Ain't Bad for a Pink

by Sandra Gibson

  My one-stringed violin looks more like an invention than a musical instrument. It doesn’t know if it’s in the string section or the brass section! I bought it from the antique shop next door to the Nantwich Road shop – the same place I bought my gramophone. This curiosity dates from the turn of the century and is called a Home Model Stroviol. There used to be orchestras of these strange-looking instruments. The studio model has a more ornate curly brass horn – rather like the early gramophone. My version is an economy version with a tin horn yet it has an exquisitely carved ivory nut. These nuts would have been mass-produced from off-cuts in the days before ivory hunting was illegal. It’s impossible to put a price on such a curiosity. Even The Antiques Roadshow couldn’t explain what one of these was.

  We used to put our stash of drugs in the tin horn.

  All my dealings with guitars and other musical equipment, all the introductions to new instruments and blue instruments and instruments falling apart or needing admiration or a new owner, all transactions involving money, bartering, pain, love, loss or cunning – all this took place in my shop which was more than a shop, and that’s where we’re going next.

  Notes: Section Five

  (1) Wayne Davies (Slim) interviewed by Sandra Gibson 30th January 2007.

  (2) Linda Johnson, interviewed by Sandra Gibson. 4th November 2008.

  (3) Guitar Gods: ed. Rusty Cutchin, Flame Tree Publishing 2009.

  (4) Ibid.

  (5) Wikipedia.

  (6) Ibid.

  (7) Letter from NATIONAL Reso-Phonic Guitars Inc. postmarked Santa Barbara.

  SECTION SIX

  Custom Amplification:

  More Than A Business

  “No-one knows more about guitars than Pete; he could go on Mastermind.”

  Zoe Johnson.

  “This shop is unique because of the man. A traditional music shop always has to have something else going on, such as repairs, collectibles, tuition. But the shop always revolves round the owner. Usually modest people. Nice people, on the whole.”

  David Rushton. Inter Music.

  “It’s just the only music shop as far as I’m concerned. The others aren’t musician’s shops – this is the only one that deals in pro. equipment. Everyone else deals in commercial crap.”

  Wayne Davies (Slim).

  “When I was 14 Pete gave me a guitar and amp. He said I could just take them away! So I took them away before I could even play and he let me pay every week. ‘How much can you afford?’ he asked me. So I paid £4 a week out of my dinner money. He’s a bloody beautiful bloke. I love Pete. But for him I wouldn’t have played. My band Chapel of Rest toured Europe. He’s a bloody beautiful bloke.”

  Ian Moore.

  “My son’s at university. I’ve got some stuff to sell.”

  “What kind of stuff?”

  “Stuff in the hall.”

  “What kind of stuff?”

  “I want to get rid of it.”

  “What kind of stuff?”

  “It’s big and it’s orange.”

  “What do you mean – it’s big and it’s orange?”

  “It’s a big orange box with another box on it.”

  “Without seeing it I would say it’s worth £200.”

  “That’ll do. Can I bring it now?”

  Conversation with man on phone.

  “When we were about sixteen and hiring amps we’d phone Pete’s shop and he’d say, ‘Oh, I’ll just hand you over to our hire department,’ and the voice that said ‘Hire department’ was still his voice! A good sense of humour.”

  Ade White.

  Shop Stories

  Focal Point

  My business has mirrored the economic climate and cultural preferences over the years and at one point it nearly went under. But after nearly forty years I’m still here and if you look around you can read the history of my musical career, my business and current lifestyle. I’ve often made jokes about its location in a sex ‘n’ drugs ‘n’ rock ‘n’ roll triangle at the top end of Edleston Road, Crewe, which included a methadone centre (now relocated) a ‘private’ shop (newly painted) and my music shop: Custom Amplification.

  Custom Amplification is more than the neutral name conveys. It has been the centre of a network of musical talent, the focus for lads in pursuit of that ever-elusive perfect amp, the home of instruments beautiful, trashed, eccentric, abandoned, expensive and vintage. It’s been a social space – more than that: it’s an extension of my living space – on occasions it has been my living space. It shares my idiosyncrasies. People have described it as “Aladdin’s Cave”, “a bit of a dump”, “the start of an adventure”, “Motorhead’s dressing room”, “The Old Curiosity Shop”, “the only music shop there is”. Disparate things are stored haphazardly but I know exactly where everything is and everything has its own importance.

