Steve Greenfield (on upgrading): What I did was I upgraded. I found a Sears Silvertone amp. When I found it it had been modified. It had a couple of bad speakers in it. I also got rid of the Teisco and purchased a Fender Mustang.
   (later on) By that time I probably still had the Mustang, but in addition somewhere about ’71 I put some money down on a Kent 12 string from a music store that was on the corner of 8th and Greene. I was able to trade that to a guy for a Les Paul. It wasn’t too long after that I got a Stratocaster. I went to an Aims amplifier. The designers were from Arizona and had worked at Fender. So it was basically a Fender amplifer. I bought two 15" JBLs from Sounds Inc. in a cabinet, sawed the cabinet up into two cabinets and made a stack.
   (on PA during Liberty) (We used) a Shure Vocalmaster. I do remember that. I don’t remember exactly how we got it–if we rented it from Sounds Inc. or what. Or if we even plugged microphones into guitar amps.
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Mark Ohlson (on upgrading): I had a Kent snare drum, a wood block and a cowbell and two of my grandpa’s pre–1900 Zildjans. That elevated into the Kent snare becoming the floor tom. I mowed yards one year when I was in 3rd grade and got a tiny 16 inch kick drum, eight inch tom and a ten inch snare drum. They were Whitehalls; a name which then became Pearl. Extremely cheesy Chinese drums, white pearl (finish). That was the Spazz and the Electric Circus kit in the beginning. Then I traded it off for the Apollo (kit); the red with black tiger stripes. That was a Christmas morning glee. Then I traded those of for the Ludwig Rock Duo; the sparkling pink champagne kit I had for 10 years.
From my own experience, my upgrade path seemed torturous. I started with a Kent guitar and 15 watt amp combo that cost around $120. My dad bought it for me and I paid him back out of my paper route money–two bucks a week. Even with this gear I was struggling to keep up with a Kalamazoo Bass 30–with 30 watts–and a small, but loud, Gibson amp. After our lead guitarist bought an Heathkit amp modeled after a Fender Twin with 75 watts of power, I was definately under powered. On a trip to Ames, I found a Magnatone M7 amp for $75 which seemed to be what I needed. It was a bass amp and probably put out 30 watts or so. This set up lasted until I got into my next band.
   In Road I was up against a Fender Twin, a Vox Westminister and a Kustom PA. I was barely holding my own again. I added a speaker out to the Magnatone figuring more speakers would be louder. They weren’t. I purchased an Electro-Harmonix LPB–1 which came in amp or instrument plug in versions and promised up to a 10 fold increase in volume. This helped me barely hold my own. My gear remained unchanged until the next band.
   In Camel I was facing a Fender Twin, an Acoustic 360 and that same old Kustom PA and I was still just keeping my head above water. Finally a break came when a friend of mine knew of a friend wanting to sell an amp. It was a Fender Dual Showman and I jumped on it for $250. It was an amp head–around 75 watts– and a speaker cabinet with two 15 inch JBL D103F speakers. Now I finally had the power to keep up with the other guys in the group.
The evolution of the PA in these early days was interesting. I touched on this somewhat previously. At first we all just plugged mics into our guitar and bass amps and everything was fine. Sure it pushed our amplifiers to their limits, but the thought of buying a dedicated PA system was almost out of the question. One reason was that proper sound reinforcement systems were pretty much nonexistent in the early to mid 60s. What was available was not designed for relatively loud rock bands. Public address was designed more for just that—making speeches addressing the public. Filling a gym or an outdoor venue was not too much trouble for these systems as there was not much other noise to compete with—at least not the kind of sound pressure levels created by two guitars, bass and drums.
   As an example of what was available, in Shure’s 1968 catalog for microphones tailored for public address and tape recording all that they had available were two mixers—the M68 with 4 mic inputs and aux input and the M67 with 3 mic inputs and a mic/line input—the power amp was left up to the user. There were no tone shaping controls, input trims, inserts or effects loops like today. What was very common in powered mixers in this part of the state were the Bogen PA amps. These usually had 3 or 4 mic inputs and a line or phono input. There was a tone control that was much like the tone control on a simple hi–fi set which swept from bass to treble. There were volume controls for each input with one being a combination of line and phono—turned to the left it increased the line level, to the right it increased the phono level—and a master volume control. One of these amps can be seen in the Telstars picture in the band section. It’s just behind Al’s left shoulder sitting in front of the drum riser. (Al is the one with the white Fender Stratocaster at the microphone on the far right.)
   In the Boone area these amps were fairly common due to the fact that the local music store, Sounds Inc., sold PA systems with the Bogen amps as the centerpiece. Bob Graybill—the stores owner—and Bub Harper—an employee—built speaker columns to go with the amp. They covered the cabinets with a black tolex and offered two different colors of grille cloth–a red/orange fabric and a green/blue fabric. The cabinets each had 4 Jensen Concert Series 12" speakers and could be wired together using the parallel jacks on the back of the cabinet. Bob wisely figured out that there was a need for this kind of system by all the new combos that were forming and playing out. He offered a flexible set up. A band had their choice of two different size amps in terms of power output and could buy as many speakers as was affordable and add more as more money became available. The typical system was a 35 watt Bogen with two cabinets.
   Vox had a PA amp that was introduced around 1967 called the Churchill. It was a solid state head with five mic inputs and one labeled “music”. There were six volume controls along with separate bass, treble and reverb level controls. The amp had a feedback cancellation control also. There were switches for each input to select between “normal”—for singing—and “speech”. These switches put a filter in line that provided a boost in the midrange more than likely in the normal setting and left the output set “flat” for speech. The amp was set up to handle up to four speaker cabinets at a variety of impedances. There was also an output for a booster amp. The speaker cabinets that Vox offered to go with the Churchill were the Grenadier speakers. Available with 4 ten inch or 4 twelve inch speakers, the Grenadier had a built in stand with the Grenadier 12 offering an input for Vox’s “treble booster horn”.
   Sunn had a sound system package in 1967 which consisted of two speaker cabinets containing a JBL LE 100S driver and a JBL 15" speaker, a Studio PA amp and a pair of 30' speaker cables all for $1395–mighty pricey for a garage band.
   By 1968 many manufacturers like Kustom and Ovation were offering some kind of PA system along with their guitar, bass and keyboard amps. Shure introduced the Vocalmaster in late 1968 which was considered to be a premier system. Most all of these systems could handle 4 microphones and had reverb usually built into the amp. They all came with at least 2 speaker cabinets and were expensive compared to the investment the individal players had made in their equipment.
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