Pass Labs

stfoth---exactly correct. How could McCartney have been poor?! He’s by far the richest of The Beatles. But he knew he didn’t have to pay his band well---he could get anyone to play for him, no matter how low the pay, just for the exposure to a mass audience that would result from doing so, to increase one’s visibility, to make a name for oneself. Denny Seiwell came from the L.A. studios (as did his current drummer, the great Abe Laboriel, Jr.) and Jazz clubs, to which he returned after leaving Paul’s employ.

And you too are right, schubert. I should have qualified musicians with the adjectives Rock, Blues, and Country. Jazz and Classical guys are a whole ’nother matter!

Amen, Bill. Musicians eat cheap so they can buy expensive vintage instruments. It’s unfortunate, but a lot of them listen to music on computers these days, and I don’t mean hirez digital streaming. It is because music is SO important to us that we spend what we do on the equipment to reproduce it well in our homes. How good a hi-fi a guy had was at one time a good indicator of how much music meant to him.

Why then do musicians almost universally have terrible hi-fis? 1- They’re poor. In the early 70’s Paul McCartney was paying his drummer in Wings Denny Seiwell $150 a week. 2- Musicians are thinking more about their own music than that of their contemporaries, not listening to recorded music nearly as much as you would think. THAT was done when they were younger, learning how to play. 3- Musician’s don’t expect reproduced sound to even remotely approach live sound. And since few of them have ever heard a really good system (since few of them or their peers have one), they don’t know how much better recorded music can sound through good gear.

Montreal is where Ronnie Hawkins put together, one player at a time, many different incarnations of his backing band, The Hawks. The longest-lived of those was the one that included amongst it’s members Levon Helm, J.R. Robertson, Rick Danko, Richard Manual, and Garth Hudson. Never liking being someone else’s employee, at a certain point Levon suggested they go it alone. And so they did, first as The Canadian Squyers, then Levon & The Hawks, then just The Hawks, working with John Hammond Jr., and ultimately Bob Dylan, as his 1965-66 world tour road band. After a motorcycle accident laid him up, cancelling the next leg of the tour, Dylan brought them up to Woodstock, where he lived.

There they found themselves a split-level rental-house with a basement in which to set-up, rehearse, and record. They spent 1967 doing all that, the recordings end up being called The Basement Tapes. Capitol Records offered The Hawks a record contract, and they spent late ’67/early ’68 recording their debut album in NYC and Los Angeles. They were also working on coming up with a new band name, The Hawks not sounding very contemporary. The were surprised when they saw the test pressings for the album, emblazened with a name someone else came up with, The Band.

The release of that album, Music From Big Pink, absolutely rocked the music world, actually changing it’s trajectory. Eric Clapton heard it, said to himself, and I quote: "Music had been going in the wrong direction for a long time. When I heard it (MFBP), I thought to myself "Well, someone’s finally gone and done it right." He disbanded Cream, perhaps the biggest band in the world, going to Woodstock to hang with The Band, waiting, as he now laughs, for them to ask him to join. It eventually dawned on him they didn’t need him, so he went looking for someone to play "real" music with, as a hired gun. He joined Delaney & Bonnie’s band, where he met all the guys he ended up picking to be in his subsequent band, Derek & The Dominoes.

It’s so funny that the whole "Americana" movement is traced back to the recording of those basement tapes, music played by a band containing four Canadians---Levon Helm is from Chicken Scratch (seriously!) Arkansas, Dylan from of course Hibbing Minnesota.

A Pass amp, or any other great piece of gear you can name, would be nice to have to listen to Music From Big Pink through, but listening to it, really listening to it, is what it takes to "get it". Getting it can be done through a boombox, it just takes a little more work!

Actually Charles, it really began with Roosevelt’s New Deal, which was a massive undertaking, at great cost, to save the U.S. from the great Depression. Republicans/Conservatives have been trying to erase it since the 1950’s!

tubegroover, my sister had a husband (now deceased) who was blind, the result of at a young age picking up a blasting cap on the farm he grew up on in Oregon. On one drive into Portland my sister commented on some new bike lanes which had been installed on some streets (bikes are huge in Portland--odd with all the rain), which outraged him. "Why should I have to pay for them?" was his comment, for the obvious reason. I was tempted to ask him why other taxpayers should have to pay for the public High School his 20-year old was still going to. The kid was on his third try at making it through his senior year. The husband was a very loud, argumentative, opinionated watcher of a certain cable TV news station (I better not name it---might ruffle the censor’s feathers). There was no such thing as a civil discussion with the guy. Don’t miss him at all, especially as was also not nice to my sister.

I agree tubegroover, Audiogon should be a politics-free zone. I myself would not start such a discussion, but once it’s going.....

My use of the term Trumpster was a while back, not in this thread. Yes, the term is disrespectful---I do believe he has earned it. Ask anyone who lives in New York! At any rate, I shall refrain from engaging in any such discussion in the future, no matter how provoked. I did find it odd that someone apparently so enamored of Reagan would not know how to spell his name!

Au contraire Schubert, I have been paying attention, and I was indeed speaking of the U.S. as a country. We all know the rich have been getting richer and the poor poorer since Reagan instituted his failed trickle-down economic policies. Even the guy who came up with the idea has disavowed it as an economic theory proven wrong. Yet, here we are back again, with the Trumpster intending to do the same.

I asked "are we still?" because I’ve seen the stats from around the world. Swedes are a pretty contented bunch, even with their very high taxes. At least they get something for them! My sisters daughter lives in Germany, married to a German, and they too are happy with their system. I don’t know many Americans who are; in a few decades our educational system has become the joke of the world, our health care system is a mess, we are falling behind in moving into a future-based economy---Coal? Are you kidding me?!

Thank God for music---it makes all the rest bearable. To hear it in our homes, we need hi-fi equipment. Sorry for your plight starving peoples, but my going without music is not going to change your situation. Besides, my system is far more modest than most of ya’lls---I’m a "starving" musician ;-). The only Pass piece I have is the $1500 (list) First Watt B4 x/o.