by Andy Powell
I was not using the Orange gear in the studio, however. I found that I did not need all that volume, and I liked the way my two Concert amps broke up nicely when driven a little harder. In fact, those four ten-inch Jensen speakers in each unit had a really musical tone. Sometimes I’d record with one amp set on full bass and no treble, with the other miked up alongside it with the exact opposite settings on the tone controls—that is to say, full treble and no bass. By combining the close-miked sound from each amp and then carefully placing ambient mikes in the room at a distance, I produced a fat sound that I could solo with or play rhythm parts when overdubbing. Remember, we were not using any overdrive pedals in those days. The tone and feedback had to come from the fingers, the guitar, and the amps.
It would be an understatement to say that we were on the road a lot in the States in the early 70s, first with Ted up to 1974 and later with Laurie. Almost by default we would all gather ever-increasing collections of guitars and basses, and I have to say the quality was always primo. Pretty soon I became the proud owner of a 1959 Korina wood Flying V. This guitar was in mint condition and quite an extraordinary find. I used it on the New England album and, unbelievably, having paid around $2,000 for it—a fortune in those days—would carry it around on the road in its original case. One would never do that now, simply because that guitar, of which only ninety-eight were ever made, in the years 1958 and 1959, would be worth around $250,000! A couple of other 1967-vintage models arrived shortly thereafter. Not many of these had been made either, but they cost less money so I snagged them while I could. One was a tobacco sunburst finish and one was what we called champagne-pink metallic in finish. All these guitars were in excellent condition and had great playability, but none equalled the original model I’d bought at the Orange shop.
In between all of this, Fender guitars would come to our notice, and almost without trying, I had amassed a collection of Stratocasters from virtually every one of the classic years from 1954 through to 1963. My favourite was a 1956 fixed-bridge model in ice-blue metal flake with plenty of mid-range in the pickups and a big old fat neck. It had obviously been a player’s guitar so it had that infused into it, with a nice patina of wear throughout.
Firebirds were also interesting to Ted and me, and at one point we thought we’d like to present ourselves both playing these, along with the similarly shaped Thunderbird bass that Martin was now using. Miles saw me playing my beautiful white Firebird VII, with its three pickups and gold hardware, and freaked out.
‘You can’t stop playing the V!’ he stressed. ‘That’s your image—you are in every music paper around the world playing that instrument!’
Miles was nothing if not market and image-conscious. I sheepishly resigned myself to this executive order—not that it was a hardship. The V suited my style more than any other guitar, and I loved it, so eventually the white Firebird was sold to Stephen Stills, who was known for those instruments himself and already had a goodly collection of them. Fred Renz, a great American friend of mine who had been present during the New England sessions, later coined the phrase, ‘Without the V it cannot be.’ Fred was a good friend of our road manager at the time, Tom Hagan, who also used to work for Stills. The story goes that Steve Stills used to be the Hagans’ lawn boy back in the days when Tom’s mother would hire him to mow the lawn for the family, but now the tables had turned and Tom was working for him.
Steve Stills also bought from me an incredible double-neck, semi-acoustic Gibson from the 50s. It was a mandolin and six-string guitar combination that I loved but that was really more of a collector’s item finished in black lacquer, like a Les Paul Custom, with ivory binding and three ‘Patent Applied For’ humbuckers.
By the end of the 70s, Pauline and I had decided to upgrade to a large country house and found a converted granary and stable block as part of a farm complex. Like a lot of musicians I’d always dreamed of having my own recording studio, and there was initially a happy pooling of resources, during the late-80s Wishbone Ash reunion period, that would see Martin install all his recording equipment there and me finally see this house work as both a family home and a music-production facility. To pay for this great leap forward necessitated the raising of some finances. It came down to this: the studio or the guitar collection. I rationalised selling off most of the guitar collection in the sense that I could not play all the instruments all the time and that unless I was going to run some kind of travelling collection in the way that Steve Howe does these days, many of them would simply have to go.
