Fender 1949-1951 Prototype Broadcaster/Nocaster/Telecaster

Hi V&R Friends

Thanks for stopping by…

In nov. 2010 I took a roundtrip to guitarstores in New York City.

I landed in JFK and went directly to Chelsea Hotel.

One of the guitar stores I visited is Chelsea Guitars – located something like 2 meters from the hotel. And I didn´t know it was so close

Me and Dan had some very good conversations about collecting guitars and life around them, the international  guitar market in generel.

During one of these conversations – Dan, the owner, showed me a very rare and unique vintage guitar.

Fender 1949-1951 Telecaster Broadcaster Nocaster Vintage Gu - Prototype

It is a prototype Telecaster made somewhere in between 1948-1951, before we knew them as Telecasters (later name). And as I am sure you know the first models were called Broadcasters and Nocasters and then changed name to the Telecaster and Esquire (depending on pickup configuration)

When Dan opened the case all I could see was a red telecaster model in a newer case. I really didn´t think much of it in those few seconds until Dan started to reveil this amazing story.

I had no idea that this very guitar was one very first prototypes and furthermore that they were made in custom colours, as Dan explains. So I was very surpriced to know that I was looking at a very important piece of guitar history.

I hope you will enjoy the YouTube-vid and pics. Feel free to help us share it.

All the best and happy holidays.

Nicolai & V&R Team

Why I Love My Electric Bass – Guest Blog by Christian Houmann

Hallo and welcome to my blog. My name is Christian Houmann. This blog will be the first of many and I will write about my love and passion for music and my desire for the electric bass.

Christian Houmann

I have played the bass for the last 15 years. I’m considering myself a musician, which happens to play the bass mostly. I would love to be a singer, but I don’t have a great singing voice so therefore I will leave that to the thousands of those amazing singers around the world. Singers have the ability to carry their instrument along with them always. Those of us who are an instrumentalist need our tools to perform. While singers have their own unique sound and will always have that sound unless they are able to change it. In the search of your sound you’ll have to find an instrument which fits you and have the sound you are looking for.

As a solo artist I believe you must find your own sound. For example guitar players such as Pat Metheny and Mike Stern. They both play the jazz, rock & fusion but still they have their own sound. So the listener can tell who it is within the first 5 seconds of listening to them. Marcus Miller and Jaco Pastorius both have different sound even though they both are playing a Fender jazz bass. Jaco Pastorius has been dead for almost 30 years, so he is obviously not playing a jazz bass anymore. But every time you hear a fretless jazz bass with bridge pickup on, you think of Jaco.

Most players care for their instruments and you often get a close relationship to some of your instruments. Your first instrument is sometimes very special. I remember my first bass. I was 12 and hadn’t played bass before. I got a 4 string white Yamaha. It was very cheap but a good instrument. I really don’t know why, but I felt that I needed a 5 string bass to become a better player. So I worked hard that summer and earned the money to get an Ibanez 5 string in a metallic blue color. I listened to Guns’n’Roses before I started to play bass, but then a friend of mine who is a drummer introduced me to Primus and from that day I was one of the biggest Primus fans in Denmark. Les Claypool’s bass play blew me away (Still does). Soon I wanted a bass like Les Claypool’s bass. But at that time there wasn’t that much info on the internet about basses or at least I didn’t know where too look. I found out that he was playing a Carl Thompson bass but that was about it.

Later I saw a catalog for Warwich basses and I found a bass, which looked a bit like Les Claypool’s main 4 string. It was a Fortress one 4 string and it had that long upper horn which was similar to Les Claypool’s bass. This bass I played for a few years and then I moved on to a Fender Jazz bass. A lot people told me that every bassplayer should have a Fender because it had the same look and sound as always and it wasn’t about to change. It was a sunburst 62’ reissue jazz bass and it had a great Fender sound. It was warm and could fit in to all different kind of music. I became better bassplayer and started being more into solo bass players and tried to learn from them all. Marcus Miller, Stanley Clarke and Victor Wooten were some of my biggest influences. I got the Bassday 98’ with Victor Wooten on VHS and from that day I knew that I wanted a bass like his. That bass was a Fodera. His bass sounded so good. So clear in sound and very very cool looking. He was playing his second version of his Yin & Yang bass. His first Yin & Yang bass was actually a Monarch fretless 4. I believe you can find it on his website. I liked my Fender but the strings where far away from the fingerboard and if I tried to lower the strings I got too much frets noise. It was like playing an upright bass!

Christian_Houmann_Fodera_Emperor_Elite_5string_bass

I knew that I had to get a Fodera bass. At that point Fodera where offering a standard Monarch model which had a bolt-on neck and 2 band preamp. Those basses didn’t have different specs so Fodera could make 4 to 6 basses at the same time and keep the cost down.

USA is far from Denmark and I didn’t know anyone who owned a Fodera in Denmark or in the rest of Europe. Fodera are some of the most expensive electric basses in the world. One day I wrote on a Danish Forum for basses about Fodera basses and a guy told me that he owned a Fodera Monarch Elite 4 string. It freaked me out and I asked if we could meet. So I visited him and it turned out that he also had a Matthew Garrison model 4 string and a fretless Beez Elite 4 string (Now called an Imperial 2 model). I tried his Monarch. It had almost the same specs as Victor Wooten’s famous 83’ Monarch. It was an Elite model, which means it had a neck-through and it had EMG soar bars pickups.  The action was very low and smooth to play. After a couple of minutes I knew this was the bass for me and I wanted to buy it from him, but no. He wouldn’t sell it to me. Instead he offered to order a new bass through him because he knew Vinny and Joey from Fodera. I said yes, but at that point I didn’t think of the money. Luckily I was gigging a lot, so my income was pretty good and I was able to do it. I wanted a bass like Victor Wooten, so I ordered a Monarch Deluxe 4 with similar spec like the Victor Wooten model, but without the Tulip marks at the 12 & 24 fret. Vinny suggested me Kingwood for fingerboard. At that point I had no idea about the different kind of wood, so I said yes. I got the bass just after 4 months because they already had a neck ready, which they could use for this bass. Normally the wait for a Fodera is around 2 years.

The bass was the best bass for me and I felt that I could play anything on it. I used it all the time and my Fender 62’ reissue, which I also had at that time got no use at all. So I ended up selling it. The Victor Wooten model featuring a Mahogany body and rosewood fingerboard (Kingwood in my case) was light and mahogany really adds tight lows and very pleasant highs. Together with the EMG pickup, which is crystal clear you have a bass with an amazing sound. My bass with same specs as Victor’s bass also had the same sound as his bass. Surprise. My only problem was that I couldn’t play like him.

Next time I will write about my other basses and how I use them in different settings. Since I’m new at this blogging thing, I would love to hear to if there are things I can change or you things you want to know more about.
Christian Houmann, 1982. Graduated Master of Music from Aalborg Music Academy in 2010.

He has played the bass for the last 15 years with several artists and different bands. He has recorded with jazz fusion groups such as Between the Lines and The New Fuzz and is currently working on his own debut album which releases early 2011.

Visit him at:
www.christianhoumann.dk
www.youtube.com/user/Houmannbass
www.myspace.com/christianhoumann
www.musicacademydenmark.dk
www.facebook.com/Houmannbass

Listen to him here:
www.soundcloud.com/humannoproject

Hendrix Fender Duo Sonic Sells for £164,000!

Here at Vintage&Rare we are huge fans of Jimi Hendrix – so thanks to our friends over at GuitarCollecting.co.uk and Marko Flyss for this shout out on a recent auction for a Fender Duo Sonic owned by Jimi Hendrix.

jimmy_hendrix_fender_duo_sonix_sold

The tan coloured Fender Duo Sonic, played by Hendrix before he was famous, fetched £164,675 at an auction today, over 400 times the price he originally paid.

The star’s early guitar sparked a bidding frenzy at the Cameo Auctioneers Records’ Music and Memorabilia auction in Midgham, Berkshire.

Hendrix had paid just £100 for the tan guitar when he was an unknown 21-year-old backing musician.

Going by the name Jimmy James, he used the 1959/60 model from March to November 1964 while performing with the Isley Brothers.

Two original pieces of Hendrix artwork from 1967 were also sold for a total of £17,400.

