Where Did The Good Ole' Days Go?

[Big John66]

Tin can flash pots, coffee can lights and zip cable everywhere! Been there, done that. My best "flash pot" story was from a drummer I knew back then.
His band had a set of pots they used through out the night. They were controlled by a foot switch he had by his high hat stand, with the pots placed on the downstage edge.

He had just been dumped by his girlfriend when, lo and behold, she showed up at his gig with her new boyfriend. My buddy watched from the stage as they worked their way onto the dance floor. The new boyfriend took off his leather bomber jacket and tossed it on the edge of the stage.....right over the top of a flash pot! Sure enough, the band comes to the end of the tune and my bud hits the hits the switch and POOF!!!!! The leather jacket (probably from Wilson's Leather at the mall) goes up in a smoldering ball of smoke!

 

[bikeplate]

We did what we needed to do back then. I'm still at it and love the ease w the current gear. Especially the advancements in PA gear

 

[madbass6]

well times change, as nice as going down memory lane is, the reality is "like it or not!" we've got to go with the flo! that's just the way it is!!!

 

[BassIsBoss]

The best thing about the good old days, was catching something after a midnight rendezvous, and knowing some pills or a shot in the butt would take care of it. Somewhere along the way, you could end up dying from a little salami layover. Quite the change.

 

[bluesblaster]

I had a friend that made a tape echo machine from an old reel to reel tape player and pieces of an erector set, it worked very much like an echoplex . So if you know what an Echoplex and/or an Erector set is than you were probably there, you youngsters can probably just google it or something. And yes, I was almost blown up several times by those cursed flash pots, you really had to remember where those damn things were and when they were going to go Boom ! We blackened the ceiling of one establishment and were never asked to perform there again after that,... might have over done it just a bit

 

[avvie]

The future aint what it used to be.

 

[bobalu]

One thing I don't miss from the old bar playing days is the reek of cigarette smoke in my clothes and carpeted cabinets. Never could get rid of it on my cabinets.... I had to leave them in the garage after a gig they reeked so much. And the blue haze of cigarette smoke throughout the entire bar when the house lights went on. Up here today you can't smoke in any public place anymore (restaurants or bars). How things have changed.

 

[james condino]

There are a lot of ideas on what the "good old days" really represented; how far back do you want to go and whose side are you on? Racism, segregation, prohibition, slavery, the civil war, the conquest of the Americas, the Inquisition, the Roman empire...they don't all sound that great to me.

As a bass and guitar geek, nothing I have seen anywhere in the world can compare to 48th street Manhattan in the early '80s when I as a high school kid could mow lawns for six weeks and head over to We Buy or Rudy's or one of the other gems and buy almost any instrument you could think of from the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s for a few hundred dollars. When the Who was in full force, I probably busted up enough vintage instruments on stage to buy a couple of Teslas or nice house at today's prices!

 

[justin fleenor]

Wow--does that bring back some memories!

I still have mine---bought it sometime in the early 80's. It still works, although I've had to replace the caps 2 or 3 times and it's gone through 5 or 6 speaker replacements. It's been retired for years now and has it's own resting place in my basement " Museum Of What Will Someday Be Ancient History".

i was given a tko 150 by someone i barely knew about 10 years ago i thought it was awesome with my warlock with dimarzios both the amp and bass were later stolen followed by my suzuki side kick then my eddie bauer exploder then i left florida

 

[7dollarbologna]

I miss the Golden West Saloon

 

[Rip Van Dan]

I remember back in '65 getting my first bass - a Japanese piece of crap but it was a bass. My first amplifier was a closet door that I would butt the back of my bass up against to use as a sounding board - otherwise you couldn't hear it.

First amp I bought was a good one - 1966 Fender Bassman (last year of the black-face). Then in 1966 I bought my 1965 Fender Jazz bass used because the organ player of a group in high school sold his organ to the group's bass player, Craig. Craig was then playing organ and they asked me to play bass. Of course, Craig wanted to sell the bass he was no longer using, gave me a good price AND let me pay it off over 6 months of payments. That's when I first knew what a good bass and amp could sound like together.

Then in the early 70's I played in a touring nightclub group for about 3-years. I put some pictures up in the Off Topic section about photos and old bands. We wore some pretty strange clothes back then...

 

[fjadams]

It's all relative. For some the good old days were 20, 40, 60 years ago. For some the good old days start tomorrow.

 

[fjadams]

Haaaaaa. you too? I made the first handmade strobe for my band in 1968 to use in clubs we played (psychedelic music).. Nobody seen them before. what a trip when you light them up on stage. I used an old record player box which was gutted. Drilled a hole in the side and mounted a 500 watt projector bulb inside with an erector set motor and a large wheel that spun on low gear with a hole in it. when the holes lined up, Bingo. The thing was hanging from the ceiling in front of the stage with a long cord to the stage so we could turn it on. I couldn't let it run too long the damn thing would catch on fire. We would do a freak out show and dump a pound of flour on the drummer and with the strobe running it looked like an atomic bomb went off in slow motion. People would be freaking out wondering what the hell was happening as we would turn all the amps up to feedback and trash the stage. what at sight. Those were the good ole' days. What was the name of your band, maybe we know one another. We were the Assorted Flavors.

Yep. Not forgetting the water and colored oil on the overhead projector for the San Francisco light show on the cheap.