Rudolf Schenker of Scorpions—a big Flying V fan, along with his brother Michael—bought at least three of my collection of Vs, and I think these can be viewed on his website. Some interesting people turned up through word of mouth to view pieces from the collection. One gentleman, a stonemason whose work took him high up in cathedrals and the like, bought the metal-flake Strat. That one was a real player and I was sorry to let it go. The 1954 model was sold for a lot of money in what I can only describe as an encounter much like a drug deal—or more accurately an arms deal. This person flew in his private airplane to acquire the instrument, meeting me in the countryside on a remote airstrip in the dead of night. He brought along a guitar expert who, after dismantling the instrument and satisfying his boss that it was indeed a 1954 Strat, gave the OK for the handover of a wad of cash, which would in due course go into financing Ivy Lane Farm.
I was already indulging my love of hanging out in woodshops with the likes of a certain Ray Cooper from Berkhamsted in Hertfordshire, who made me a great Strat-style instrument that I’d used to great effect on songs like ‘Underground’ and ‘Open Road’. It had a compressor built into the body and could produce these very modern sounds that were really in tune with the 80s. He built me a fabulous Telecaster-style guitar body using ash wood that had come from the ancient bar top of the Red Lion pub in Berkhamsted, which was being demolished at the time. I’d also had a Flying V-style guitar made for me in the late 70s by Sam Li, who had a workshop in Gerrard Street in Soho’s China Town. Sam was an inscrutable guy who a lot of us pro players would use to repair instruments that had got broken on the road. When this occurred he had a real ability to keep you on edge by saying very little at the inspection, and then for weeks after, until you finally would get to see a perfectly restored instrument. He was the best. He definitely made you feel stupid for allowing an accident to occur to a precious guitar. He was very in-demand, too, so you would have to wait weeks—it didn’t matter who you were.
Years earlier, a Soho violin-case maker made an incredible case for my original Flying V, which I’d use to carry the instrument by hand all over the world. I remember one security guy down south asking me if it was a giant snake catcher. In fact, the guitar itself had actually once been used by me to pin down a human-sized snake—an over-zealous Russian security guard at one of our Leningrad concerts. He was wading into the crowd, beating kids. Both Trevor Bolder and I used our instruments as weapons on that occasion. The V could be useful in more ways than one.
In the 90s I had the great good fortune to meet another private luthier, Kevin Chilcott, who lived with his wife Lyn and their three delightful daughters in Llangeadog, Wales. Kevin was a fan of Wishbone Ash and it turned out that it had been his avowed ambition to make me his version of a Flying V. We met, and I laid out my ideas for how a variation on the theme could be produced, complete with a piezo pickup system, in addition to the regular magnetic pickups, so that I could obtain acoustic guitar sounds from it as well. The first prototype he called ‘Problem Child’, because we’d encountered issues mostly to do with my impractical demands concerning the finish and so on. But finally two other beautiful guitars made from aged Honduras mahogany arrived, and to this day I still play them, keeping one in the States and one in the UK. They have ebony fingerboards and are real workhorses, very solidly built in order to stand up to the rigours of the road. Several fans of my guitar playing have subsequently had replica instruments of the Andy Powell
series of Vs made by Kevin, and I believe they are all supremely happy with their babies. Sadly, for health reasons Kevin no longer builds instruments, but I’m supremely grateful to him and to Lyn, who aided and abetted all the projects he undertook for me.
Most recently, another in the line of great luthiers that I’ve had the pleasure to work with is Jon Case who, aside from being a fan, is another full-time luthier with an avowed ambition to build a V for me. He has come up with his own version of this concept, the JV1, also featuring this time a Fishman piezo system as opposed to the L.R. Baggs setup on the Chilcott Vs. The tremolo system is a Wilkinson, and the body of the guitar has an incredible layer of buckeye burl wood forming the front of the instrument.