Brazilian Rosewood by Takis Kokkalis

Hello V&R Friends,

This weeks guest blog is written by Takis Kokkalis from Greece. Takis is a good friend of V&R and apart from being a passionate guitar aficionado & collector, Takis is also a businessman in the music industry and an expert on selected tonewoods. In this great article, Takis is telling us about brazilian rosewood.
Please enjoy the reading – All the best, Nicolai & V&R Team.

BRAZILIAN ROSEWOOD (JACARANDA) – Dalbergia Nigra GENERAL INFORMATION
For over 200 years the Brazilian rosewood has been regarded as one of the most desirable woods for stringed instruments, due to its sound quality and appearance. Its great tap tone, sustain, unique grain pattern ( figure ) and color makes it a ‘must’ or even a ‘dream’ for every guitarist. It always has been the first choice for the top of the line guitars. However, this wood is very rare and very expensive, not only because of the increased demand, but also for the following reasons.

a) This particular tree grows naturally at a slow rate and is not planted in various plantations around the world, as it happens with most of the other rosewood types.
b) According to the Convention on International Trade In Endangered Species (CITES) restrictions, this wood cannot be harvested after March 1992. Only the wood that has been cut before that date can be sold and used. Hence, old Brazilian rosewood tends to be almost unavailable at any price. Please, find below all the relevant information about the Brazilian Rosewood.

OLD GROWTH BRAZILIAN ROSEWOOD
This is the wood that has been harvested from trees which are at least 70 years old and over. Only these trees, being mature, have the desirable density for the sound, give the required size, possess the best colors and the fantastic grain pattern. (which make this wood unique among all the other rosewoods).

OLD CUT BRAZILIAN ROSEWOOD
It is a fact that old instruments or instruments made by old wood sound better. They have the so called ‘old – warm tone’. Technically, due to a certain oxidation during the seasoning period, the damping factor is lowered which means they have better response, mainly in the low frequencies (more volume and articulation). Also, the wood is very stable in terms of deformation. The size remains unaltered and it suffers less from weather or climate changes. Therefore, the old cut Brazilian rosewood is extremely stable with excellent response in the low frequencies.

THE SOUND OF BRAZILIAN ROSEWOOD
The woods with the lowest value of the damping factor, are the most sonorous, which means they have the biggest sustain. The Brazilian rosewood has very low damping factor, consequently ‘tons of sustain’. Its sound is rich, more pronounced than other rosewoods (more attack) and being old cut, very articulate and warm.

THE COLOR AND THE FIGURE
Its color ranges from very deep reddish brown to violet and sometimes orange with ebony colored streaking. There are many species, different in color and in figure, others with dark shaded parts or with even light brown (beige) parts. The figure may be very wild, exotic, consisting of dark and light parts with color variations or may be more regular consisting of fine dark lines close together with reddish intervals. However, Brazilian rosewood as it ages it tends to become darker. The dark parts will become almost black. The reddish brown will become deep purple or burgundy red and in general every color is going to look darker, thus giving a superb look to this wood. The darkening process might take at least one to two decades and it is going to be more obvious at the unfinished parts like the fingerboards or the inside of an acoustic guitar.

TYPES OF BRAZILIAN ROSEWOOD
As far as the sound is concerned all types sound the same, with two exceptions : a) Of the Grassland type, which is ideal for small auditoriums and recording studios, due to its warmer sound characteristics. b) Of the Piaui type, which is ideal for big auditoriums due to the big projection sound that it produces. Additionally, certain species may be categorized somewhere between the different types.
1) CLEAR ROSEWOOD Very obvious grain pattern with more intense color variations i.e. reddish brown to light brown and sometimes orange. In this case the tree grows on a wet region (acid soils).
2) DARK ROSEWOOD Very dark with not so apparent figure, certain parts might look like ebony and certain others have a very deep purple or very dark orange color. This type is rare and much more expensive. In this case the tree growed on a deserted region ( alkaline soils).
3) IMPERIAL ROSEWOOD The ‘crème de la crème’ of the Brazilian rosewoods. Very rare and extremely expensive. It consists of many black lines closed together and the space between ranges from deep red to orange. The Dark and the Imperial types are used for fingerboards. The Clear, the Dark and the type between the Clear and the Dark is used for necks. Finally, according to availability, all types can be used for backs & sides of an acoustic guitar However, there is also a more precise classification which depends on the location that the tree grows and it is described below:

TYPE / QUALITY
1) Imperial ( Most Expensive) – Dark brown to violet bases with fine black lines. (Forest growth). 2) Colonial ( Most common type ) – Dark brown to black with diffuse design. (Forest growth). 3) Piaui ( Extremely rare ) – Dense wood, brown to violet – brown with darker stripe-design . Ideal for big auditoriums that a big projected sound is required. (Desert growth). 4) Grassland ( Rare ) – Slightly softer wood, looking similar to the Colonial type with somewhat clearer basis. (Grassland growth) GRADES ARE CLASSIFIED AS : A, AA, AAA, MG ( Master Grade ) The price varies according to the type of wood , the quality and the quantity. The cut ( quarter sawn or flat sawn…etc ) is also associated with the quality and the grade.

WE HAVE OFFICIAL PERMISSION FROM THE BRAZILIAN GOVERNMENT TO SELL BRAZILIAN ROSEWOOD. EVERY SET OR COMPONENT ( NECK – FINGERBOARD – BRIDGE – BODY TOP ) IS ACCOMPANIED BY THE CITES PASSPORT FOR FREE INTERNATIONAL TRANSIT. Takis Kokkalis President & MD Odes International S.A. Email : tkodes(at)hol(dot)gr

Interview with Howl Guitars / Tokyo, Japan

This time the V&R Blog is travelling to the other end of the world to make an interview with Howl Guitars in Tokyo, Japan.

howl store4 howl store3 howl store2 howl store1

How many years have you been running Howl Guitars? Why is it called Howl Guitars?
About 3 years we’ve been running the business. I thought Howl sounds quite unique. Also I’m musician too, so I wanted to “ho wl” to someone or something my passion.

Is it only vintage guitars you aim at selling? Do you also do new guitars or other instruments?
No, I sell new guitars too. Other instruments like amps and tubes.

What was your first guitar? How old were you when you started playing? Did you have a band?
TELECASTER! I bought super cheap full guitar kit, me and my brother built it and painted it black. I started to play guitar when I was eight. I’m always having a band.

How do you select your luthiers from all over the world? I mean how do you chose one over another? Is it because those ones have a better market than others?
First point, of course the tone is the best priority. Then I care about quality of woods and steel materials such as bridge plate or saddle. Also out looking is very important too.

In how many countries in Europe do you have customers? What about builders and luthiers?
Mainly UK, because I used live there. Other.. French and Germany. I have never had deals with builders or luthiers in Europe.

How is the vintage guitars market in Japan at the moment?
About 4 or 5 years ago, all vintage guitars were priced the way too high. Then it just gone about 2 years ago, prices went down and down. But now the price is staying sort of normal. Japanese loves vintage guitars. Some 90’s era people said almost vintage guitar went to Japan. So vintage guitar is a very big instrument market in Japan.
Well that’s amazing.!

How has the Internet impacted vintage guitar collecting in Japan?
Massive changes. Normally, traditionally, we go to guitar shop to see, play, buy the guitar by our foot. Imagine if you have no internet at your home. You would buy guitar magazine first, then you find the guitar which is very attractive. You may make a phone call to shop due to HOLD the guitar. Then you go to the shop. Finally you can face to the guitar and play. By Appearance of the internet, these thankworthy actions have just decreased badly. Half of enquiry is from internet. I mean it’s very useful but I

What are some good resources for people interested in Japanese vintage guitars?
Digimart and J-Guitar.com are quite big instrument searching website in Japan.

