Guitar Archeology

In the 70’s the Gibson guitars artist relations office was operated out of Buck Munger’s home basement recording studio in northeast Portland, Oregon. When the first half-inch video cameras hit the market Buck grabbed one and started shooting low key back stage interviews with Gibson artists directed at the plant workers and field reps to boost morale and increase sales. This is an intro to the first Artist Relations field tape. Buck introduces a trashed Les Paul given to him backstage by Pete Townshend. The guitar was destroyed by Pete because he discovered it had a faulty neck. When he became convinced that something was wrong he bashed it against the wall and indeed the center core of the neck was rotted. So he told Alan Rogan the roadie to save it for that guy from Gibson. In this video Buck also touts the Bo Diddley “Mark Series” model acoustic. In truth, at the time, the Mark Series acoustics were the first costly boondoggle by Gibson’s new owners the Norlin Corporation, having spent thousands to develop a whole new bridge concept outside the Gibson design team. Unfortunately, also outside the design team they added a plastic ring around the guitar’s sound hole, which instantly turned off the players and killed sales. Munger picked up the little square guitar in the office of Gibson’s Kalamazoo plant while visiting the factory with John Entwistle of the Who. After walking through the factory collecting instruments Entwistle were invited into Carl’s office. A row of unfinished prototype instruments lined the wall. One instrument stood out. A little square guitar with the new Mark Series bridge. What in the heck is this. “Oh that, says Carl. The New York Norlin guys discovered Ovation guitars (with a plastic back) and they instructed us to build them a prototype so they could evaluate the acoustical properties of plastic.” “I could see Carl was not comfortable telling this story, says Buck, these were his corporate bosses he was talking about and I was the corporate Artist Relations guy.” “Carl said he looked all over for something plastic like the back of a guitar and all he could come up with was this refrigerator vegetable drawer.” So the Gibson craftsmen, who had established the baseline for excellence in the guitar building business were forced to build a guitar on a refrigerator drawer. “I asked for it, and after all the Entwistle freebies I guess Carl was glad to get rid of it.”

WATCH THE VIDEO HERE

Buck Munger w/ Pete Townshend\’s Guitar 1975

HOUSTON FEARLESS

I was now living the Large life. Handling talent, hanging with popstars and having my phone calls returned. My associations with Hendrix and the Who generated a multitude of opportunities to roll the musical dice and I knew I’d never get a better place at the table. With producers like Dave Hassinger (Stones), Terry Melc…her (Byrds) and Charlie Greene (Springfield) in and out of the Sunn office I had a variety of role models: Hassinger, the engineer, Doris Day’s golden son Terry and Charlie Greene, king of the street. Charlie was still basking in the glow of the Iron Butterfly, which had ushered in a whole new bag and generated so many sales that the RIAA had to create a new album award, called a “Platinum” record. Labels were throwing money at Charlie for acts and he was scrambling to find talent to fill the demand. The current LA Sunn demo band was a strong four-piece of nice young kids. Lead guitar, bass, drums and screaming Hammond B-3. (Vanilla Fudge meets the Grateful Dead). Bob Wall, the guitarist, sang lead and wrote most of the material, Harley Baker the organist was the volume hog, wild man, Joel Krasomil was Entwistle-steady and the band’s glue and the drummer Bill Combest played hard and looked exactly like Paul McCartney. Another set of Sinatra-lawyer management contracts and I was back in business. I shopped them to Charlie Greene who got them an album deal with Imperial. I would produce the album for Charlie’s York-Pala Productions in exchange for publishing. For the single we would cover a UK hit, “Race With The Devil.” I changed the named of the band to Houston Fearless, which came from a movie camera tripod manufacturer in west LA located right across the street from the Warehouse 9. Every night when I left the club with the Stillwaters, and drove past the sign, I thought what a great name for a band. Sunn had big plans for Houston Fearless. I reached out to the Hammond organ and Slingerland drum companies, pitched them my program and got them to agree to an endorsement deal with advertising, and tour support. A free organ and three sets of drums, and more importantly, two national advertising campaigns.

I was back in The Game. Norm and Con Sundholm had asked me if I could use my “extensive contacts” in the music business to get their Sunn clinician a record deal. Buddy Fite was a Portland jazz guitarist that had been demonstrating Sunn amplifiers for a while and created a sensation at the ’67 NAMM Show in Chicago when h…e strung his guitar with two bass strings and four guitar strings and played both parts at once. Les Paul came over from the Gibson booth with his entourage and sat-in for an hour, and then spent the next two days steering people to the Sunn booth. Jazz wasn’t really my bag, but with my new friend Howard Roberts, who co-incidentally, was a big hero of Buddy’s, I thought I would broaden my game. Buddy arrived in Hollywood with neatly trimmed hair, wing-tips and a business suit. You’d never guess he had been an active member of the Hell’s Angels. He had some great stories and became an instant favorite in the office. After signing my Sinatra-lawyer management contracts, we went into the studio to cut a demo. We also recorded Buddy’s two bass, four guitar-string solo. Back in the office, the stunt solo got most of the attention. Our next-door neighbor on the fourth floor was Robert Mersey, an old school producer at Columbia and one of the first to go independent. He now produced Barbra Streisand, Aretha Franklin and Johnny Mathis and was setting up his own label. Our two offices shared a wall and we listened in on each other’s playback. I knew he was looking for a guitar player for Johnny Mathis, so I sent him Buddy’s tape and his reaction was positive, but he was skeptical about one person playing both parts simultaneously, so I invited him down the hall to see Buddy play it live. We had a deal before he left the office.