  When I first started going into the Nantwich Road shop I didn’t belong to a band. That didn’t last long – the grapevine worked efficiently. Dave Evans, a keyboard player, walked in and said to me, “I believe you want to play in a band.” It was like a speakeasy – talking about gigs – and that’s how bands got together. “We’re short of a bass player…has anybody got…do you know anybody with...”and that was it – sorted. And Pete gave generous support of one kind or another. Being a musician it didn’t matter if you were rich or poor – if you needed an amplifier, Pete would say, “Take that one; we’ll square up later.” We were never short of equipment and Pete never charged a thing. He’s a great bloke – I must admit it whilst he’s out of the room.

  Wayne Davies (Slim) (1)

  When I had the Squier I took it to Custom Amplification. I’d seen it from the bus. Loads of people knew about it. I knew it was owned by a personality. He did the job; he fixed my guitar. It’s a weird shop. It doesn’t look much at first but when you go in it’s got a lot of very nice guitars. Old guitars but they’re all quality guitars.

  Dec Higgins (2)

  Move Over Dali

  Amongst the conventional things for sale there are unusual items of furniture: a juke box disguised as a cupboard with leaded glass windows, an old wooden gramophone side by side with enormous dense black speakers and amplifiers: monuments to past and future sound extravaganzas. There’s an accordion with salmon pink decoration, an ancient and abandoned wind instrument leaning against the wall, faded advertisements for gigs, current requests for drummers, a chunky wooden box, a gourd-like, face-down mandolin and a guitar strap for every taste: powerful black or multi-coloured or smiley-faced or intensely pink. A Sixties Futurama Duosonic guitar with “Bender Jobbycaster” printed on it is the lone survivor of a rogues’ gallery of naff instruments. And in the window there’s a clarinet: pale brass in black fur, its cleaning cloth pristine white.

  At the back of the shop guitar cases lean together, wearing polythene covers to resist a storm and a group of guitars on stands gathers near the piano like a barber’s shop quartet. There’s a large inflated replica of a Guinness on an amp next to a huge metallic wedding cake of drums and a Gallotone guitar, its name faded by time. On the counter is a spectrum of plastic plectrums in every conceivable colour. Like penny chews.

  Some days the shop is fuller than usual. Occasionally there is a flight case in the repair queue: an industrial amp rack on robust castors, edged with aluminium, designed to house several amps for a PA system – reminding you of the sheer scale of amplified music. Scratched and dull and scuffed, amps and speakers always bear the scars of their life in transit. Many will soon be redundant; the trend is towards smaller equipment.

  Music shops are full of chance meetings between unrelated objects, or items altered in some unnerving way that changes their appearance, or objects so obscure that only the fanatic or the antique dealer or the historian can guess their identity. When an electric guitar is reduced to its carcass of moulded plastic, it looks as if it’s made of old fashioned washing soap. How naked a guitar looks without its strings! What about this ceramic model of our
mascot skunk next to a cool brass canal boat and this tiny tin of cider with the encouragement to “pull ring in case of emergency”? High on a shelf is an ancient washboard, a couple of claxons and some tubular brass, with some incongruously small American flags and a product for cleaning steel and bronze strings called “The Swipe”.

  Spirits

  Sometimes, when the shop is closed and silent, its walls lined with curved shapes, the eye is drawn to the back walls where the atmosphere changes and where I’ve placed portraits of blues gurus: Arthur “Big Boy”Crudup, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Blind Boy Fuller, Sonny Terry, WC Handy, Robert Johnson, Blind Willie McTell, Bessie Smith. Guardian spirits. A little apart from these photographs is a pencil drawing of me. If this was a film it would be in sepia tones at such a moment. Then the camera would focus on the montage of more recent coloured photographs, each with its own rock ‘n’ roll story.