About HOWL GUITARS
HOWL GUITARS is the vintage guitar shop in Tokyo Japan. We are always welcome to any customer with wide range of selected guitars mainly from Fender Telecaster and Gretsch Guitars, and boutique amps from Matchless, TWO-ROCK, VOX, Plexi Marshall, Mesa Boogie and Dumble amps. New and used guitars are also available in the shop. We are happy to deal with you all. Feel free to contact us by e-mail or phone call for availability, details or anything about instruments. Keep your eyes on our collections!

http://www.howl-co.com/index2.html

Contact:

Howl Guitars

Hiroki Muramatsu
POST CODE 180-0023
4 – 23 – 6 Kyounan-Chou Musashino-shi Tokyo Japan
TEL : +81-422-30-9196 FAX : +81-422-30-9197
MAIL: info(at)howl-co.com
OPEN:12:00~20:00
Shop Closed : Tuesday / Wednesday

 

Palm Guitars, Amsterdam/Holland – Interview

When it comes to vintage and rare instruments in the Netherlands, Palm Guitars is one of the most well-known dealers. The owner, Soren Venema, has been in the business of fine and collectible vintage instruments for 35 years. His website www.palmguitars.nl has many amazing instruments from all over the world. Whether it’s an old Fender Stratocaster, a Greek Bouzouki, or an Uzbhek Tar, it can be found at Palm Guitars. Let’s meet, Soren, one of vintage musical instruments premiere dealers.

V&R: Hello Soren, thank you for taking the time for this interview. Before we discuss the range of your products and collections in more detail, can you please give our readers the history of Palm Guitars? When did Palm Guitars become an idea? Can you tell us how it all started?

Soren:  Palm Guitars started in 1976, on Waterlooplein , the famous flea-market in Amsterdam, with 50 euros and half a cowhide, making belts and other leather goods by hand. Then we slowly moved into antiques and ethnographical items and musical instruments. After spending 10 years in England buying and selling, Palm Guitars moved back to Amsterdam. We ran a musical instrument auction for a few years doing cataloguing and valueing all musical instruments. Then in 1995 Palm Guitars at its present location opened its doors.

V&R: That’s fascinating. So what was your first instrument sale back then, if you can recall?

Soren: It was an old Greek Lautas–a type of bouzouki from Macedonia.

V&R: An old Greek bouzouki? That’s very cool. Do you guys offer any artist appearances and clinics within Palm Guitars?

Soren: I have done clinics and concerts with some of the National Reso/Phonic players such as Bob Brozman, Catfish Keith,and many others , as well as ethnic concerts with players from Siberia, India , Serbia and so on.

V&R:What is the main focus in your business? Does Palm Guitars focus on selling vintage instruments only?

Soren: I am also importing a few brands, such as National Reso/Phonic guitars, Goldtone banjos as well as having my own brand “Palmstrings”, which include resonator Django Selmer type guitars…….

V&R: Do you offer private lessons in Palm Guitars?

Soren: I give one lesson with every instrument I sell.

V&R: So where did you get your enthusiasm and passion? Are there any exciting stories you would like to share with us?

Soren: Having a shop is my way of interacting with the world, and meeting known and unknown musicians can be a bonus.

V&R: Does Palm Guitars export instruments to every corner of the world? Or is it more of a regional kind of store for locals?

Soren: A lot of business goes all over the world through the website, in fact probably a greater part than what sells locally.

V&R:We have noticed that you aim to keep your prices as fair as possible, for any musician to experience a vintage instrument. Do you feel that this has been a great asset for business?

Soren: It was a long time ago when people decided themselves what something was worth, but nowadays everybody has internet and so prices have become more standardized. Price Guides can be of help but are of course not always dependable.

Thanks again for taking the time to answer the questions and share your experience with us.

———————————————————————————————-

If you want to contact Palm Guitars here is some information for you:

Palm Guitars specializes in buying, selling and repairing used and antique musical instruments, western as well as ethnic.

The adresse is:

s’Gravelandse Veer 5bg 1011 KM Amsterdam The Netherlands

And they are open: wednesday-saturday 12-18 Phone:+31 (0)20 422 0445

E-mail: palmgtr(@)xs4all.nl

Guestblog: MusicFund – Instruments for development

Today we present to you Oliver Marie from MusicFund. An organisation that VintageandRare.com supports and admires.

Music Fund and VintageandRare.com hope to interest amateurs of vintage instruments to give support to Music Fund’s efforts to train instrument repair technicians in Africa and the Middle East, by donating money to Music Fund for this.  Furthermore, there is the possibility via MusicFund to buy guitars made locally and in poor conditions by Congolese guitar-makers.  And last but not least, Music Fund is looking for good quality guitars to donate to the music schools of Haiti.  If you have a guitar which is in good condition and want to donate it via Music Fund, please send it to Music Fund in Brussels. “Music is an instrument of development.”

Music Found pic1

Music Fund (MF) develops partnerships with music schools in developing countries and conflict areas, specifically the Middle East (Palestine: Gaza, Ramallah, Nablus; Israel: Nazareth, Jerusalem); Mozambique (Maputo), and the DRC (Kinshasa). It focuses on the music instrument (donations, training in repair techniques, and creation of repair workshops for music instruments).

Music Found pic2

MF collects music instruments all over Europe, inspects and repairs them, and then donates them to its partner schools.  However, most of its investment is in the creation and management of local repair workshops within its partner schools, and in the organisation of training programmes in instrument repair. This methodology allows the music instruments donated by MF to be maintained in good condition by the partners themselves, independently from Music Fund. Since the creation of MF in 2004-2005, thousands of music instruments have been collected and transferred to the Middle East and Africa.

Music Found pic3

In Europe, MF is backed by a broad group of concert organisers and media. It also has the support of a wide variety of volunteers. The steering committee includes representatives from the cultural sector as well as the economic and political world.

In the Middle East and Africa, MF works with well-established music schools that need music instruments and technicians to maintain them. The partnerships with these schools are established for periods of three years, renewable normally two times, and a maximum of three times.

MF understands that music education and music playing alone do not prevent conflict or promote economic development. However, MF’s experience – in Congo, the Middle-East and Mozambique – is that music plays a very important role in building a society whose attention is directed towards culture, and thus away from the misery of war and poverty.

For example, music plays an important role in Congolese society. Music is omnipresent in Kinshasa, to help to soothe the pains of the war and at funerals, but also to celebrate weddings and births. Music has survived the conflicts in this country. The capacity is large: there are talented musicians and orchestras everywhere. There are needs for music instruments in good condition, instrument restorers to keep them in good condition, and music schools with sufficient means to educate young people in music.

In Palestine and in Israel MF has been able to measure the impact of music on young people. During the more violent periods of the Intifada, they came to learn music, to play chamber music, even as the shooting continued. These young people have refused to accept the inevitability of violence and conflict.

The goal of Music Fund’s activities is empowerment. MF seeks to move away from ‘aid’ towards development of capacity building and wealth creation. Its programmes take an holistic approach: MF not only supplies music instruments to its partner schools, but also takes initiatives for the transfer of the expertise needed to tune and repair them via training programmes and the creation of repair workshops in the partner schools.

Although it is satisfying and useful to organise the transfer and donations of music instruments from Europe to music schools in the Middle East and Africa, Music Fund since its creation in 2004-2005 has given priority to those aspects of its projects that enable empowerment and independence of its partners. Music Fund seeks to achieve this goal through: (1) training of technicians, and (2) the creation of repair workshops in the music schools.

  • (1) Training programmes teach teachers and students of the partner schools the basic repair techniques of music instruments.  The most talented students are invited to train as professional repair technicians in workshops and schools in Europe. After finishing these training programmes, the technicians are employed in the repair workshops in the partner schools.

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  • (2) Four repair workshops have been opened in the partner schools in Ramallah, Nablus, Maputo and Kinshasa.  MF is responsible for their start-up and provides tools and parts to allow these workshops to start repairing music instruments.  These workshops not only provide employment for young repair technicians; they also generate income for the schools, as musicians from outside the music schools have their music instruments repaired there for a fee.

Music Found pic5

This combined methodology (opening workshops and training technicians) allows the partner schools to maintain their own musical instruments in good order independently from Music Fund. It also provides income and employment opportunities in and around the music schools. Music Fund spends as much as it can locally (buying instruments, tools, commodities, paying salaries, etc.), so that local people profit as much as possible from Music Fund’s expenditures.

Trade not aid: the overall aim is to shorten the aid-driven interventions and allow the partner schools as quickly as possible to become independent from Music Fund, both financially as well as in terms of possessing quality music instruments and repair tools and the skills to use them.

To what extent are the candidate’s initiatives innovative, in terms of focus area or methodology? Do these activities have the potential to be reproduced elsewhere in the world?

Music Fund understands ‘solidarity’ as a contractual relationship. One of Music Fund’s central concerns is the development of contractual relationships with its partners.