I keep a nucleus of player’s guitars in my arsenal of instruments: the 1952 Buchanan Tele is still integral, and has appeared on pretty much every recording I’ve ever made. It’s an incredible instrument, recently re-fretted by German pickup guru Andreas Kloppmann, who himself rates it as one of the finest Telecasters he’s ever seen. My original 1967 V still makes appearances on recordings, and recently I’ve been working with the Duesenberg company from Hanover, Germany, who make a great line of real rock’n’roll guitars that sound great both in the studio as well as onstage. They feature a similar construction to Gretsch guitars. I owned a great 1959 6120 model once and regretted selling that one. These Duesenbergs have great sounding pickups along the same lines as those found in the early Gretsches.
Every guitar player should own at least one Fender Stratocaster. It was the electric guitar that first inspired me. I have a $400 Jimmie Vaughan model Mexican Strat that is an excellent value-for-money modern instrument, not too dissimilar to the original 1954 model I once owned. And, just for good luck, I purchased, at over £4,000, a Fender Custom Shop fifty-year reissue of the 54 Strat. I like it, but I can honestly say that it is no better an instrument than the $400 Mexican Strat.
That’s the way guitar collecting goes. It can be like playing the stock market. If I still had my original collection of instruments from the 70s, it would perhaps be worth a couple of million. But I’ve no real regrets. I’ve had the great pleasure of playing them all, onstage and on record, and that means more to me in real terms than stashing them in cupboards or under beds. Great guitars need to be played. If left idle, they lose their vibrancy—and, I like to think, their soul. The very act of the constant vibration of playing seems to do something to the molecules in the wood itself, realigning them and bringing everything alive, so to speak. And then there is the wear on the fingerboards, the sweat and toil that all adds up to the guitar being your greatest friend. It sounds romantic, but I’ve been so grateful to have my trusty V in hand on some alien festival stage in a foreign country: sometimes I’ll look down on this old friend and see my own fingers dancing across the fret board and—this can be dangerous—wonder at the gift of music and all those years of working the craft, as I’m transported in the middle of a guitar solo. Real guitars do indeed have wings.
CHAPTER 8
DRIVING A WEDGE
(2000–07)
We get a lot of applications from bands asking to open a show when we’re on tour—usually a local act at what to them would be a local venue. In a way, it was a support slot to Deep Purple on one gig back in 1970 that began our career, so we’re always happy to give people a platform if we can—you never know what impact it might have, even in the reduced world of today’s music business.
Sometimes, though, particularly in Germany, where we tour religiously every January and February, we get bands asking to play support for the entire tour. While Mark Birch was still holding down the second-guitar role we had such an application from a band from Finland called The Guitar Slingers. I’d always been aware of guitar players in Scandinavia—a lot of good rock and also a lot of good pop music has emanated from that region over many years, and a lot of good production work as well. Consequently, despite their having one of the corniest names I’d heard, The Guitar Slingers came on the tour. Even weirder than the name, though, was the fact that there only was one guitar in the band, slung by a man called Ben Granfelt.
We were touring Germany quite prudently by then, not wasting any money and not careering around like archetypal rockers. Rebalancing the image, these guys turned up in a Nightliner bus. We were sleeping in nice hotels, possibly even drinking cocoa and snoozing off to the shipping forecast on Radio 4 LW; they were partying on the bus.
Thus we trundled around Germany together, and we all became friends. They were just such a laugh. We had a great time on the road: we got something from them and I think they got something from touring with us. A couple of the guys had previously been in The Leningrad Cowboys, a large-scale band full of Elvis impersonators with huge wigs and winkle-picker shoes. They were a big deal in Finland. Ben had been the guitar player in the Cowboys and, for all the absurdity of their stage personas, he was a really tasty player.
In due course, as I’ve mentioned above, Mark tendered his resignation after I’d dragged him around one too many extreme American tours. He wanted to settle down, and he’d earned his honourable discharge from the Academy of Wishbone Ash. I was mulling over what to do about replacing Mark when it came into my mind that I should give Ben a call:
‘Hey Ben, the guitar slot in Wishbone Ash is vacant—whaddaya think?’