  Comings And Goings

  You can’t separate the shop and the stock from the people who come to the shop, and you can’t presume that they have come merely to buy something. For some it is entirely transactional of course but there are many other reasons. A jovial Liverpudlian brightens a wintry day just to remake contact: “I still talk about you, Snakey Jake!” He used to bring in amps for mending when he was on the road many years ago and now he speaks about someone in Tasmania who still asks about me! Tasmania?

  There’s a wild boy at the door one day when I’m closed going, “Oh fuck! Oh fuck!” and I open the door expecting some hassle and he says, in an Eton accent, “Terribly sorry to bother you but do you have a high ‘E’ guitar string?” Well of course I do.

  Various fierce bikers come to talk about bikes and guns and guitars: they’re interchangeable. The man from next door visits once a fortnight to return the tenner I lend him once a fortnight; a man with a boxer’s face is terribly disappointed that I don’t sell leather cloth; a small square man with a hearty complexion staggers in with a huge square speaker and speaks fast about a blown horn as if he’s in a perpetual hurry but he’s just out of breath; white vans drive up, disgorge their contents and drive off; a well-dressed woman with an air of academic inquisitiveness looks in at the window; Joey Shields is looking at everything with the enthusiasm of a child, wanting me to get him a hundred quid home recording studio; a mother is buying her son’s first guitar, “I’m going to regret this – he can’t even play!” One busy morning it’s students looking for percussion instruments – such as primary school children use – for a photo shoot.

  Sometimes my customers bring with them a whiff of fame…or notoriety. There’s a gentlemen’s outfitter who comes in to buy banjo tuners who went to Lonnie Donegan’s last birthday party. A bloke with a long pigtail and a beard brings tales of piracy in the backwaters of Cheshire and boats so old they have moss growing on the interior and the music scene in Crewe now that The M Club is on the ascendancy and will this be bad news for The Limelight? There’s gossip of someone with at least forty-seven collectible guitars and an E-type in a hermetically sealed bubble plus a TVR and foreign thieves at large.

  You’ll find all sorts of people wanting to touch, buy, sell or swap all sorts of instruments, amps and speakers. People dither at the door and go away again; people bang on the door when I’m closed; fail to turn up for an appointment when I’m open; breeze in when they’re cheerfully out of jail; slope in when they’re depressed. A policeman is enthusiastic about a musical project for local kids; periodic reps. bring music shop gossip.

  People haul in stuff from car boot sales, from the attic, from the tip, stuff “as seen on eBay”, stuff left to them by relatives, stuff stolen, borrowed, or abandoned, stuff they’re weary of collecting or stuff they love but have to sell because they’re broke, need drugs money or are living in a small space. Millionaires are just as likely to come through the door as someone wearing all his clothes at once with a dog on a string. Come in on some days and I’m teaching a couple of fishermen to play guitar – great manual dexterity from all those years of tackling up! One day it’s my drummer Melvyn bringing me laminated recipes and photographs of a Scottish-themed wedding, shaking his head over the Glaswegian tendency to deep-fry pizzas. Sometimes there are famous visitors from the past, like the Incredible String Band.

  For some reason the shop attracts a lot of blokes called Lee. There’s one: tall and lean and restless who’s got quite a rock ‘n’ roll past. He’ll never run to fat – his mind’s as mobile as his body but always on the subject of music. He was keen to find a Telecaster and admired one I had in for £350: “I’ve been looking for a good Tele for ages you know. It’s not heavy either, is it? I’ll come back and play when I’ve got a bit more time. That’s lovely, that is. A good Waylon Jennings…I’ve got this Gretsch – I don’t know what I think of it really. It looks good and if you play rock ‘n’ roll you need to look the part. It’s just got to feel right…Andy Boote… breathtaking…is he still well into that?”

  I think the leap here comes from the fact that Andy also plays a Gretsch and he wants to know if he’s still Vavooming. But it’s hard to keep up with him. Lee’s stylistically good across the board and has been with a Hendrix-style band – not just doing covers but writing stuff in the style as well – that very nearly made it but for a horrendous event. One of the musicians got MS and murdered his mother – just walked barefoot to the police station and handed himself in.