 

[McG]

... in 1968 to use in clubs we played (psychedelic music)..

Ah, something else we have in common. We were a psychedelic band too from 1970-1975. The lead guitarist was in the Hendrix/Trower vein. Fun times for sure. Every local beer bar had bands playing lots of original music. We were pretty good and gigs were plentiful. Then disco hit big here in 1975 and many clubs went DJ. Like *poof* overnight. Those weren't the good ole days

well times change, as nice as going down memory lane is, the reality is "like it or not!" we've got to go with the flo! that's just the way it is!!!

It sure is. For those of us in our 50s/60s/70s looking back on our musical selves in our teens/20s is fun. But nothing ever stays the same so we have no choice but to see what comes next. For all the fun I had playing more and bigger gigs in my youth I'm enjoying playing more and playing better than ever now.

Feel pretty good to still be playing out at 65. Most of my old bandmates from back then hung it up years ago.

Can I just take a time machine to the year 2040, when everyone will be saying that 2016 was the good old days?

Funny but reading through this thread made me think the same thing. Of course I'll be 90 in 2040 so I may not remember 2016. Maybe I should write myself a note saying how great things are now so I'll know these were the good old days

 

[Relsom]

The good old days........they're right around the corner.

 

[alaskaleftybass]

My first bass was a hollowbody Harmony single cutaway that I bought from my friend for $50 including case. I used a tan Fender Vibrolux for a bass amp. I remember a friend bought two Heathkit cabs his dad put toget her for him. They each had 2 x 12"s with a horn and he always got to be in all the bands even though he couldn't play very well lol. He WAS the p.a. in our little town. Later, I left for Seattle and bought a Fender Bassman 50 with 2 x 12's. It was my first brand new bass amp. I bought a Gibson EB-0 and Fender P-bass that I used until I switched to Ibanez in 1980's.

In 1980 my parents and brother received a large settlement from Alaska Native Land Claims and they gave me enough money to buy everything we needed to equip a band. I got a MusicMan 130 with 2 x 212 cabs, bought the guitarist a 50 watt Marshall half stack, and a Peavey p.a. We had a rolling rack with wheels and the board was a huge 12 channel board that was bolted to the rack. We had two HUGE Peavey SP1's that weighed a ton. We used to curse those speakers if we had to go up any stairs at all.

We had three Peavey Black Widow 112 monitors as we were a ZZ-Top style band-- guitar, bass, drums, and all of us sang vocals. Add a Peavey stereo 15 band stereo EQ for mains and monitors. A Peavey CS-800 powered mains and monitors and it cranked loud back in those days. We didn't know that 800 watts was not enough power!

Our lights were Par 64's plugged into surge protectors! Either on or off, and we had two color schemes controlled by the surge protectors. LOL.

But we toured a lot, met a lot of wonderful people and that equipment worked for us through most of the 80's. I miss those days very much. Many of my musician friends are gone now. I think of how the 80's rock sounded so crisp and fresh to me and today I still love it and play it on weekends.

EDIT: I started experiencing GAS at an early stage of my career and sold the MusicMan double stack that I regret to this day. I bought numerous Peavey bass amps- combos or heads and Black Widow equipped cabs. Ampeg and Acoustic. They all served me well.

Thank you all for your fine memories. We were all together in spirit living the same rock and roll experience and American dream that seems to be now just a memory in American culture.

 

[drakson]

One of the guitar players had an old Fender with a 15 inch speaker with a microphone input. I bought a bass and showed up and plugged in that amp, it also had a guitar and I think and a 2 Microphones plugged in it. Then we had a small 4 piece drum and the other guitar player had a small amp. I guess it was the good old days of light equipment, not much to carry in and set up. People wanted to be entertained and dance. They didn't seem to care it sounded a bit muddy, just wanted to have some fun and listen to good music.

 

[Joe Nerve]

There are things I like and missed about the 70s, but truth is we're much better off now than we were then. The 3 things that immediately pop into mind for me are cigarette smoke (in restaurants, planes, even doctors offices), the prejudice and lack of tolerance people had for differences in one another, and the Vietnam War. I can't even begin to wrap my brain about what it would be like if I or anyone I loved or cared about could be shipped out on a moments notice to go into literal hell. Where they were forced to kill and die for something they didn't even believe in. People complain about politics and the state of the world as if we're crumbling to pieces. We WERE truly crumbling to pieces back then.

And ya wanna talk about cops beating people up...

We have it much MUCH MUCH better today than we had it back in the good old days. In countless ways.

The internet is kinda cool too .







I don't want to hear anybody complain about anything today.

 

[lbbc]

The "good old days" found us playing on and through crappy equipment by today's standards...Par cans (or coffee cans) for lights, Bogen Kustom or Peavey PA systems, everyone singing through 1 or 2 mics, Peavey TNT or some other bass combo, copy or "lawsuit" basses with terrible action/intonation. It would take 1-2 hours to set up. Zip cords for PA and multiple extension cords all plugged into 1 power strip in many places with only 2 wire ground service. If we were lucky, we'd make $50/night per person and get free draft beer. BUT, it's all relative...AND people always came out to support local live music.
I guess if it weren't for the "good old days" we wouldn't be where we are today.....we've had some common experiences and great stories to share!

 

[Zooberwerx]

An apology from those of us 55+ years old:

Sorry kids, we used up all the fun before some of you were born.

Riis