For those of you too young to remember. . . .

[FlatEric]

I am scanning some old magazines/trade press releases for a project,
some dating back to 1974.
Very entertaining reading.

What you have got to bear in mind is that if you were still at school at that time,
bussing it into town to press your nose up at the Guitar Shop window, an almost
weekly event for some of us, a Saturday job would give you £1.00 to £1.50 and
according to a house valuation site, the average price for a house, in the period
that this scan was taken from, July 1978, was. . . . . . £15000.00!
In July 1978, I was earning £19.00 a week, £4.00 to my mum - bus fare to work,
about £3.00 ish, leaving me £12.00 disposable income.
Beer was around 25p a pint!!
It's all relative.




Right at the back of the magazine is an interview with Lou Maccari, featuring
a pic of Phil and the boys, with him playing a Ric.





Ahhh, those were the days.

Anyone here buy a brand new instrument in the summer of '78 - what was it
and how much did you have to pay for it?

Do you still have it or know where it is?

Cheers.

[bartelby]

I was only 6 at the time, but a few days ago my dad was telling me about the day he bought his brands new coral pink '62 P for £150.
Unfortunately he sold it 10 years later, when I was born... stupid man.

[teej]

Around that time (probably '77, but could have been '78) I bought a brand new Fender Musicmaster for £85. Later - '78 or '79 - I bought a second hand Rickenbacker 4001 for £275. Still got it.

[crez5150]

Ahhhh...... RIP Honky Tonk!

[Sarah5string]

I wasn't even born.

[OldGit]

Phil on a 4001? I bet it still sounded the same as his Precision and psudo precisions

Meanwhile that just goes to show what absolute bargains we have now.

[Rayman]

I was 13, and [i]just[/i] starting to show an interest in music. I would have had a copy of ELO's Out Of The Blue around then which started me off, but it was my older brother playing Be Bop Deluxe and Yes records that really grabbed my attention.

I got my first bass from Rhythm House in Stockport, a Columbus Jazz, maybe a year or so later.

[BigRedX]

Summer of 78 I bought the first lot of parts for the guitar I was going to spend the next year making at school. This was during my final year in the 6th Form and on reflection I think I spent more time in the woodwork shop then I spent on any one of my A Level subjects!

Making one myself and buying the bits as I could afford them was the only way at that time I was going to get an electric guitar that wasn't a PoS Woollies "special".

I don't have the guitar any more as the neck joint failed after significant abuse and by then I had pretty much switched to bass (and synth).

Edited July 8, 2010 by BigRedX

[Spoombung]

Beer may have been 25p a pint...

...but we had Thin Lizzy


Me in 1978:



The Aria cost me £165. It took 6 months to save up by working in a sugar beet factory

Edited July 8, 2010 by Spoombung

[Low End Bee]

I was working week days after school and Saturdays at Maurice Plaquet's on the Uxbridge Road, Shepherds Bush in 1978.

That brings it all back. Roland Space Echo at £295. I reckon that at about £1500 plus today!
I remember I sold 2 to Roger Waters (I didn't know who he was). I made him walk to the bank to get cash as I couldn't get through to Access on the phone for authorisation.

Every shop had glass cabinets full of MXR pedals, Dimarzios and brass hardware.

[xgsjx]

If you take into account the price of inflation on everything else, then Rics, Fenders & many others are less than 1/2 the asking prices back then.
An average house would cost at least £150k, an average unskilled job would give you at least £190 a week. Going on your figures for '74 that's 10x more than then, so the Ric should now be £3250, the Fender Jazz £2750, oh, and a MXR Phase 90 £690?

We're living in bargain heaven.

[yorick]

I bought a second hand bugle for 75p...

[geoffbyrne]

I had been playing guitar in rock groups & bands since 1959 and, as child #1 was on his way would soon give up as we were out 3 times per week and had been for about 8 years non-stop - in fact it was difficult to organise a holiday!

I was using a beautiful Antoria (Ibanez) Les Paul Black Beauty with an ebony fretboard inlaid with the Tree of Life & had Super 70 pickups - a real cracker, which I stupidly let go for Not Very Much when the babies came along. I originally paid about £135 for it.

