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This should be interesting.
A million years ago (1971), back in the ‘shire, I fooled around in the music business firstly plying my trade as a crazy DJ. Thanks dad. I traded under the name ‘Jungle Jerry’ and for some reason wore a gorilla mask for some of the act. Back then we still had records to carry around and used enormous amounts of Watkins Electric Music (WEM) speakers; WEM, HH transistor & Carlsboro valve amps. A full transit van held a very heavy imperial ton of equipment which we carried into every gig. We pumped out a massive 600 watts of sound through 5 pairs of large speakers. (At this time the ‘Isle of Wight Festival’ was using 5,000 watts of WEM gear and we were using 10% of this power for a mobile ‘disco’.)
You don’t want to know about the lights, but we made our own using plywood, the large covers from industrial strip lights and plastic sheeting supposedly for lining showers. I think Kam and others produce very similar products now.
Some of you will remember WEM ‘Super Dual 12’s’ and ‘Vendettas’, used by ‘the Floyd’, pictured right, and the home made dual record deck consoles that were way too big to make any sense. I was even involved in the ‘Northern Soul’ scene; I still have a large collection of very individual Northern songs, although I can not remember the name I used then. Played every ‘punk’ recording I could get my hands on to ‘Young Farmers’ discos in barns. And played YMCA and Donna Summer to everyone in a 200 mile radius. Sorry. (Bootsy was cool tho’)
During this time some of my friends started to play in bands and a couple of Wem speakers, microphone and an amp were idea for a rehearsal. Very soon we took the gear to gigs and a little pa business was born. Trouble was I didn’t know that was what I was doing.
Proper PA gear, to me, was a world away. So we just used what we had.
I had seen a Wem Audiomaster 5 (on the bonnet of the truck) channel mixer from a distance, but my DJ mixer had, with a little modification, the same amount of channels so we used that. Seemed we could find a few microphones and some stands; put the mixer on the side of the stage and really let let go with 200 watts in town & church halls all over the place.
To be continued....
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