Music Fund works within the music niche of society and with a limited number of partner schools. Music Fund has made a conscious choice to focus its activity in terms of the type of interventions (music instruments, via donations and repair) as well as in terms of a limited number of partners.  This focus allows MF to deepen its involvement on basis of long-term relations that are direct, personal and durable.

Music Fund’s projects are concrete, clearly focused and limited in terms of timing and locations. For these reasons, they have a real impact on people’s lives. The activities are directed towards job and wealth creation. Because music, in general, and Music Fund’s projects, in particular, draw a lot of public and media attention. Music Fund has an important exemplary function: if Music Fund can do it, other organisations can do it as well in other fields.  Music Fund’s methodology is to develop programmes that are a format or template that can be implemented in other sectors of society.

Music Fund is innovative in giving importance to the role of music, in particular, and culture, in general, as instruments for development, It brings together expertise from the world of development workers and NGOs with expertise from the world of the arts – music ensembles and music presenters from all over Europe – in projects for development of poor and/or conflict stricken regions.  Culture and development is a small, but growing, sector in which Music Fund in a few years time has become a well-known and internationally respected pioneer, drawing enthusiasm and support for its actions, focus and perseverance.

Oliver Marie

MusicFund

 

Find more MusicFound on Facebook

Jimi Hendrix: ‘You never told me he was that good’

Our Friend, Roger Mayer, just sent me this amazing article. I remember having read parts of this before somewhere – but could never remember where. Big thanks to Roger!
Check out the übercool products from Roger Mayer on VintageandRare here:
Hope you enjoy the article.
Kind regards, Nicolai

Jimi Hendrix: ‘You never told me he was that good’
On the the 40th anniversary of the great guitarist’s death, Ed Vulliamy speaks to the people who knew him best and unearths a funny, if driven, superstar.
Ed Vulliamy
The Observer, Sunday 8 August 2010
On the morning of 21 September 1966, a Pan Am airliner from New York landed at Heathrow, carrying among its passengers a black American musician from a poor home.
Barely known in his own country and a complete stranger to England, he had just flown first class for the first time in his life. His name was James Marshall Hendrix.
On 18 September 1970, four years later, I picked up a copy of London’s Evening Standard on my way home from school, something I never usually did. There was a story of extreme urgency on the front page and a picture of Hendrix playing at a concert – still ringing in my ears – at the Isle of Wight festival, only 18 days earlier. The text reported how Hendrix had died that morning in a hotel in the street, Lansdowne Crescent in Notting Hill, in which I had been born, and a block away from where I now lived.

During those three years and 362 days living in London, Hendrix had conjured – with his vision and sense of sound, his personality and genius – the most extraordinary guitar music ever played, the most remarkable sound-scape ever created; of that there is little argument. Opinion varies only over the effect his music has on people: elation, fear, sexual stimulation, sublimation, disgust – all or none of these – but always drop-jawed amazement.

The 40th anniversary of Hendrix’s death next month will be marked by the opening of an exhibition of curios and memorabilia at the only place he ever called home – a flat diagonally above that once occupied by the composer George Frideric Handel, on Brook Street in central London, in the double building now known as Handel House. The flat will be opened to the public for 12 days in September and there is talk about plans for a joint museum, adding Hendrix’s presence to that already established in the museum devoted to Handel. Involved in the discussions is the woman with whom Hendrix furnished the top flat of 23 Brook St, and with whom he lived: the only woman he ever really loved, Kathy Etchingham.
In a rare interview by telephone, (she has moved abroad), Ms Etchingham explains: “I want him to be remembered for what he was – not this tragic figure he has been turned into by nit-pickers and people who used to stalk us and collect photographs and ‘evidence’ of what we were doing on a certain day. He could be grumpy, and he could be terrible in the studio, getting exactly what he wanted – but he was fun, he was charming.

I want people to remember the man I knew.” When she met Hendrix (the same night he landed in London), he had already lived an interesting, if frustrating, 23 years. He was born to a father who cared, but not greatly, and a mother he barely knew – she died when he was 15 – but adored (she’s said to be the focus of two of his three great ballads, “Little Wing” and “Angel”). He had always been enthralled by guitar playing – a “natural”,immersed in R&B on the radio and the music of blues giants Albert King and Muddy Waters. When he was 18, he was offered the chance to avoid jail for a minor misdemeanour by joining the army, which he did, training for the 101st Airborne Division.

His military career was marked by friendship with a bass player called Billy Cox from West Virginia, with whom he would play his last concerts, and a report which read: “Individual is unable to conform to military rules and regulations. Misses bed check: sleeps while supposed to be working: unsatisfactory duty performance.”
Hendrix engineered his discharge in time to avoid being mobilised to Vietnam and worked hard as a backing guitarist for Little Richard, Curtis Knight, the Isley Brothers and others. But, arriving in New York to try and establish himself in his own right, Hendrix found he did not fit. The writer Paul Gilroy, in his recent book Darker Than Blue, makes the point that Hendrix’s life and music were propelled by two important factors: his being an “ex-paratrooper who gradually became an advocate of peace” and his “transgressions of redundant musical and racial rules”.

Hendrix didn’t fit because he wasn’t black enough for Harlem, nor white enough for Greenwich Village. His music was closer to the blues than any other genre; the Delta and Chicago blues which had captivated a generation of musicians, not so much in the US as in London, musicians such as John Mayall and Alexis Korner, and thereafter Eric Clapton, Peter Green, Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page among many others.

As luck would have it, the Brits were in town and Linda Keith, girlfriend of the Stones’ Keith Richards, persuaded Chas Chandler, bass player of the Animals, to go and listen to Hendrix play at the Cafe Wha? club in the Village. Chandler wanted to move into management and happened to be fixated by a song, “Hey Joe”, by Tim Rose. “It was a song Chas knew would be a hit if only he could find the right person to play it,” says Keith Altham, then of the New Musical Express, who would later become a kind of embedded reporter with the Hendrix London entourage. “There he was, this incredible man, playing a wild version of that very song. It was like an epiphany for Chas – it was meant to be.”

“To be honest,” remembers Tappy Wright, the Animals’ roadie who came to Cafe Wha? with Chandler that night, “I wasn’t too impressed at first, but when he started playing with his teeth, and behind his head, it was obvious that here was someone different.” Before long, Hendrix was aboard the plane to London with Chandler and the Animals’ manager, Michael Jeffery, to be met by Tony Garland, who would end up being general factotum for Hendrix’s management company, Anim. “When he arrived,” recalls Garland now, sitting on his barge beside the canal in Maida Vale, west London, where he now lives, “I filled out the customs form. We couldn’t say he’d come to work because he didn’t have a permit, so I told them he was a famous American star coming to collect his royalties.”

It is strange, tracking down Hendrix’s inner circle in London. His own musicians in his great band, the Experience – Noel Redding and Mitch Mitchell – are dead. Likewise, his two managers, Chandler and Jeffery, and one of his closest musician friends, the Rolling Stone Brian Jones; the other, Eric Burdon of the Animals, declined to be interviewed. But some members of the close-knit entourage are still around, such as Kathy Etchingham and Keith Altham, wearing a flaming orange jacket befitting the time of which he agrees to speak, in defiance of a heart attack only a few days before.
Music in London had reached a tumultuously creative moment when Hendrix arrived and was perfectly poised to receive him. “The performers were just your mates who played guitars,” recalls Altham. “It was tight – everyone knew everyone else. It was just Pete from the Who, Eric of Cream, or Brian and Mick of the Stones, all going to each other’s gigs.”

For reasons never quite explained, the blues – both in their acoustic Delta form, and Chicago blues plugged into an amplifier – had captivated this generation of English musicians more deeply than their American counterparts. Elderly blues musicians found themselves, to their amazement, courted for concerts, such as an unforgettable night at Hammersmith with Son House and Bukka White. Champion Jack Dupree married and settled in Yorkshire. “People [here] felt a certain affinity with the blues, music which added a bit of colour to grey life,” Altham continues. And as Garland points out: “White America was listening to Doris Day – black American music got nowhere near white AM radio. Jimi was too white for black radio. Here, there were a lot of white guys listening to blues from America and wanting to sound like their heroes.”

