Rickresource Rickenbacker Forum

And his Rick...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DT7MNwx4el0&NR=1

Yeah, you can't play lead on a Rickenbacker, especially one with toasters!

Great video, Eric!

BTW, that Les Paul Bass sounds great, too.

Anyone else notice how many of the classic and really good songs were made on Ricks? I'm continually amazed how many times since I joined here I find out songs I really liked and artists I held/hold dear were playing Rickenbacker instruments. Yes, I always knew JF used a Rick.... this thought occured to me as I watched, though.

Back in the day, JF actually used a 325 - DEFINITELY not a guitar you'd associate with lead playing!

Anyone else notice how many of the classic and really good songs were made on Ricks? I'm continually amazed how many times since I joined here I find out songs I really liked and artists I held/hold dear were playing Rickenbacker instruments....

This has slowly started to dawn on me, too. And you know what the funny thing is? No one around here plays them. And just the other week end, I heard a local group do a Beatles tribute set, and never was a Rickenbacker played at all. Sure was missing, indeed.

JimK

I have thoughts on this.

- What's up with the end of the first solo? He takes his hand of the Bigsby but the sound still goes wow-wow-wow-wow for a second. They get sloppy in post?

- Is that Kenny Arnoff? And if so, when did he start playing like Keith Moon?

I thought Fogerty played an "Acme", you know the same outfit that made all of that stuff for Will E. Cayote...

It’s spelled Kenny Aronoff and yes that sure looks like him. (The bald head and gloves kind of give him away.)

Aronoff, btw, is the center of one of the (many) Jefferson Airplane controversies when he was selected to play on the JA’s ’89 reunion tour instead of (the late) Spencer Dryden.

Other Airplane connection in the clip –
The bassist is playing an Epiphone Jack Casady model bass.

It is Kenny Aronoff.

He's good. It comes as no surprise that JA chose him over a corpse to play on the '89 tour.

Needless to say, Spencer (unlike Franco) was not dead in 1989. At least not in any legal sense.
There are several theories as to why he was not invited for the reunion (which I will not bore you with ... unless asked).
The inclusion of "the late" reference was an attempt at respect for one of the greatest musicians who ever lived.
And a nephew of Charlie Chaplin, by the way.

My mistake Mark, I thought you just worded it really oddly.

No problem John.

Sorry we couldn't meet up at MARF II.

"The bassist is playing an Epiphone Jack Casady model bass."

I think that is a real Gibson LP Bass, unless that video was shot after the Epi was introduced.

Jeffrey, you could very well be correct. Should teach me not to watch videos at work and not to jump to conclusions.

I've never actually seen a Gibson LP bass that didn't look like the same basic shape as a Les Paul guitar. (In fact I used to own a LP bass.)

The one in the video is missing the Epi symbol and seems to be missing the impedance dial that Jack's bass has. (Whatever it is, he's getting a nice tone out of it.)

Jack himself admits that he based his instrument on the Gibson in this interview:

While living in New York about 1986 I walked into a little music store next to the Chelsea Hotel and I saw the Gibson Les Paul Signature bass in there and I had never seen it before. I bought the bass and what I liked about it was it had a full scale neck plus one really nice pickup in the center of the speaking length of the strings and it was low impedance. One of the things we used to do back in the '60s, I took all the Guild basses and turned them into low impedance basses to get a smoother tone. Of course Les Paul is a big fan of low impedance for that very reason, the tone opens up and it is a very clear melodic tone. I believe the only reason the low impedance didn’t catch on with a lot of people is just because it is a low output. People I think like the illusion of a higher output guitar yet that is what an amplifier is for. That’s where you can get your volume.

I understand you had some hands on development in the design of the Epiphone.

After playing the Gibson version for a number of years I did some investigation and really liked it but thought the pick up was muddy. My sound engineers were always coming up and saying, "In live performances, I can’t distinguish the tone. It’s OK in a room but as soon as other people start playing around the tone sort of dissipates." So I wrote to Gibson and approached them about getting a Jack Casady signature bass based on the general premise of the ’72 Gibson. I talked with Jim Rosenberg at Epiphone who was so helpful and enthusiastic for me. We kept our dialogue going and I explained what I wanted was a supreme instrument and no limit in addressing the quality construction and the quality that goes into the pickup, pots, and transformer. At that time he said lets go into development. They found the old presses that the original ’72 model Gibson was made from and sent those to be duplicated in Korea and we started working with the prototypes and I have a lot of them upstairs. I worked for a couple years with the prototypes honing in what I wanted and what I wanted to do was start the pickup over from scratch. So I went down to Nashville and spent a couple weeks with J.T. Riboloff, who is an excellent pickup man there, and we basically started with an empty table, spools of wire, and a box of old alnico magnets. We figured out first how to get the sound that was in that pickup.