My amp at the time had been a 50W Marshall 2x12 combo which I changed to a compact Maine 2x12 & 65W head to be more portable as the Marshall weighed an absolute ton. I think the amp cost me just under £100 and the cab was about 85.

Effects? What are those?

Never took pics in those days, got almost nothing at all.

G.

Edited July 8, 2010 by geoffbyrne

[Musicman20]

I love the simplicity of choice. I wasn't born until 81 but you guys seems to have had a blast back then.

Despite the fact we are lucky to have sooo many options now in bass, it sometimes seems best to go back to basics; p/j/rick/ray plus amp. No faffing.

[Born 2B Mild]

In '78 I bought a Fender Precision from Norman Hackett's in the arcade in Reading. It was a natural gloss and I think I paid £275. It was also my first brand new American bass.

And here is a contemporary pic of it taken at the Target in Reading...

[Shaggy]

First (and last) brand new bass was a year later in 1979; an Ibanez Musician from Hessey's of Liverpool for £220 ('cos Sting had one)

'78 I was still on my s/h Columbus Jazz and Carlsbro Stingray amp, punking it up

[FlatEric]

WOW, what a lot good memories out there.

As several of you have said, things are so cheap now, relative to then.

Looking at them reminded me that in almost every small town there
was a music shop that specialised in second hand gear, as the new
stuff was so flamin' expensive!!!

Here's a couple more - check out the prices of the Revox!!!!!!!!!!!!
Just think how easy home recording is now.
You can do your own demo's, record song ideas, cheaply.
Just to get the tape machine would have taken a lot of saving up!!



Here's one for Biggles in Bristol.




I have got loads of these.
International Musician's from about 1974 and various other Guitar Mags up to
around 1989.

Anyone remember Stephen Delft, the guitar builder - always had a spot in the IM?

Some of the interviews from the time are priceless.

The other thing that I remember from that time, it was "let's rip out these naff pick-ups
and put some DiMarzio's in. Oh yeah, baby!!

How things have changed!

That's all for now.
If anyone has memories of their favourite shop at the time, PM me and while I am
going through them all, I will keep my eye out.

Cheers.

[Spoombung]

New gear was [i]incredibly expensive[/i] relative to nowadays! There was no easy credit - just HP (the never never).
It took us ages to save up. Ages!!!

You young 'uns have got it sooooo easy now. You've got it all on a plate!

So, so, so, easy for you kids....

[Urban Bassman]

....ahh yes 1978 - was 17 then....

Here's a couple of photos of me with my first proper bass, sorry they're a bit small - I'll try and find the originals photo and re-scan them. The bass I'm holding is a 75/76 (I think) Fender P Bass. Can't now remember exactly how much I paid for it; £200-ish I guess, a small fortune in those days. I was earning £23 a week as an apprentice.

The photo was taken in the Allan Gorden rehearsal rooms in Leyton. They were built into/underneath some railway arches. It might also be interesting to some chatters here that rehearsing next door to us that day was an unknown band called Iron Maiden...

[attachment=53792:jw78b.jpg]

[attachment=53793:jw78a.jpg]

Edited July 8, 2010 by urban Bassman

[casapete]

I was playing guitar in 1978 - bought a brand new Gibson Firebird reissue with case for £395 from a shop in Sheffield called Sudbury Music.
Had it a month but could n't get on with it so took it back and swapped it for a tobacco sunburst Gibson Les Paul,complete with Gibson Protector
case! Think that was around £450 - seem to remember that discount Gibsons were unheard of through authorised dealers, so a lot of shops used
to obtain them from Europe (Holland mainly?) and bootleg them into the UK.-mine was one of those I believe! Great guitar though.

Other shops I have fond memories of around that time were Carlsbro (Mansfield), Music Ground (Stainforth), Scheerers (Leeds),Tim Gentle
(Southend),Musical Exchange (Brum). Back of Melody Maker was the place to look for s/h stuff, along with all the London stores advertising
Fender,Musicman and Gibson gear etc. such as Tempo, Orange, Macaris, Rose Morris, Argents and all the shops down Denmark St.