The WHO Sunn Advert

I was spending a lot of time with the Who. Of all Sunn’s acts, Pete and the lads worked hardest to promote the Sundholm brother’s little Oregon amplifier company. Before and after tours, the lads would set up camp at the Continental Hyatt House out on the Sunset Strip-shortly thereafter to be known forever as the Contine…ntal “Riot” House. When the Who were in town whole floors of the hotel would be set aside for the band and entourage. The hallways smelled funny and were jammed with beautiful Mods, Rockers and Flower People. We recorded some radio commercials with Pete & John marveling at the fact “even the Who” couldn’t destroy Sunn Amplifiers. It was true. The gear held up, and John Entwistle for one, thought it produced the best bass sound ever. I was getting closer to John, both through herding Keith and talking careers in the music business. There was a seismic power-shift taking place in the music industry at that time. Recording artists suddenly discovered all the real money was in music publishing and administering their own copyrights. All you needed was a file cabinet. John was a writer pushing to get the band to do his songs. John’s composition “Boris The Spider” was the most popular song with American audiences on the first tour. John knew there had to be room for more Entwistle tunes on the Who’s set list. John also knew of my independent producer aspirations and fed me tips on label changes and new talent. He pitched me songs and suggested names for my acts and told me the story about how he and Moon had been approached by Jimmy Page, when the Yardbirds broke up, and Page wanted John & Keith to leave the Who and join him and Jeff Beck in a new band. John said he and Keith talked about it and came to the conclusion it would go over “like a Led Zeppelin”, a name so catchy, Jimmy Page decided to keep it. The infrequent casual conversations with Jimi Hendrix had also became more and more about the music industry, how it operated and where does all that money go, anyway? Jimi was not a happy camper about his business dealings, and he didn’t try and keep it a secret.

I got off the plane in Nashville looking for my guide, Earl Owens. After all the emphasis on Hendrix, the Who and Cream, the marketing department decided Sunn could use some exposure in Country music. Through a dealer in Nashville, Charlie Louvin, who owned a unit, expressed an interest in an endorsement agreement. Charlie had been a member of the Grand Ol’ Opry since 1955 and a hit recording act with his brother Ira, as the Louvin Brothers, on over a dozen Capitol albums. Ira had been killed three years before in an automobile accident and Charlie was building a solo career touring through the Opry circuits in the south and midwest. It was a rainy Friday night in Nashville and as we were driving in from the airport, the Grand Ol’ Opry came on the air. Earl Owens, Charlie Louvin’s manager, dialed WSM in on the radio, as we drove toward the Ryman Auditorium. “Charlie might be comin’ on any minute here,” and sure enough there was Charlie Louvin loud and clear on the radio, “Howdy ya’ll, some band introductions and then, “And I’d like to welcome Buck Munger to Nashville from the Sunn Amplifier Company up in Oregon.” It was a real shock to hear my name over a car radio on the Grand Ol’ Opry. Earl smiled. These guys really knew how to promote. My tour of the Ryman Auditorium and backstage look at the Grand Ol’ Opry was illuminating. This was a live radio show with a cast of many. You had to know when you were on, and nail it when you got there. There were no retakes. The audience was exuberant. The parking lot was filled with out of state license plates. I could see a dozen musicians mingling around in the wings, but unlike any major rock-n-roll concert I had ever attended, I detected absolutely no stress in either the artists or the crew. Every rock performance had backstage high drama about something but not here. These people were complete professionals. I enjoyed my few days in Nashville. Earl Owens steered me from dawn to dawn and on my last night got me called up on stage to sit-in on drums. These guys really knew how to promote. In the morning, as we ate breakfast in the airport, Earl said he had a present for me from “The Sheriff”, who knew of my stint with the Phoenix PD. He produced a .38 snub-nosed Smith & Wesson, a box of shells and a State of Tennessee Deputy Sheriff’s badge. “You are duly sworn,” he said. “Oh, and here, try these, they’re what all the bus drivers use to stay awake,” as he handed me a plastic bottle described only as “uppers”. Because this was 1968, I had no trouble flying back to LA with the gun, badge and uppers in my briefcase.

