30 Years Ago, Interesting Comments About And By PRS

[Eichaan]

In my latest post in my blog series "Thirty Years Ago in Guitar Player", Ted Nugent expounds at length about his new PRS guitars and why they were so great. The article also includes an interesting quote from PRSh about Ted's gear.

Check it out and more, including musings on gear from Andy Brauer and articles on Martin Barre and Frank Gambale at: https://icarusanybody.blogspot.com/2018/06/my-back-pages-thirty-years-ago-in_17.html

 

[gush]

Very cool

 

[Eichaan]

Thanks, Gush!

 

[sergiodeblanc]

Somehow I think Uncle Teddly’s comment about always having lots of miniskirts in the studio is different than what I’d mean.

 

[markd21]

Cool!

The Nugent snippet was fun - I chuckled when he mentioned the "Paul Rivera stereo tube amplifier". I have been using one of those since 1990, and he's right....the tone IS rich, thick and creamy!!

Thanks for sharing - it was an all around enjoyable read!

 

[Eichaan]

Glad you liked it Mark! And how cool is it that you confirmed the gear evaluation? Lots of great experience on this forum for sure.

 

[alantig]

Cool read. Aside from repeating some of the Nugent comments from above, I loved the comment about the TGP thread about Guitar Player, and the "Put Martin Barre on the cover and I'll subscribe" comment. I wonder how many hours the editors spent debating, "Gee, we can get this one guy's subscription, or...we can slap Slash on the cover again and sell an extra thousand newsstand copies". I mean, I get it - I get kind of tired of seeing the same faces on the covers (I used to joke that Guitar World only needed to work on six covers a year - the other six were two EVH, two Dimebag, and two Hendrix). There are a ton of guys I think are deserving of the recognition and the exposure, but let's be real, they probably wouldn't sell issues and that's what the magazines are supposed to do.

 

[Eichaan]

Thanks for reading, Alan--I'm glad you liked it. I agree with you about the cover artists. That's one of the things that changed the most over the years. If you look at the cover artists from March 1987 through June 1988 (the issues I've written about on the blog so far), the diversity is pretty striking:

https://icarusanybody.blogspot.com/2017/07/30-years-ago-index.html

There are "classic rockers" like Joe Walsh, Lynyrd Skynyrd and George Harrison and Chuck Berry, "new" artists like Gambale and Satriani and Eddie Van Halen, but also several that I can't believe had great newsstand appeal (Robert Cray, John Scofield, the quartet of Canadians from July 1987). And three of their covers had no artists at all.

It will be interesting to see when and how that begins to change, and if there are other editorial changes that appear at the same time.

 

[jxe]

great series.

“So, at this point the only two rock legends I can think of who never did drugs are Ted Nugent and Bruce Springsteen.“

 

[Eichaan]

Thanks, JXE, I appreciate it. And I didn't know that about Frank--pretty cool. He must have been the only straight person in Laurel Canyon, that's for sure!

 

[Alnus Rubra]

Great thread! This is a real trip down memory lane!

Crest of a Knave was an album of my mis-spent youth. This track was my introduction to Tull -

The genre went from folk to prog rock and I was hooked! Barre’s full tone of what I have always felt was an HB tone and what a tone!

My introduction to Frank Gambale was that very video. Played at a friends house. All the guys were mystified with his scales and those “extra notes”. This would have been circa ‘91, I remember it vividly because it was after a jam night at a local pub and suddenly one of the guys put on the news and that was Gulf War 1 starting.

 

[Eichaan]

Thanks, Alnus--I'm glad you liked it. Like I said, my introduction to Frank Gambale was through my teacher, who was amazing at sweep picking (he learned it from Frank at GIT). I can still remember watching his left and right hands seeming to move at different speeds while he played blazingly fluid licks.

 

[Alnus Rubra]

The combination of Anderson (Fifer - Scottish) and Barre (Glaswegian) was always something special to me!

Anderson is famously quoted as saying (similar to) -

“I’m the guy who will be sitting at your local bar, just don’t expect me to buy you a drink”

 

[jxe]

barre came by my guitar shop in the late 80s, after he left one of the salesmen told me who he was.

 

[Alnus Rubra]

He and Iain had a very similar look in the ‘70’s!

 

[BMiller]

I had a copy of that issue many years ago. When I first started playing guitar, a neighbor across the street gave me crates of guitar mags. He was a bassist in a popular cover band in town....had a nice studio in his basement as well. This would have been '91 or '92. Gambale, while not a huge favorite of mine, did have an influence on me.....such as "listen to the horns". Given that I played trombone in school, I had access to all all sorts of sheet music, a great director, and loaner instruments. I used to transpose all sorts of things for warm up exercises and technique building.

Thanks for posting this and I look forward to seeing next months installment!

 

[jxe]

all i remember is he was quiet and his cuffs were tucked into his boots.

 

[ScottR]

Very good read! Thanks for posting! Quite a flashback for sure!

 

[Eichaan]

Thanks for reading!