  Safe Bed

  Some people are not only concerned – or not concerned at all – with the things I sell. It’s a sociable space and we drink tea and put the world right, and in recent years I’ve had my baby granddaughter with me on Mondays. Some will be in to discuss jobs I want them to do, or jobs they have done: mending and refurbishing musical equipment or my camper-van.

  My son Jordan did his Work Experience at Pete’s shop. He never shuts up about it. He says it’s the only shop he’s been in where you have a siesta time: just sit back and chill. He remembers Pete cutting through someone’s incessant babbling by playing slide guitar. He looked sideways at Jordan. It was one of those moments.

  Wayne Davies (Slim). (3)

  Over the years I’ve given people a temporary roof. One of the most recent was a singer-songwriter friend who had fallen out with his sister. I stored his few possessions – a medium-sized black bag and a nice brown leather jacket – and gave him a bed whilst he found somewhere else to live. Part of the problem between brother and sister was that she was rationing his beer; the other problem was that her TV was tuned to the God channel at all times.

  I was quite glad when he left though – he had buckled the electric fire and de-potted Zoe’s plant in no time.

  When my son needed a refuge for himself and his two young daughters, and there was no other way I could find to keep them safe, I took what I felt to be a big risk to our relationship. I asked Pete if I could move the family into our one-bedroomed flat whilst things got sorted out. It was a matter of several months and it was not easy, as can be imagined. But Pete was absolutely marvellous and I don’t know what I would have done without his support.

  Zoe Johnson. (4)

  I’ve never had a problem sharing my space. Whether people are mad, stinking, egotistical, passing through, depressed, impoverished or getting divorced, as long as they respect the house rules – trust is one of them, so no locked interior doors – I’m very tolerant. The shop is an extension of my living space: it’s where I do business, socialise and play music. It’s been the scene of practical jokes, wardrobe malfunctions, spectacular drunkenness, good news drifting through the letter box, police raids, bad news over the telephone, knife threats, parties…and people are welcome to share it with me. Most folks know instinctively how to behave but if anyone starts dictating or influencing the atmosphere, putting other people off or making it seem like their front room, then I don’t like it. Narrow-mindedness and hypocrisy are out. Why do people who drink alcohol feel able to criticise drug users?

  Tea And Sympathy

  Not
everyone needs a roof; sometimes they just need a listening ear or a sympathetic space or a good turn. You have to be astute and diplomatic and compassionate because people bring in more than just their musical buying and selling needs. So many stories walk in through the door: from the hilarious to the tragic.

  Pawn Shop Blues

  A musician friend and customer took the heroin trail and pawned his electric guitar and amp. He probably got £100 or less for them and needed £130 to retrieve them. The pawn shop makes a weekly charge as well as giving you far less than the items are worth. Anyway, he was almost in tears when he came in because he didn’t have the money to get them back. I wrote him a cheque and told him to bring the stuff to my shop where there wouldn’t be a weekly charge.

  However, the pawn shop wouldn’t accept a cheque because – unbelievably in these times – they were on the verge of closing. It was strictly cash. Pawn shops can be as inefficient as any other business, I suppose. Unless people know the value of stuff they don’t ask the right prices: they overprice and underprice and it doesn’t always balance out.

  My bank agreed to pay some cash over to my customer as long as I sent a covering letter. So the customer’s daughter took him to collect the money and then the equipment, which I now hold for him. I trusted him; I’ve done it before for him but there’s a safeguard anyway. If he doesn’t pay me I have equipment worth far more than £130 – the Fender amp is worth £250 in itself. I’m compassionate but I’m not daft and unlike the pawn shop I do know the value of things.

  One Of My Business Cards

  A guy had phoned earlier in the day to warn me that he would be bringing in some speakers and an amp he wanted me to sell. He arrived and I helped him with a huge Trace Eliot speaker. Then a woman brought in a 240 watt Ampeg. Next I helped the guy to haul in another enormous red-carpeted brass-tacked speaker with a slack front.