Things happened at speed after Hendrix landed. “‘Come down to the Scotch,’ Chas told me the day Jimi arrived and hear what I found in New York,” recalls Altham. “Jimi couldn’t play because he had no work permit, but he jammed that night, and my first impression was that he’d make a great jazz musician.” That was the night, his first in London, that Hendrix met Kathy Etchingham. “It happened straightaway,” she recalls. “Here was this man: different, funny, coy – even about his own playing.” “A short while later,” recalls Altham, “Chas took me to hear him at the Bag O’Nails club [in Soho] for one of his first proper gigs, turned to me and said, ‘What’ya think?’ I said I’d never heard anything like it in all my life.” At a concert in the same series, remembers Garland, “Michael Jeffery put an arm round Chas, another round me and said, ‘I think we’ve cracked it, mate.’” They had: Kit Lambert, according to Altham, literally scrambled across the tables to Chas at one of the shows and said, “in his plummy accent”, he had to sign him. Chas needed a record contract, Decca had turned Hendrix down (along with the Beatles) and Lambert was about to launch a new label, Track Records, with interest from Polydor: “The deal was done, on the back of a napkin,” says Altham.

Hendrix had formed his band at speed: a rhythm guitarist from Kent called Noel Redding – who had applied to join the Animals but to whom Hendrix now allocated bass guitar – and Mitch Mitchell, a jazz drummer seeking to mould himself in the style of John Coltrane’s great percussionist, Elvin Jones. With a stroke of genius, Jeffery came up with the only name befitting what was to follow: the Jimi Hendrix Experience. Is there any line in rock’n’roll more assuredly seductive as: “Are you experienced?/ Have you ever been experienced?/ Well, I have” (from 1967′s “Are You Experienced”)?
Paul McCartney, John Lennon and the other Beatles quickly converged to hear this phenomenon, along with the Stones and Pete Townshend. Arriving one night at the Bag O’Nails, Altham met Brian Jones “walking back up the stairs with tears in his eyes. I said, ‘Brian, what is it?’ and he replied, ‘It’s what he does, it chokes me’ – only he put it better than that”.

There was also curiosity from the emergent powerhouse of British blues: Cream and Eric Clapton. There was a particular night when Cream allowed Jimi to join them for a jam at the Regent Street Polytechnic in central London. Meeting Clapton had been among the enticements Chandler had used to lure Hendrix to Britain: “Hendrix blew into a version of [Howlin’ Wolf’s] ‘Killing Floor’,” recalls Garland, “and plays it at breakneck tempo, just like that – it stopped you in your tracks.” Altham recalls Chandler going backstage after Clapton left in the middle of the song “which he had yet to master himself”; Clapton was furiously puffing on a cigarette and telling Chas: “You never told me he was that fucking good.”

With a reputation, a recording contract and the adoration of his peers, Hendrix was allocated a flat belonging to Ringo Starr, in Montagu Square, in which he lived with Etchingham, Chandler and Chandler’s Swedish girlfriend, Lotta. It was not ideal, but base camp for an initial tour – as opening act for Cat Stevens and Engelbert Humperdinck, with the Walker Brothers topping the bill. Something was needed, Chandler thought, whereby Hendrix could blow the successive acts off the stage and Altham had the beginning of an idea. He said: “‘It’s a pity that you can’t set fire to your guitar.’ There was a pregnant pause in the dressing room, after which Chas said, ‘Go out and get some lighter fuel.’” Garland remembers: “I went out into Seven Sisters Road [in north London] to buy lighter fluid. At first, it didn’t make sense to me – there were too many things going on to worry about lighter fluid – but it all became clear in the end.”

Altham borrowed a lighter from Gary – the third Walker brother and drummer – and that night, at the Astoria theatre in central London, Hendrix set his guitar ablaze for the first time. “One of the security guards said, ‘Why are you waving it around your head?’” recalls Altham. “‘Cause I’m trying to put it out,’ replied Jimi. Actually, he only did it three times after,” says Altham, “but it became a trademark.”

The touring began in earnest during that winter of 1966-7: around working men’s clubs and little theatres in the north of England. “That’s when I remember him at his very best,” recalls Etchingham. “And at his happiest. The small clubs in regional venues. When he was desperate to make a name for himself, but was also playing for himself. In the working men’s clubs, they just wanted some music to enjoy while they drank their beer. In the small theatres, people had come to hear him. But that was his best music ever – played for its own sake. None of these crazy expectations, no one hanging on – just the people he knew, liked and trusted, and his own music.”

But what was this music, this singular, uplifting, otherworldly, menacing, exotic and erotic sound? “Hendrix was a magpie,” says Altham. “He would take from blues, jazz – only Coltrane could play in that way – and Dylan was the greatest influence. But he’d listen to Mozart, he’d read sci-fi and Asimov and it would all go through his head and come out as Jimi Hendrix. Then there was just the dexterity – he was left-handed, but I remember people throwing him a right-handed guitar and Hendrix picking it up and playing it upside down.” “And don’t forget,” says Tappy Wright, who acted as roadie at first, then joined the management team, “we were using the cheapest guitars. These were no Fenders or Stratocasters. These were Hofners we bought for a few quid. Very basic, but stretched to the fucking limit.”

The most precious insight comes from Etchingham. “People often saw Jimi on stage looking incredibly intense and serious. And suddenly this smile would come across his face, almost a laugh, for no apparent reason,” she says. “Well, I remember that very well, sitting on the bed or the floor at home in Brook Street. Sometimes, he would play a riff for hours, until he had it just right. Then this great smile would creep across his face or he’d throw his head back and laugh. Those were the moments he had got it right for himself, not for anyone else.”

Touring ran concurrent with work in the studio – first the singles: “Hey Joe”, the inimitable “Purple Haze” and “The Wind Cries Mary”, written for Kathy when Hendrix was left alone at home after she had stormed out from an argument, so the story goes (Mary is her middle name). “I never realised quite how hard he worked,” says Sarah Bardwell, director of the Handel House Museum, researching her new charge. The Experience would finish a concert up north, drive south, record between 3am and 9am, then return north for two more shows each day. LSD had yet to play a major role – if the Experience were on amphetamines, it was to keep the schedule.
In various studios, ending up at west London’s Olympic, work began. “I used to ring them up to book time,” recalls Etchingham. “Thirty quid an hour and they’d want the cheque there and then.” Chandler was aware of this and would occasionally hasten things along by taking what the band thought was a warm-up to be the finished product.

“‘What?’ the band would say,” recalls Altham. “‘That’s it,’ Chas would reply. ‘Now for the next one.’” But the soundscape unique to Hendrix, pushing the technology to its limits, was not serendipity, nor was it only about Hendrix’s genius: there was science behind the subliminal magic. “This was not ‘psychcolergic’, as Eric Burdon used to call it,” says Garland. “Hendrix knew exactly what he was doing.” And this process began with a man called Roger Mayer.
“We call this the Surrey blues Delta,” says Mayer, with a wave of his arms across the crazy-paving pathways of Worcester Park, near Surbiton. “Eric over here, Keith down the road, the Stones from there.” Mayer was an acoustician and sonic wave engineer for the Admiralty, a civil servant in the Ministry of Defence, but also an inventor of various electronic musical devices, including an improved wah-wah pedal and the “Octavia” guitar effect with its unique “doubling” effect. “I’d shown it to Jimmy Page, but he thought it was too far out. Jimi said, the moment we met, ‘Yeah, I’d like to try that stuff.’” “One of my favourite memories of all,” says Etchingham, “is Jimi and Roger huddled together over the console and the instruments, talking about stuff way over my head, and then this glorious thing happening.”

“We started from the premise that music was a mission, not a competition,” says Mayer, who describes himself as a “sonic consultant” to Hendrix. “That the basis was the blues, but that the framework of the blues was too tight. We’d talk first about what he wanted the emotion of the song to be. What’s the vision? He would talk in colours and my job was to give him the electronic palette which would engineer those colours so he could paint the canvas.

“Let me try to explain why it sounds like it does: when you listen to Hendrix, you are listening to music in its pure form,” he adds. “The electronics we used were ‘feed forward’, which means that the input from the player projects forward – the equivalent of electronic shadow dancing – so that what happens derives from the original sound and modifies what is being played. But nothing can be predictive – it is speed-forward analogue, a non-repetitive wave form, and that is the definition of pure music and therefore the diametric opposite of digital. “Look, if you throw a pebble into a lake, you have no way of predicting the ripples – it depends on how you throw the stone, or the wind. Digital makes the false presumption that you can predict those ripples, but Jimi and I were always looking for the warning signs. The brain knows when it hears repetition that this is no longer music and what you hear when you listen to Hendrix is pure music. It took discussion and experiment, and some frustrations, but then that moment would come, we’d put the headphones down and say, ‘Got it. That’s the one.’ “But I take none of the credit,” insists Mayer. “You can build a racing car just like the one that won the 1955 grand prix. But if you can’t drive like Juan Manuel Fangio, you’re not going to win the grand prix. Jimi Hendrix only sounds like he does because he was Jimi Hendrix.”