The Louvin Brothers Video here;

The Louvin Brothers

I was having trouble keeping all the Sunn artists happy. The relationship with the Jimi Hendrix Experience was up and down. Noel Redding loved his Sunn gear and rarely missed a chance to talk it up in the music press. Jimi however was up and down. Giving Sunn one of the biggest engineering tips in its history, he informe…d them that the Coliseum PA head, at 120 watts RMS was a better guitar amplifier than the 100S at 60 watts RMS. There was a lot of confusion about power ratings about this time because the English marketed their amplifiers using Peak Power ratings whereas American manufacturers used RMS Power ratings. So, a British amp that was rated at 200 watts might actually be less powerful than an American amp at 60 watts. The 60 watt Sunn amps had a peak power of 250 watts. Unfortunately, most players couldn’t get their heads around this problem and approached it by simply opening it up all the way to see how loud it was. Sunn took Jimi seriously and introduced a 1000S guitar amp and a 2000S bass amp, both essentially revamped Coliseum power heads. The Sunn engineers also tried to outsmart Jimi with a little internal tweaking. As noted, Jimi turned the volume all the way up to ten to play. When the engineers did this at the factory it was like fingernails across a very loud blackboard. They heard the thing audio engineers loathe most; noise. How could Hendrix stand all that distortion? They solved the problem by adjusting the volume knob to read 10 when the amp was only really at 8, which, is about where the distortion started. To the engineers this was brilliant. Jimi could twist that knob wide-open to 10 and the unit would deliver a cleaner, more acceptable sound. I was there when Jimi got his new 1000S set-up. It took him about 30 seconds to figure out what was happening. Cleaner was not what Jimi was looking for. Note to the factory: “distortion” is no longer a bad word. This incident was reported extensively in Guitar Player magazine and reprinted in the liner notes of The Essential Jimi Hendrix. As it says in the liner notes: “Soon thereafter, Jimi went back to Marshalls”. And Spinal Tap turned it up to eleven.

Howard Roberts

I met some interesting people passing through the Sunn office. Our policy of free amplifier loaners to professionals drew a wide variety of players including guitar giant, Howard Roberts. HR was already legendary in the Hollywood music business. Born in Phoenix, he started playing professionally at 15 and moved to Los An…geles at 20. A couple of years later Downbeat named him “Jazz Newcomer Star of The Year” and shortly thereafter he left the clubs and moved into Hollywood’s recording studios to help usher in Rock-n-Roll. HR played on Ricky Nelson’s “Bee-Bop Baby”, Eddie Cochran’s “Sittin’ In The Balcony” and Peggy Lee’s “Fever” He played the iconic opening notes to “The Twilight Zone” television theme and did albums with Chet Atkins and Duane Eddy. He had Top 20 hits with Elvis, Pat Boone, Bobby Darin, Dean Martin, Bobby Vee, Larry Williams, Gene McDaniels and a dozen others. He became the first-call guy for rock guitar in movies and TV and was a regular on the recordings of the Beachboys and the Monkees. He also had his own career as a Jazz Guitarist with four albums on Verve and nine on Capitol by the time he showed up in the Sunn office. Howard’s interest extended way past borrowing an amp. HR thought the only thing Sunn didn’t have in the line, was a small studio amp, and he had an innovative design that involved interchangeable equalizer modules. He and one of his students, Ron Benson, had built several dozen for HR’s studio contacts. Howard was also helping a friend up in Los Gatos named Bud Eastman start the first magazine specifically for guitarists called “Guitar Player”. Eastman joked that people asked “what are you going to write about after the first issue?” Howard also had an idea for a trade-school for professional guitarists that grew out of his seminars. He was working on that with another student of his named Pat Hicks. This was an active time in Howard’s career. He was tired of grinding out elevator-music jazz albums for Capitol and dazzled by my stories of the average album front-money deal for this new wave of guitar stars. Howard was ready to make his move. I’ll have to admit I was a little stunned when he asked me, would I consider being his personal manager?

Buck Munger

Billy Gibbons (white shirt-center) opens for Jimi

I spent the next few months bouncing around the country with the Who and the Jimi Hendrix Experience while Pete and Sheila ran the new Sunn offices on the corner of Sunset & Vine. The location quickly became a popular destination for local and touring acts. Neil Young was back in the Buffalo Springfield and now sporting …an all Sunn backline. Bands from the UK chose LA as the beachhead of the invasion and Hollywood was quickly becoming British territory. Headquarters for many was the Continental Hyatt (Riot) House on Sunset. Jimi Hendrix was still waiting for his 12” speaker cabinets and in the meantime had taken the horns out of the top of the 100S speaker cabinets. You couldn’t see the difference through the grille cloth and each night he’d ram his guitar into the empty hole. With the feedback and theatrics it looked like he was reaming the loudspeaker. The next night, new grille-cloth, new amplifier. About this time Jimi introduced me to a young guitar player from Texas that had opened for him and made a big impression. Jimi wanted to give several of his older Sunn units to the Moving Sidewalks guitarist Billy Gibbons. No problem. I noticed, the reports of Jimi trashing his gear didn’t go down well with Pete Townshend at all. By the time the Who landed in Los Angeles we were tight and I was excited to show them around. John Entwistle was amazed at the fruit salad at the Room At The Top and Keith Moon loved ordering beer down to the office, so we could close the inner door and do phone pranks. Pete Townshend kept urging me to cover his songs with American acts. The band bonded with everybody in the Sunn office. Peter Burke even volunteered his credit card when Wallach’s Music City wouldn’t take a check from Townshend for a new Les Paul.