‘Yeah, that would be really great! Count me in!’
There was no hesitation at all. And thus started another phase of the band: the Finnish phase. We’d had an American phase with Roger, Tony, and Mike; we’d reverted back to a British phase with Mark, Bob, and Ray; and now here was a whole other culture. Actually, it was a culture within a culture: Ben would often say, ‘Well, you know, I’m not strictly Finnish. I’m a Swedish Finn.’ You learn something new every day.
On one level, it didn’t matter where he was from. With the advent of the internet, everything really had become global and the great thing about rock’n’roll is that it’s no big deal if you’re working with someone from Tucson, Arizona, or someone from Helsinki, Finland—you’re all plugged into the same influences and the same lifestyle.
When The Guitar Slingers toured with us they’d brought their own soundman, Pete Knuutinen, and we were able to pick Pete up ourselves for odd tours after that. In due course, we would co-opt another Finn into mixing an album, Bona Fide, the first blast of twenty-first-century Ash on record. So while it may have seemed as though there was simply one Finn in the band with three Brits, the change was subtler and deeper than that. I was getting Ben, I was getting a live sound mixer, and I would also be getting a studio sound mixer.
Onstage, for me, it felt totally refreshed. Ben was using Engl amps, from Germany, and getting a much more compressed guitar sound. I never went down that amplification route myself, but it made for an interesting pairing. We would have proximity limiters on the vocal microphone, so we were starting to isolate the stage volume. This was something that all the players in Finland were used to. I realised that while we all shared, as I’ve said, the same rock’n’roll influences, they had ‘learned’ rock music in a different way from those of us in Britain or America. Finland was just about on the touring map in the late 60s and 70s, though it was still fairly exotic and not somewhere you routinely visited. To a great extent, the way the Finns received music from British and American bands was on the radio, whereas we in Britain, certainly, had heard lots more of it live, in clubs and at festivals. That affects how one then goes on to make music. If you’re keenly aware of it in a live context, you’re going to play it really loud. In Finland, and in Scandinavia in general, they can produce what sounds like a very loud sound but in a very controlled manner.
Wishbone Ash suddenly started to up its game because of this Finnish influence and the various technical adjustments that improved our stage sound. I’m sure our fans noticed around this time that something had changed but they probably couldn’t put their finger on what it was. I put a lot of thought into this at the tim
e. Suddenly, to coin a phrase, we were a Finnish product.
Having made the connection with Uncle Barry at HTD we now had an album deal on the table, plus a label that we could record for, so we started to work toward our new album, Bona Fide. Ben would have a huge input into the album, contributing six of the songs. When somebody like Ben comes into a band like Wishbone Ash you’ve got years of accumulated ideas meeting a vehicle within which they can be let loose. It was the same when Mervyn Spence joined in the 80s. That’s one of the bonuses when you change members of a band—it refreshes it in so many ways.
Ben was a fan of the band: he knew the songs and, in fact, he’d already been in a twin-lead-guitar band years before with one Muddy Manninen, who was, unbeknown to us all at the time, his Wishbone successor in waiting. That band was called Gringos Locos and, amazingly, they had recorded an album for Atlantic Records with Tom Dowd as producer around the same time that we’d recorded Locked In.
All the other guitarists in Wishbone Ash had brought something unique and valuable to the table—different personalities, different ideas, different creative and technical approaches, and a different dynamic, naturally, in the twin-guitar partnership with me. One of the areas where Ben differed most keenly with his two immediate predecessors, Mark Birch and Roger Filgate, was in road experience. He already had a good idea of what being in a professional band was all about and the various demands it made. The Leningrad Cowboys had toured everywhere and performed some really big gigs, including one in Helsinki with the entire Red Army Choir as backing vocalists. Ben had stamina, too—he’s a martial arts expert. When we went to Brazil he’d already been out there independently to study martial arts. Often, we’d go to a bar for lunch and he’d go off and do some training.