Everyone knows that Hendrix had hundreds of women, often concurrently – but that is not as interesting as the fact that, says Altham, “Kathy Etchingham was the love of his life”. Mayer recalls them “oozing affection, even when there was a row – he needed her very badly indeed”. Hendrix called the flat into which he moved with her in 1968 “the only home I ever had”.

“We knew we wanted Mayfair,” says Etchingham, “so we could walk to the gigs, but the prices were high, even though it was a little seedy – £30 a week.” The couple furnished the split-level, top-floor apartment together with prints and wall hangings from Portobello Road. When Hendrix found out that Handel had lived downstairs, “he went round to HMV or One Stop Records to get Messiah,” says Sarah Bardwell. “What is so interesting is that they were both musicians from abroad, who came to London to make their name in this building.”

It feels extraordinary now to walk over the venerable floorboards past a replica of Handel’s harpsichord, portraits of the composer and the score of Messiah in the room in which it was composed, then up a wooden staircase to Hendrix’s whitewashed sitting room and bedroom above. Sarah Bardwell’s aim is for a joint Handel-Hendrix house museum of some kind. Blue English Heritage plaques accompany each other on the wall outside; Hendrix was added in 1997, a labour of devotion by Kathy Etchingham, who recalls English Heritage balking at the fact that the shop front below was a lingerie shop, “all mannequins wearing suspenders and knickers”, which needed covering up while the plaque was unveiled.

Now, it is the posh Jo Malone perfumery, though “in our day it was Mr Love’s cafe,” she recalls fondly. “On the corner of Oxford Street. And there was an Indian tea shop we’d go to in South Molton Street, and always HMV or One Stop – and we’d walk to the gigs along Regent Street or across Hanover Square, and maybe take a taxi home.”

The memories of the people who actually knew him overshadow the tragic, antiheroic Hendrix of popular imagination. Etchingham and Keith Altham recall a man with a sense of humour. “If things were getting tense in the studio,” says Altham, “he’d just play ‘Teddy Bears’ Picnic’.” Adds Tony Garland: “If I told Jimi to ‘kiss my arse’, he’d answer, ‘You’ve got a rubber neck, do it yourself’ with a sly grin. You always knew you were with someone quicker-witted than yourself.”

Altham also talks about Hendrix “saying nothing to reporters, or contradictory things, on purpose. He would pat his fingers against his lips mid-sentence and go, ‘etcetera, etcetera, etcetera’, in order to say, in effect, nothing. He wanted the music to speak. He also had this way of saying things that made you do a double take: ‘Did he really say that?’ Such as, just before he went on to play with Clapton, who was his idol, for the first time, he told me, ‘I want to see if he is as good as he thinks I am’ – which is not at all the remark you first think it is.”

But many of those who comprised Hendrix’s inner circle in London now talk about some demise in his mental agility once he became popular in his native US, a mass commodity caught between the triangle of his own “racially transgressive” music, his blackness and the black power movement, and his overwhelmingly white audience. Even then, though, Hendrix closed the 1969 Woodstock festival with a version of “The Star-Spangled Banner”, which became the anthem for both the movement against the war in Vietnam and Hendrix’s own complicated empathy with the young American fodder sent to fight it, as a former military man himself. Many of his childhood friends were over there, some never to return. The anthem made Jimi famous worldwide, veering into a vortex out of which emerged “Purple Haze”, a glorious, lyrical dirge – for something, for everything; an endpiece not only to Woodstock but to so many dreams.

“Chas Chandler would come into the studio and find two women in his chair,” recalls Tappy Wright. “‘Get out of my chair!’ he’d say. And then, well, there were drugs, drugs, drugs. I never took any, because I had to make sure everyone got out of bed in the morning – but they were around, too much around.” Altham says that Chandler told him “that he gave Jimi an ultimatum: ‘Either I go or the hangers-on go.’ But there was no getting rid of them, so Chas quit and Jimi was left with Michael Jeffery”.

“Jimi was at his best when the fame never got in the way of the music,” says Etchingham, “and at his worst when the fame took over, when people who hardly knew him suddenly became his best friends.” “He had this thing,” says Altham, “of not being able to say no to people – and this became a problem.”

Even the flat on Brook Street became an open house, to journalists, anyone. “It’s funny,” says Sarah Bardwell. “Here we are trying to contact his old friends who are now superstars for our events and exhibition, and it’s like laying siege to Fort Knox! Yet Hendrix was available to anyone, perhaps almost too much so.”
Despite the distractions, there was one project consistently dear to Hendrix’s heart: the state-of-the-art Electric Lady Studios in New York, opened with a party on 26 August 1970, the night before he was due to fly back to England to play the Isle of Wight festival. Only Hendrix was almost too shy to appear and, when he did so, he retreated to the steps outside, where he met a young singer-songwriter too shy to enter the fray – Patti Smith. “It was all too much for me. Johnny Winter in there and all,” recalled Smith in a past interview with the Observer. “So I thought, ‘I’ll just sit awhile on the steps’ and out came Jimi and sat next to me. And he was so full of ideas; the different sounds he was going to create in this studio, wider landscapes, experiments with musicians and new soundscapes. All he had to do was get over back to England, play the festival and get back to work…”

It had been a long weekend on the Isle of Wight and, for me, an exciting one. I was compelled – not disgusted, as is the official history – by the determination of French and German anarchists to tear down the fences so that it be a free festival. I loved the fact that Notting Hill’s local band, Hawkwind, played outside the fence in protest at the ticket prices. The strange atmosphere added to the climactic moment, after the Who and others: the one set, at 2am on the Monday, for which it was imperative to get down from among the crowds on Desolation Row and force a way right to the front and concentrate or, rather, submit to hypnosis. The set by Jimi Hendrix.

It is written in the lore of Hendrixology that this was a terrible performance. Hendrix had arrived exhausted, by the previous month’s events, the upcoming tour, the day’s violence and by walkie-talkie voices that somehow made their way into the PA system. But all I remember, having just turned 16, is a dream coming true: the greatest rock musician of all time (one knew this with assurance) dressed in blazing red and purple silks, actually playing the version of “Sgt Pepper’s” about which I had read so much in NME, playing “Purple Haze”, “Voodoo Chile” and a long, searing “Machine Gun”, just yards away. I remember the sound – the sounds, plural – bombarding me from the far side of some emotional, existential, hallucinogenic and sexual checkpoint along the road towards the rest of my life. I remember him playing the horn parts to “Sgt Pepper’s” on his guitar! I remember the deafening and painful silence after he finished his fusillade and in the crowd a mixture of rapture, gratitude, enlightenment and affection.

Afterwards, Hendrix went on a reportedly disastrous tour of Scandinavia and Germany (failing to meet one of his two children, by a Swedish girlfriend – the other he had sired in New York and also never met), before returning to the Cumberland hotel and the room in which he gave his last ever interview, to Keith Altham. (To mark the anniversary, the Cumberland has designed and decorated these rooms in a swirl of colour, stocked it with Hendrix music and called it the Hendrix Suite, in which people can stay.)

“There were two women in the room,” recalls Altham. “One of them was a girlfriend called Devon Wilson and she was dodgy – she dealt him drugs and I can say that now because she’s dead. But he knew me well by this time and he seemed better than I’d seen him previously.” The interview is a remarkable one, utterly devoid of all the nonsense that would ensue about suicide and a death wish. On the tape, Hendrix laughs and jokes; he tells Altham about plans to re-form the Experience and tour England again.

