Gear? Hear!
The Nihilistics amps
Picking up on last week’s look at my main Nihilistics axe, let’s spend some time with the amps that Ibanez 2350 was played through.
WOLLENSAK My very first amp was not an amp at all. It was a Wollensak reel-to-reel tube tape recorder. I’m not sure where it came from–it might’ve been boosted from the high school by one of my brothers or my dad might’ve brought it home from somewhere–but it ended up in our basement and became pivotal in my life. That’s the recorder I used to tape my brother Mario’s copy of Led Zeppelin II, the album that made me want to play guitar. And when I realized I could plug Rodney’s Harmony Stratotone into the PA input and get a nice tube distortion tone (the trick was to plug it only halfway) I was off and running. Years hence, when Nihilistics played that doomed New Year’s Eve show with, among others, Big Boys, I was surprised to see the Big Boys guitarist Tim Kerr using a Wollensak as a preamp. That’s why I took a Wollensak tube tape recorder home from a recent estate sale I helped with and pulled out the electronics.
KAY AMP A tiny amp with an 8” speaker, it was bundled with my equally-crappy Kay SG copy as a package deal, $99. I remember very little about this amp except how eager I was to get it the fuck out of my life. Amp pictured is not mine: I probably threw mine off a bridge.
UNIVOX U65RN NOW we’re getting somewhere. A decently-loud solid-state combo amp with a 12” speaker, made by the Univox company, which was headquartered on Long Island (Westbury). I probably bought it at my local Lindenhurst music store, Music Land. Plugging an Electro-Harmonix Linear Power Booster (I’ll get into effects in a subsequent post) into it almost doubled the amp’s volume. Saturday nights when my house was empty you’d find me jamming along with LPs in the living room, my Ibanez and Univox making quite the racket. That little amp–recovered in white vinyl (not Tolex, which is what’s usually on amps, but vinyl like you’d use on car seats)–somehow carried me through the entire life of Cobra (and into Nihilistics) and can be seen in the picture above, backing me up as we play a backyard party.
FENDER TWIN REVERB It’s hard to believe but for years I owned a silverface Fender Twin Reverb, the 1970s workhorse amp that was relatively cheap and ubiquitous. It was a great amp… when it worked properly. There was always something going on with the tubes and it let me down more than once on a gig. It was also heavy as fuck and I finally bid it farewell when I met my next amp (below). Did I know at the time that Steve Jones used a Fender Twin Reverb while recording Never Mind The Bollocks? Of course not.
GALLIEN-KRUEGER 212G Gallien-Krueger made some of the very first halfway-decent sounding solid-state amplifiers. I’m sure I first read about the company in Guitar Player magazine. Then I found a used 212G (as in two 12” speakers) in a music store in Bay Shore for some ridiculous price–in my memory, $200–and took it home. It became my main Nihilistics amp and I’m almost positive it’s what I used on the EP and LP. The GK was a great gigging amp because it never died and it was fairly light for what it was. What became of it is anybody’s guess but at some point I felt it wasn’t pushing enough bass and decided to go back to a tube amp for some bottom end. (The amp pictured above is not mine.)
AMPEG VT40 I was always a fan of Billy Kammerer’s Ampeg, a 1960s Jet, and I went out and found a VT40, a beastly 60 watt tube amp with four 10” speakers. Thank God it had a detachable dolly to roll it around because it, too, weighed a fuck-ton. This is probably the amp that carried me through to the end of my time in Nihilistics. I’m not sure if it made it off Long Island with me when I moved to New Jersey.
ORANGE OVERDRIVE 80 Gifted to me by Rhino, AKA Stephen Gawryluk of NJ Hardcore legends Bedlam. Paul Richard of AOD and I had gone to Rhino’s to deliver a Randall amp Rhino bought from Paul. A smoky poker game was going on and Paul and I carried the Randall upstairs to a bedroom where I spied the Orange in a corner. I mentioned it to Rhino )”Hey, cool Orange amp.”) and he said, “You want it? You can have it.” Paul and I carried it out to his car and it was mine. It wasn’t until years later I realized what a valuable gift Rhino had bestowed on me. My Overdrive 80 dates back to 1973 and when I got it it had been painted black and was missing its grille cloth and back panel. I painstakingly stripped the paint off to restore the orange Tolex, made a new back cover and replaced the grille cloth. I also found some original Orange badges at a music store in Newark that carried Orange (the original iteration) and had a stock of parts. This is the amp I used when Nihilistics got back together in 1989 and recorded new material. It may have also been backing me up at the NY Thrash reunion. This is the amp (pictured) I’ll keep when I get rid of all my others and I’ve already figured out who to live it to in my will.
NEXT TIME: Stomp? Whomp!