me and the thing arrived in the studio in New York at the moment I was starting to record Tabernakel with Les Paul's son Gene behind the desk " 

"I used it on most pieces on Tabernakel and, of course, Hamburger Concerto. After the Personal I also used a gold top Gibson." The Les Paul Personal "For some reason the gigs in the UK last year kind of triggered my interest in the old Les Paul again. It brought back memories but I didn't know I still had the tiger-stripe (Personal). I knew somewhere it was stashed away with a guitar builder called Anno Galema but I had left it there. I drove up there in summer of last year. The guitar was totally stripped and cracked up but Willem Heins restored it and he's done a marvellous job. It took him four or five months. He got the whole top out because it was totally spoiled, all the bindings were gone. He used 24 or 25 pieces of original lacquer and put on a new maple top." 
"My gold top has gone, and also the Gretsch Super Jet (on the Live at Montreux cover). I've still got the Gretsch White Falcon. There's some knobs missing, because I used those on the Black Beauty."https://www.janakkerman.com/index_page.html

trolley

ICBM said:

That's a Les Paul Personal - similar to the Recording, but with a top bout microphone socket and volume control so Les could fit a short gooseneck mic to it and speak through the guitar amp. I'm not kidding . Why Gibson ever put such a bizarre and very 'personal' (indeed!) instrument into production, I have no idea...

Some things never change 

bbill335

ESBlonde said:

Ha!

In the bad old days the Hammond player had a van because...and all the rest of the gear was packed around in the space that was left after the organ and leslie were loaded.

Canny players had thier organ cut in half to make it manageable!

I used to play in a band that had one of the " p o r t a b l e " Hammonds. L100 i think? it was white and there were adverts of two small women lifting the top half, demonstrating just how p o r t a b l e it was. 

Both halves weighed as much as a car and it still had to come with the infinitely unportable leslie so it was, in fact, not portable at all. but i guess it's a relative term! 

ICBM

bbill335 said:

I used to play in a band that had one of the " p o r t a b l e " Hammonds. L100 i think? it was white and there were adverts of two small women lifting the top half, demonstrating just how p o r t a b l e it was. 

Both halves weighed as much as a car and it still had to come with the infinitely unportable leslie so it was, in fact, not portable at all. but i guess it's a relative term! 

It means portable compared to a full-size B3 or a church organ .

The two women were probably either ballet dancers or Olympic gymnasts .

bbill335

I think it was actually an m102? Either way, you could only ever call it portable relative to the B3/C3. 

prlgmnr

ICBM said:  It means portable compared to a full-size B3 or a church organ .

I was delighted that my immediate thought "I bet someone has put one of those on the back of a truck" wasn't wrong.