On the night of 16 September, Hendrix went to Ronnie Scott’s without his guitar, hoping to jam with Eric Burdon’s new band, War. Burdon considered him unfit to play. The following night, he returned and joined his friend on stage. “I was tired, I missed it,” says Altham, “though, of course, I regret that now. It was the last time Hendrix ever played the guitar.”
Hendrix went on to a party with a German woman, Monika Danneman, and back to her rooms at the Samarkand hotel in Lansdowne Crescent. There are so many accounts of exactly what happened next, but all converge on the fact that he had drunk a fair amount, taken some kind of amphetamines (“Black bombers, I think, given to him by Devon Wilson,” surmises Altham) and some of Danneman’s Vesparax sleeping pills, not knowing their strength. He vomited during the deep ensuing sleep, insufficiently conscious enough to throw up; Danneman panicked, and telephoned Burdon, who urged her to call an ambulance. But the greatest guitarist of all time was dead upon arrival at St Mary Abbot’s hospital, aged 27. (Sadly, Danneman took her own life in 1996.)

So it was, back in September 1970, that I made my way up Lansdowne Rise and round the corner to the Samarkand hotel after reading the news today, oh boy. I was amazed to have the pavement outside the address at which Jimi Hendrix had died that morning all to myself for a good couple of hours – not a soul. I went home, got some chalk, and wrote: “Scuse us while we kiss the sky, Jimi” on the flagstones (OK, but I was only 16) and retreated to watch. Nothing happened and after another hour, a man came out and washed the words away and I returned home to write a lament in my diary, which I still have, the Standard’s front page folded at the date.

Speculations about suicide and murder are too ridiculous to contemplate – most of them are probably concocted in order to dramatise and distract from the awful reality of such a genius dying in this way – but what does matter are Kathy Etchingham’s reflections.
“Jimi died because the simple things got complicated. He was born to a father who was an alcoholic and a mother who died and he died because he was in that flat in Notting Hill with a complete stranger who gave him a load of sleeping pills without telling him how strong they were. It’s as simple and as complicated as that.
“I’m older and wiser now,” she says. “I enjoy culture and the fine things in life. I can look back and see all that more clearly than I did at the time – I was so young, only 24.” Of the compelling memoir she has written, Through Gypsy Eyes, she says: “I’d like to go over it again, fill in a few things, but what I want now, most of all from this anniversary, is for people to understand that it was in Britain that he was welcomed, it was there he was happy and such fun to be around – yes, grumpy at times, and a handful – but such a man. I’d like the young people to know that.”

“Let’s face it,” says Tappy Wright, “if Jimi had stayed with Kathy, he’d probably be alive and playing still. Plus, he always said he wanted to be buried in London, not Seattle, where he was born and his family lived. It wasn’t just me he told that, it was plenty of people – that this was home.” “Still,” says Etchingham, “at least we’ve got the plaque, the Handel House Museum, and I’m looking forward to seeing everyone in September.

They were great times and we’ll take a trip down memory lane. Only 40 years is a long time and Jimi won’t be there.”

http://vintageandrare.com/roger-mayer

Interview with Moollon Musical Instruments

Moollon is a company producing a range of effects pedals that will guarantee to catch your eye and stop you in your tracks. With a number of leading guitarists using their products, Guitar Jar catches up with Moollon manager Andreas Roselund to find out more about the company, its products and their fascinating artwork.

…the artwork etched on Moollon pedals and guitars are inspired by existing traditional Korean art pieces found in palaces, temples, and various preserved works, the rest being original designs…

Hi Andreas, before we discuss the range of Moollon products in more detail, can you give our readers a rundown of the history of the Moollon company?
Moollon was founded in 2002 by Young Joon Park and CG Ji, who were both active musicians and guitar builders that had gone to art school together back in the 1980s, studying sculpting. ‘As individuals who had quite an expansive collection of vintage guitars and amps along a penchant for traditional Korean art, they had in mind a plan to start building pedals and guitars together early on.’ After a several years of planning and testing, the first pedal (Moollon Overdrive) was released, along with a few custom guitars. Winter NAMM 2004 was pretty much the debut of the gear for international release, and things have expanded since.

Do Moollon focus on producing a particular type of effects pedal or do you like to cater for most types of effects?
Although there are now about a dozen and a half Moollon pedals in production, drive pedals of different sorts have primarily the focus of Moollon designs. Young Joon especially wanted to get some of the best vintage overdrive tones he’d enjoyed from the 1960s into a very convenient package, hence the early release of the Moollon Overdrive, along with the Distortion and various vintage-spec fuzzes, even leading up to the rather unique Class A Boost, which is a point-to-point wired 3-band silicon transistor boost.

Which effect is your best selling pedal?
Although we’ve had fairly steady sales across the line, the Overdrive has pretty much been the consistent seller worldwide, although the Compressor is remarkably popular here in Korea and is slowly gaining respect abroad.

I’ve been aware of your effects pedals for a number of years, mainly due to the stunning artwork engraved into the units. Can you tell us where the idea came from to engrave your pedals? Do you use the same artist to create all the designs for the complete range of Moollon effects?
Young Joon and CG told me years ago how they wanted to produce a line of products that had an exterior that was just as impressive as the effect itself, so decided to employ their skills as artists to create an effect that could only be done by hand, albeit a labour-intensive process. They both had learned chemical etching in college and had done it enough to apply the art in fine detail on aluminium alloy, so it seemed only logical for them to try things out on commonly-used aluminium enclosures used for effect pedals. The artwork etched on Moollon pedals and guitars are all CG’s designs as well, many derived from or inspired by existing traditional Korean art pieces found in palaces, temples, and various preserved works, the rest being original designs. CG comes up with a design concept, and has it sketched and rendered in detail on his PC before he has the design printed to a silkscreen and subsequently etched, buffed, and inked. They had considered laser engraving and other methods early on, but felt that the “hand worked” idea shouldn’t be limited to just the circuitry. As a result, due to the inconsistent effect of acid on the aluminium surface and how each enclosure takes to buffing, no two pedal enclosures are exactly alike and we admittedly have to discard quite a few along the way, but we’re satisfied with the final effect with those that make it into the hands of the customers. I guess one could say that each pedal is unique.

How have you found the recent global financial crisis and is it difficult to compete against the mass produced manufacturers like BOSS?
We’re a team of 5. Young Joon designs and wires the VintAge Series pedals, winds the Moollon pickups, and builds the Classic series of Moollon guitars, CG builds the Custom Shop guitars and does all of the etched designs, electronics engineer Hyungwoo designs digital pedals, wires the BufferAge Series pedals and forthcoming models, and full-time builder Suhyun works on BufferAge Series Pedals and does domestic sales. As the newest member of the team (I’ve been with Moollon just under 4 years now), I get to do this-and-that and handle dealer/distributor/customer service, along with artist relations.

As a low-volume pedal and guitar builder company that still hasn’t received that much exposure in the world market, the past few years have certainly been a bit trying for us, and the temptation to diverge from Moollon’s original pursuit of “everything vintage” tone-wise has no doubt been on our minds, especially when we see fantastically innovative pedals consistently coming from some of the bigger makers. However, Young Joon and the staff have never thought of companies like Boss as “the competition”, and have candidly expressed that despite the fact that their goal has been and will always be “quality vintage tones”, there can always be lessons learned from companies like Boss. Case in point, we’ve been more than satisfied to see an esteemed guitarist as Derek Trucks using the Moollon Compressor, and were very happy to hear the nice things that Blues Saraceno also had to say about it at Winter NAMM 2009. Just the same, I have a feeling we’re not the only boutique pedal maker who both appreciates and knows the value of the influence that a giant like Boss has had with the design and endearing qualities of the CS-2. There always seems to be something to learn, and there’s a certain degree of unspoken respect around the Moollon shop for those who have gone before us, be it Pete Cornish or an unknown electronics engineer in Hamamatsu.

How do you maintain your motivation and enthusiasm in driving the business forward?
I’d say the majority if it all stems from the feedback we get from artists. When a guitarist we’re fond of give us a chance and tries out our stuff, we’re already smiling, but if he or she tops that off a few weeks later with some words of approval, we’re quite chuffed. It definitely can make those slow days coming into the shop worth more than it might seem.

Moollon has an impressive amount of guitarists using your products. Do you approach them for endorsements?
Yes we do, although as of yet we’ve never had the budget for an all-out endorsement of sorts. We may make just a handful of pedals a day, but nonetheless feel grateful to pass on a couple or more to those we’re musically fond of, given the opportunity. Most of this goes on either at the Winter NAMM show or (granted that we know the right folks) when an artist on tour passes through Asia and does a show here in Korea. As primary builder and president, Young Joon makes a concerted effort to meet them in person and answer questions directly when given the chance. It’s otherwise a little bit of this and that, as we also get a fair amount of regular email from guitarists looking for endorsements.