My band (that was wowing the working mens clubs around Yorkshire) decided to invest in a new PA system. I remember Rick Harrison at
Music Ground in Stainforth (near Doncaster) opening the shop specially one Thursday evening to demo an HH PA set up for us - MA150 mixer amp,
pair of Pro 200 2x12 cabs, a matching slave amp and a pair of 1x12 monitors! Think that came to around the £400 mark, and we used that PA
wherever we played, all 150 watts of it! Never let us down either. You can probably get a similar small PA now for around the same money-crazy!

Edited July 8, 2010 by casapete

[Bassassin]

Absolutely fascinating stuff. I bought my first-ever bass, a short-scale Grant sort-of-Jazz copy in June '78 - I was 16 & still at school.

It was identical to this:

[attachment=53794:grantfront.jpg] [attachment=53795:granthead.jpg]

It cost me (or rather my Mum) £59 from Unisound/Melbourne Pianos in Chatham High Street. It was absolute, utter borderline-unplayable garbage and I repeatedly tried (and failed) to kill it. I didn't sell it (who'd buy it? Apart from me, now I suppose) and as far as I know it's still in a loft somewhere, unless the owner of the loft has flung it in the tip.

Anyway crap or not, I made enough progress on it to be able to approximate most of JJ Burnel's lines from The Stranglers' first 2 albums after 2 or 3 months. Couldn't afford an amp so I bodge-wired a guitar lead into the aux input of my little stereo - which of course destroyed the speakers - but at least I could hear it! Later my dad helped me to build a ported 1x12 cab from plans from some music mag (not sure but it was probably IM&RW) and I ran that off a 2x20 watt Amstrad hi-fi amp, with my bodge-wired lead!

Took me a couple of years to get out of the bedroom & join a band, by which time I had a no-brand Les Paul bass copy (secondhand for about £50) which was light-years better than the Grant, and a Selmer Treble & Bass 50w head with 2x12 cab, which was about £25 out of a charity shop. I gigged that, plus my home-made cab a couple of times.

Unfortunately all our gear was kept in the drummer's mum's basement, where we practiced, and it was wrecked when a pipe burst & the basement flooded. The Selmer would certainly be worth a few quid these days, and that home-made cab would have incalculable sentimental value to me.

Ah, mammaries, eh?

Jon.

[Big_Stu]

My first bass was a s/h Gibson EB3, (SN. 907469 - now THAT'S anal!!!) bought for £165 from JSG in Bingley W. Yorks. After a lot of research & window staring I discovered it was a badly adapted EB0. The bridge pup was a Gibson engraved guitar humbucker which I had swopped out to a Schaller twin-pole job, & was ripped off in the process at "Mary's Music" in Accrington.

That's something which I think happened a lot more back then, kids getting ripped by the shops, there's a lot of ways, that weren't about back then, to read up on gear now to stop rip-offs.

I sold it when I got married, & it turned up years later in a junk shop that was a front for a fence in Edinburgh, I would have bought it back but it was a wreck by then & the price was too high.


My first amp was a 100watt Marshall PA with eight inputs. Bought s/h with a 150watt cab made by TVM of Manchester, in was huge with a single 18" speaker. £125 for both.

[BigRedX]

[quote name='FlatEric' post='889459' date='Jul 8 2010, 12:56 PM']Anyone remember Stephen Delft, the guitar builder - always had a spot in the IM?[/quote]
A guitar reviewer who wasn't afraid to call something crap if it deserved it (why can't reviews be like that now?)

His series of articles on building your own guitar were the foundation for my early attempts at lutherie!

[spinynorman]

In about 1965 I bought an imported Jap no-name acoustic 12-string for £10. About 3 years later a suddenly ex friend sat on it and bust the neck. It was repaired, but was never as good. In 1973 I bought a Gibson J50 for £200, recently sold for £750. Not that good an investment really.

Must have been about 1968 my father bought me a Grundig portable cassette recorder, which was cutting edge technology. I spent large parts of every weekend recording songs off the radio, mainly John Peel's Top Gear. Unfortunately Grundig's cassette format was different from Philips', which became the standard, and it quickly became impossible to buy blank cassettes for it. So I was stuck with the audio equivalent of Betamax.

[budget bassist]

Hmm, 1978, i hadn't even been born until 12 years after that! Makes me appreciate the quality gear we have now!

Edited July 9, 2010 by budget bassist