Woodstock VH-1

[57basstra]

Saturday morning, just turned on VH-1 and saw bits and pieces of the Woodstock documentary playing this weekend. The Who played and I saw Pete beat an SG on its bottom and toss it out into the audience. Wonder where it is now? Also, very few shots of John and it looked like he was playing a Fender Precision (Video shows, etc., never show the bass player and they are the most interesting of the lot, usually.) Keith was beating it up and Roger was in rare form. Don't know if it's playing all weekend, but I missed the ending and hope to catch that (at least Hendrix) later on. Chow.(ciao -)..have a great weekend everyone. (Man is it hot!)
 
(Message edited by 57basstra on August 20, 2005)

[57basstra]

No, I don't think a Precision is being used by Entwistle, at Woodstock I think it's a Fender Jazz. Anybody know? (or it this a dumb question? Hey, no dumb questions, just dumb people who ask them, huh?) Here's the Woodstock list. Am I leaving anyone out? (Hey, I was born 7-5-57, I really was a Child of the '60s. This is giving me a lot of  D?j? Vu  feelings that are pretty nifty.)
 
Joan Baez  
Arlo Guthrie
Tim Hardin
Incredible String Band
Ravi Shankar
Richie Havens
Sly and the Family Stone
Bert Sommer
Sweetwater
Quill
Canned Heat
Creedence Clearwater Revival
 Jefferson Airplane
The Who
Grateful Dead
Keef Hartley Band
   Blood, Sweat and Tears
Crosby, Stills & Nash (&Young)
Santana
The Band
Ten Years After
Johnny Winter
Jimi Hendrix
Janis Joplin
Joe Cocker
Mountain
Melanie
Sha-Na-Na
John Sebastian
Country Joe and the Fish
Paul Butterfield Blues Band
 
(Message edited by 57basstra on August 20, 2005)

[chuckc]

There is an extremely brief view in the opening shots of See Me where you can just barely see John in the background, it appears that he is playing one of his Fenderbirds by the protruding lower bout of a Thunderbird and the standard Fender head stock of a Precision.  That was around the time John was experimenting with that hybrid of Gibson and Fender.

[chuckc]

Well, there is a re broadcast of Woodstock on right now and the Who are playing Summertime Blues. JAE is playing a Precision on this one.  Still think he played the Fenderbird as well on some numbers though.

[57basstra]

Thanks for the response, Charles. What you just posted is the first I have ever heard of Fenderbird. What was that? It seems like I learn something new almost every day. So he was playing a hybrid Gibson/Fender at some point in time? (also, the show was on VH-1 Classic, as I pointed out to my friends here at home who said It's not on my VH1.)  Also, this was the award winning movie made just after the event. The acapela version of Amazing Grace by Joan Baez was simply awe inspiring. I had almost forgotten at how blessed she is as a singer. Also, Country Joe's I wanna Die Rag where he says to the crowd, There's 300,000 of you here, if you want to stop a war, you'll have to sing louder than that put chills down my spine. The Hippies and Folk musicians, and Rockers to an extent were very profound intellectually and politically at the time. It was a good thing they were. I wonder if we will see that kind of significant rise of the artists of this generation step up and lead the charge. Perhaps not. Look what happened to The Dixie Chicks. Peace and Love to you all!  
 
intellectually
 
 
(Message edited by 57basstra on August 22, 2005)

[sfnic]

I seem to remember him playing a FenderBird on at least some part of the Woodstock show...
 
(No, I wasn't there; I was sick that week and didn't make the trip with Steve Cohen's lighting team.)
 
But Pete's SG ended up back at Brady St. about a year later, and hung around for about six months.  As you might expect, the peghead snapped clean off it when it landed.  Wer ended up grafting the peghead back on using a pair of inlaid ebony reinforcements.  We swapped it to Tom Scalley in exchange for some money we owed him for building some speaker cabinets.  
 
Tom had a nice little basement shop on Fulton St.--about five blocks from the old Airplane house--and he built many of the Greatful Dead Style speaker cabinets we sold out of the Brady St. store.  We had him build a pile for Manfred Mann's bass player, and the payment got hung up in the paperwork.  The band was on the road, and the invoice never got to their London office.  We finally did get paid for the cabs about 18 months later, but in the meantime had to pay Tom for the materials and labor.  We didn't have a lot of spare cash that month, but he proposed trading part of his invoice for the SG.  Seemed to be a fair trade; he certainly enjoyed the guitar...
 
I don't know if he still has it or not.  My own '71 SG _may_ have been one of Pete's.  I got it from Mike Tobias when he was a roomate of mine.  He said the guy who sold him the carcass claimed it was another of Pete's broken headstock victims, and that he had bought it from one of the Who's roadies.  Mike had done the same inlay/graft repair on it that we had done years earlier on Tom's.  I swapped a nice Takemine 12-string for it, along with a handful of unpotted Stars circuit modules.  It's still one of my favorite screamer guitars; skinniest neck you'll ever find (1 9/16 wide at the nut, .790 thick at the 12th fret), but remarkably stable.

[57basstra]

That is just too cool, Nic.

[chuckc]

David, the Fenderbirds were JAE's way of trying to find a better bass then either a Fender or Gibson.  He would take the body of a Gibson Thunderbird bass and the neck of a Fender Precision bass, usually a maple neck and thus became the Fenderbird

[jacko]

David.
Here's a pretty cool website detailing most of Johns collection...
http://www.thewho.net/whotabs/equipment/bass/equip-entwistlegear-67-71.html
 
Graeme

[bracheen]

Awesome site Graeme.  Thanks for the link
 
Sam