Crispian Mills (Kula Shaker) is one of the most recent artists to have custom shop pedals created in his honour. Can you tell our readers more about these pedals?
It’s been such a pleasure to be in touch with Crispian Mills and hear him make good use of Moollon pedals on his recent recordings, and we’re most certain he is one who shares a lot of appreciation of classic rock tones that inspired Young Joon and CG’s founding of the company in the first place. This past year, Crispian made an interesting proposal about a pedal idea, and after several months we have a few special designs now headed toward regular production, including a signature Fuzz 14 and VintageWah in the works, hopefully ready for release sometime this year. While this was all going on, CG also wanted to build him a one-of-a-kind “Strangefolk” guitar, that united both an etched guitar face of Moollon patterns, paired with some personalized images and ideas from Crispian himself, and we were pleased to work closely with him on the custom design that resulted. It’s definitely one of the more impressive things CG has done, combining red and black ink on the recessed etched areas for a really unique look.

How long does it take to design and manufacture a pedal once you receive a request from a guitarist?
Since all staff members are hands-on and have little reserve time outside of what we do, custom pedals (and guitars, for that matter) can take quite a while, and it is honestly very rare that we can actually accommodate a custom request. R&D time with circuit design is half of the work, the other being the enclosure design, which can take several weeks for CG to render before being satisfied with a final design.

Can we purchase the custom shop pedals from dealers or do we have to order directly from Moollon?
The Custom Shop OD/DS and 3-Plus are regular production items and can be both ordered from our dealers or (if no dealer is in one’s country) direct from our shop. As for the Custom Shop guitar line, due to the one-off nature of each model, they are usually ordered from us direct but can also be purchased through Ludlow Guitars in New York.

Can you tell our readers more about the guitars and pickups Moollon produce? Are you seeing an increasing amount of guitarists opting for Moollon guitars?
Young Joon has a massive collection of vintage guitars and amplifiers from the 50s and 60s in his private studio, and spent many years with CG in research while trying to hear what exactly was going on with those early production instruments in the context of how they were being used, all the way from a guitar’s wood and how many layers of lacquer they were finished in, to tone that could only come from less than perfect transformers used in old amps, even the surprisingly odd output resistance pairings in pickups from late 1950s Gibson Les Pauls we’ve chanced upon (more on that later!). Young Joon calls such factors the starting point for Moollon’s raison d’etre in regard to guitar building, and has repeatedly stressed how one must never assume that “shape equals tone”, regardless of assumed materials used: there are simply too many variables involved that need to be attended to in order to have a guitar behave like a vintage piece.

The Classic Series, for example, is an effort to simply do nothing more than be faithful to some original designs that resulted in some historically authentic tones, all topped off with Young Joon’s own handwound pickups based on vintage units from his collection. As a part of this process, he also asserts the importance of nitrocellulose lacquer being applied in micro-thin layers, in order to preserve the wood’s natural resonance characteristics, and takes his time with the application of 15 coats or so over several weeks time with each guitar. The Classic Series debuted this year at the Winter NAMM show.

When CG builds a Moollon Custom Shop guitar, the variables take a slightly different turn with the addition of the aluminium face that goes on most of them, which not only provides excellent shielding from single coil pickup noise but also can slightly darken the overall tone of an excessively bright ash body, for example. There are also more options with the Custom Shop line: As we have no CNC machines in our shop, each neck is shaped by CG to a customer’s preferred grip, and is mated to a custom wound set of pickups that best suits the tonal personality of guitar at hand (not just the kind of wood) , usually testing with a few slightly different winds of the same Moollon pickup series to see how the guitar best responds, also taking into consideration what kinds of tone colours the customer tells us he/she is after during our in-shop consultations. All in all, there is a little more study that goes into each Custom Shop guitar to come up with a result that will satisfy both us and the customer who has placed the order.

As for interest and sales, the Moollon Classic series has become a very popular option here in Korea for those who can’t afford a high-end import guitar but would still rather not compromise on quality and tone with an otherwise more affordable product. We have local musicians come into the shop almost daily, spending time to test demo models with different woods and pickups, and talk about the options available with Young Joon and CG, factors no doubt which influence them to buy a Moollon guitar or not. On the other hand, things are admittedly a wee bit quiet in the international scene. The fact that we have built and exported abroad so few of them certainly adds to the lack of knowledge about them, but we get regular emails about each guitar line and have seen a definite increase in interest in Moollon guitars over the past few years.

…the next 12 months, we’re looking at the debut of a “modern line” of pedals in all-new diecast enclosures, including the Modern Distortion and Modern Overdrive (both with boost circuits), in addition to a digital chorus and simplified delay…

The pickups Young Joon winds are very era-specific and are based off of his own personal vintage collection. One unique thing about how they are paired is that he never specifies the position of each when we ship out a set in a box (listing only the specific output resistance of each), much to the surprise of numerous customers who have asked why. He’ll often reply with a curious answer, firstly how factory-specified pickup positions are a rather contemporary option that is not necessarily true to vintage, and elaborates with the following story: Many years ago, he had the chance to handle a dear friend’s original ’59 Gibson Les Paul “Burst” and check the output of the factory pickups in original positions, and contrary to his expectation was surprised to find the guitar came out of the factory with a neck pickup wound nearly 1k ohm stronger than that of the bridge. A good amount of additional investigation revealed it wasn’t an isolated case among late 50s Gibsons by any measure, and he soon felt that one’s preferred tone in modern instruments with vintage-spec pickups should not disregard something as simple as pickup height in favour of pickup output. Long story short, Moollon pickups are made to encourage a player to use them in the positions one seems fit and to play about with pickup height to achieve one’s desired tone, rather than us dictating how they should be used. That being said, Young Joon always pairs a set with specific tones in mind.

Although relatively unknown due to limited orders from our dealers, we’ve seen a rather favourable response to the pickups so far, the latest being an exciting interaction with veteran L.A. session guitarist Michael Thompson this past year, who was having a guitar built for him by luthier Greg Back. They dropped by at our booth at the Winter NAMM show and Michael asked us for a set of Moollon VS-64 pickups to specifically put in it, and we were more than happy to oblige. Suffice to say, he later told us some overwhelmingly nice things about them that really got the staff buzzing.

The Moollon factory is burning down. If there was a pedal and guitar you had to save, which models would go for?
I’d grab the first Class A Boost I could see, and if I didn’t burn up first, I’d run back to CG’s workbench to see if I could save a Narcis NC Feldge, though I’m well aware that we don’t keep a regular stock of Custom Shop line!

Lager or Cider?
Can I cheat on this one? I had a Wychwood Hobgoblin while at the pub in the UK Embassy in Seoul a little while ago and have been itching for an ale of equal calibre ever since. With just weak pilsner brews locally being the mundane standard of the masses here in Korea, sometimes a decent lager isn’t even enough!

What’s the future for Moollon? Are there any new pedals in the pipeline? What lies ahead for 2010/11?
The next 12 months are set to have has some of the biggest additions we’ve had since the addition of the Classic Guitar Series, as we’re looking at the debut of a “modern line” of pedals in all-new diecast enclosures, including the Modern Distortion and Modern Overdrive (both with boost circuits), in addition to a digital chorus and simplified delay with nearly all of the bells and whistles featured in our popular Delay (names pending). Built in-house with the same high quality parts used in our BurfferAge and VintAge line, we’re able to cut costs and work time significantly by using non-etched enclosures.

We’re also looking forward to the release of a quality power supply as well. Using a toroidal transformer with no less than twelve independent DC outputs (all switchable from 9v to 12v), three will feature higher amperage ratings for modulation/delay pedals, etc. We have gotten so many requests at the NAMM show over the years to make available the power boxes we build for use at the show (with etched enclosures of a thorny vine), that we felt it was time to finally get to work, each one being hand wired by Moollon engineer Hyungwoo and featuring an all-new etched design on the aluminium enclosure. The first batch will be for the locals over here (220V), but if requests come in from others around the globe, we’ll probably start making them in 240v and 110v as well.

Young Joon has also hinted at a new guitar line for 2011, but that’s news even I’ve yet to hear! Stay tuned, I’m sure we’ll have more info on the Moollon site as new items are released, and any of CG’s new designs and works in progress are usually posted on his blog well before he finishes them: http://blog.naver.com/cgjee.