Words and Music by….
..with a new song by Kelly Driscoll.
Also..my “Twitter” link (on the Music page)…unless, as the Byrds said, “I Wasn’t Born To Follow”.
(Extra credit:What soundtrack is the Byrd’s song from?)
(Extra extra credit:What songwriting team from the early 60′s adapted to the “new folk rock sound” by penning this “sounds like Dylan” song)*
* If you know the answer to this without having to Google it, I recommend the book “Girls Like Us” by Sheila Weller.
Somewhere around this era, our drummer left and I got pulled in to play drums…..not sure for how long or exactly when…it may have been a leftover kit or maybe my dad’s white Ludwig kit.
I don’t think that it was for more than six months or so..and I was the lead singer behind the kit…in the words of Garry Shandling “..that wasn’t good for anybody”.
At some point, we felt something was missing in our group’s sound…maybe it was a bass player? So we asked our friends..and our buddy Gary wanted to be in the band so he got his mom to get him a bass and amp for Christmas..and away we go. I’d been doing the “fake bass” duties on the low strings of my Lafayette guitar so I had some idea of what the bass was supposed to be playing..and Gary was a pretty quick learner. It didn’t hurt that Gary was one of the coolest kids that we knew and we were hanging out with him all the time anyway so it seemed natural. I think that the local music store had a very limited choice of bass and amp (1 or 2)..or maybe we helped him pick one out from the Sears or Lafayette catalog…I don’t remember. But I do recall that it had NO BRAND NAME on the bass.
Gary held down the low end for a few years, although we nearly came to blows when he went behind our back and took the band fund (intended for our future P.A. system) and spent it on black turtlenecks with the idea of changing the band name to “The Invaders” ( I told you he was cool). Unfortunately, Gary was a TRUE rock star so on one of our gigs at the local high school,he took off to make out with Erica after the first set and never returned. (Timeline:we were in 9th grade at this point). Since we had three guitar players, I just stepped in to the bass player slot and ended up staying there (with the no name bass) for a few years.
Things get a little fuzzy here…I remember my brother and I poring over the guitar and amplifier pages of the Lafayette Electronics Catalog for hours. We wound up with Lafayette guitars and amps that were probably manufactured by the Tokyo Sound Company and Univox. The guitars were decent and the amps were about 15 watts each. We played these for a few years,although I seem to remember my brother buying a Teisco Del Ray. The Teisco name stands for ‘Tokyo Electric Instrument and Sound Company’.
There were a few guitar distribution deals in the U.S. from Teisco..they also sold guitars through Silvertone (Sears) and Kent.
We didn’t have a bass player for a long time…until…
….it turned out to be an auto harp. I don’t know what side of my parents family we got this from. For those of you who are unfamiliar with this instrument, it looks like an oversize cigar box with strings and it has about 25-30 push button slats that are labeled by chord and type (ie.A Minor). All you have to do is strum the strings (never knew the correct implement for this..we used our nails or silverware) and press down on the buttons. The skill level that you need to play the auto harp is only slightly higher than that of making music on an iPod.
Although the auto harp had some novelty value with us,it just wasn’t the same as a guitar..and it looks about as cool on stage as one of those strap on keyboards from the ’80s.
Somehow,we wound up with a nicer acoustic nylon string guitar (from Sears Mail order?!?) and I saved up all summer to buy a pick-up that would slide into the body (Made especially for acoustics). My brother Rob and I plugged it in to a Sony Tape deck….and..nothing. Well..it turns out that you had to have STEEL strings..it was a magnetic pick up.
Despite some sage advice from our mother about the strength of a nylon guitar’s neck,we strung the guitar with steel strings..and we were rocking. Plugged into the Sony, it was the “Street Fighting Man” sound…kind of..
After three glorious days,the neck bowed and then snapped off.
..nylon string guitar that was my mother’s. She was fairly fluent on it and my brother Rob and I figured it was WAYYY cooler than the ukuleles that our two sisters were playing. So off we went,armed with a few pages of chord diagrams in the back of “The Burl Ives Songbook”.It was an instant epiphany to me….90% of all the songs that I knew on the radio could be played with just 7 chords!!
The Harmony (I think it was a Sovereign but a search for a photo of the guitar has proven to be fruitless) had a narrow neck but the strings were about a mile off the neck…..you had to have the strength of the Incredible Hulk to pull off a bar chord on it.
We pretty much appropriated the guitar from my mother and it survived a lot of miles before finally succumbing to the freight handlers at the St.Thomas Airport.
..in the world of musical instruments. Everyone had to start with something,whether it’s a Steinway piano or a Casiotone.So I figured I would go down the path of my musical evolution and see what was a gem..
