Originally Posted by: earthman buckLordathestrings is GT's resident gearhead. If you've got a question about tubes, pups, or anything, really, just ask LatS and he'll answer you in record time.....and in more detail than you really wanted. :)[/QUOTE]

I got to thinking about whether my memories of 'the day' were fuzzy or not:
... from >this thread< in December of 2003:

Originally Posted by: Lordathestrings[QUOTE=Leedogg]What was the feeling like back in '69? How old were you? It was a really busy year, with immense social implications. I'd really like to hear someone's account of it besides my parents'. My dad was 20 and in the jungles of Vietnam. My mom was 17 and sitting in a one bedroom apartment praying everyday that my dad wouldn't die.

I could write a long book to answer your post, but a lot of other people already have.

I bought my first guitar to celebrate my 16th birthday in October of 1968. It was a used hollow-body electric. A Japanese ES-335 knockoff with the name "Guya" on the headstock. I paid $40 CDN with the money I earned from my morning paper route. I would meet the truck that dropped off my 144 copies of the Globe & Mail for my daily deliveries at 04:30. I was usually home by 07:30, to get ready for school. My Saturday deliveries jumped to over 200. The Globe kept sending me a bunch of extra papers and charging me 65 cents a week for each them, which wiped out a lot of the 17 cents profit from each of my actual customers. That $40 took a lot of work to accumulate.

So, then I did the obsessive practice routine previously described. By July '69, I was playing lead guitar for a band we called "Little Earth". We were the unofficial house band at a night club called "The First Church of Alice", which was decorated with stuff from Lewis Caroll's book "Alice Through The Looking Glass". The back of the stage featured a gigantic magic mushroom, complete with hookah-smoking caterpillar. The cap of the mushroom extended out over the stage like a canopy.

I spent a lot of time either hunched in front of my stack, trying to hear myself through the stage wash, or standing in front of the drummer with one foot braced against the kick-drums, trying to keep our pet maniac from walking his kit right off the stage.

Musically, it was a time of self-indulgent solos and stretched songs. A one-hour set might be comprised of three or four songs. After Cream released "Toad" on the "Wheels of Fire" album, our drummer insisted on doing a solo every night that grew into a 40-minute bash-fest. Try spending your evenings braced against a kick-drum, and see how you like it. :p

Socio-politically? I was in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, which is located on the north shore of Lake Ontario, where the St. Lawrence River starts. About 20 miles from the Thousand Islands. New York State is about 12 miles south, across the water. All of which is to say that we saw a lot of draft-dodgers passing through on their way to Toronto. At the time we were too young and ignorant to do much in the way of critical thinking, and often too stoned to do much of any kind of thinking. We were push-overs for squishy-pink socialism in general, and anti-Vietnam-War sentiment in particular.