Guitars and Stuff

Back in 1968 I owned what was probably the strangest guitar and amp combination in history. They were acquired separately and I'm still not entirely sure why I decided to buy those particular items... They were purchased on credit (or course)... Hey - what's a bit more debt when you're already in way over your head, right?

The guitar was a Vox Phantom XII Stereo. That's an electric 12-string with three stereo pickups and 12 control knobs... Yeah - Vox made some pretty unusual guitars back then. They also made the V251 "guitar organ" - I tried one out when I bought the Phantom XII but it was a bit too weird - even for me :-) ... Here's a picture of a Phantom XII Stereo from online:

I think my main consideration was that it didn't look too strange upside down. (I was left-handed so I always just swapped the strings on right-handed guitars and played them upside down). Also - I had been listening to a lot of The Byrds and liked the sound of the 12-string. Plus the salesman was desperate to get rid of it and sold it to me dirt cheap...

Sidebar: Simply remembering The Byrds "8 Miles High" puts me right back in Winnipeg. I can recall exactly how I felt when listening to it back in then...
Another one of my triggers is Roundabout by Yes. Every time I hear that song it's 1971 again and I'm driving my 1966 Charger up Mingo Road next to the railroad tracks in Denton, TX. It's a hot day and I've got the air conditioner on... I can smell the interior - see the instruments - and hear the rumble of the 383 through the dual exhaust... I can even remember how the steering and suspension reacted to the bumpy sections in the road... But I digress :-)

The amplifier I bought back in Winnipeg was a Yamaha TA-60. We bought it at the same time we got Karina's combo organ. It was definitely one of the strangest amps ever made. Again - I found a picture online:


I used to refer to it as my "pagoda amp" :-) As you can see, it's triangular shaped and the controls are across the top. It was about 3 feet tall and featured a pair of trapezoidal 15 x 20 flat rigid foam speakers...
I seem to recall that I bought it because it was loud, powerful and easy to transport. The price was also heavily discounted - I think they were trying to get rid if them...
It was a decent amp - the only issue is that it was solid-state (tubeless) so it sounded too clean... That was one of the great ironies of the era. They started making solid-state amps to do away with those unreliable and "noise inducing" vacuum tubes only to discover that tube distortion was what gave the electric guitar it's unique sound... So they started adding more circuitry to attempt to replicate the distortion that they lost when they got rid of the tubes... Go figure :-)
But regardless - those Yamaha amps may be even rarer than Vox Phantom XII guitars.

BTW: Most Winnipeg bands at the time were using Garnet amplifiers. They were a local company and their amps had a very distinctive sound... They had just gone into mass production and I couldn't afford one :-)
Related historical note: Bachman Turner Overdrive got the idea for their name from the Garnet BTO (Big Time Operator) model amp - some of the first Garnet amps were hand-built for Randy Bachman (and Neil Young) in the early 60s by Garnet Gillies... But I digress :-)

I took the Vox guitar with me when we left Canada - and soon thereafter traded it straight across for a 1953 Fender Telecaster... I don't recall what happened to the Yamaha amp. I suspect we sold it to help finance the trip. But that's a topic for a later post :-)

I'd been planning on blogging about what it was like to play with my first band. Even though we were still just practicing it really defies description...
I finally read the book "This is Your Brain on Music" and it explains a lot of why music has such power... There is no other human activity that exercises the mind the same way - or has same emotional impact. And there is no other human activity that (over time) alters the structure of the brain in a way that can be detected during a CT scan...

And - in a way - music saved my life...