![]() ![]() For his part, bassist Dee Dee purchased three Ampeg SVT 300-watt bass heads and three matching 8x10 cabinets. So when money was finally available, Johnny purchased not one but three Marshall 1959 Mark II Super Lead heads and six Marshall 1960B 4x12 straight cabinets. Having witnessed these bands in their heyday, he had seen first-hand the power waiting to be unleashed from a quartet of glowing bottles like a hell-bent genie trapped in a really lame lamp. Guitarist Johnny Ramone was a wild fan of the Who, the Stooges, and the New York Dolls. We could blow this place apart if we wanted to.” “But now we got these amps that they…they, they’re really, they, they…work. “We play so loud that the amps couldn’t take it,” bassist Dee Dee Ramone explained in 1976 in the documentary End of the Century: The Story of the Ramones. In their place were two of the all-time giants: Marshall and Ampeg. Gone were the small combos they had struggled with. And like Townshend & Co., the Ramones got new amps. Like the Who, the Ramones initially struggled with underpowered gear and cheap guitars. The Ramones played music similar to the Who’s-it was chaotic, loud, and aggressive-but there was a sonic difference: it was stripped down to the basics, it eschewed any blues influence, and it tossed out all dynamics in favor of a take-no-prisoners onslaught of sound and speed. The leaders of this new movement were a gang of four from Forest Hills, Queens. Early on, someone called it punk rock because it was the music of people who lived on the fringes of society. After the rise and fall of the hippie movement, the beginning and end of acid rock, and the short flicker of glam rock, a new sound emerged from New York City’s Bowery scene. Note Johnny’s gig/shopping bag.įast-forward to 1974. Slumming on the Subway: (left to right) Dee Dee, Joey, Tommy, and Johnny Ramone in NYC, circa 1975. What was once a major no-no became exactly what people wanted. The tones, the overtones, and the harmonics of that saturated sound changed guitar and the way people heard it. And the defining guitar tone of the last 40 years. The sound of tubes and speakers being pushed beyond their limits-something that, in previous generations, had been avoided at all costs- became the sound of a generation. ![]() The Who were at the forefront of a new sound in rock and roll: distortion. The unit he delivered, the Marshall 1959 SLP100, satisfied their requirements for power, volume, and durability and became one of the classic rock amps of all time. Townshend and Entwistle, who had determined that their brand of aggressive music required more volume than either the current Fender or the Marshall lines could supply, requested a 100-watt amp from Marshall. ![]() By the mid ’60s they were working with British music shop owner Jim Marshall, who was building clones of the Fender Bassman circuit for the British market. Both Townshend and bassist John Entwistle were admirers of Fender amplifiers. Early on, the Who struggled to get acceptable sound and volume from cheap, underpowered gear. They certainly created the blueprint for punk gear. Many would argue that the Who, four angry young men from Shepherd’s Bush, London, were the original punks. The Who’s music spoke of disaffection and dissatisfaction, and it sounded dangerous, loud, and nasty. The tools were big amps and electric guitars. The job was to get ideas across to people-teach them and wake them up. “Big tools for a big job,” is how Pete Townshend of the Who described his gear. You can also make people think twice before taking a shot at you with a beer bottle or a glob of spit. You can command a lot of attention with 120 decibels of sonic fury. In punk, volume is both a weapon of aggression and a tool of protection. Duh, right? So let’s examine the gear used by the three primary exponents of punk music in its first days-the Ramones, the Sex Pistols, and the Clash-to see how they used it to wake up a generation. At least it started that way, but almost as soon it began to change, grow, and expand. Punk was the antithesis of the hippie music that preceded it. The primary vehicle of punk expression was music. The music, the look, and the attitude of the punk movement that took place in the US and UK in the “Me Decade” had a huge impact on music and culture across the globe. It was a reflection of hard times, boring places, and frustrated ambitions. It’s the sound of fury, the energy of the disaffected. In the mid 1970s, the sounds of anger and energy collided in what came to be called “punk rock.” Punk-and its genre-spanning reverberations-changed music, and the world.Īnd that’s because punk is energy. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |