April Birthdays 
Spent a fun afternoon at Randy Holden's wonderful pad high above South Laguna with a great view of the surf at Salt Creek. A little background: We were able to cajole Randy, who hadn't played his classic Fender IV tunes live in decades, to appear at the 2016 SG101 Convention, and needless to say, he blew the roof off the dump. It wasn't easy, however, and our two aces in the hole were Dusty Watson on drums, and promising to supply him with the exact rig he used to create the sonic assault of "Margaya". Originally from Baltimore, he lays claim to buying the first blond double Showman ever shipped to the East Coast, which was his workhorse throughout the Fender IV and beyond. Well, no problem! I have a great '61 Showman that Norm Cowell (DD's amp tech) rewired with a 4-ohm OPT, and both a tone ring cab (with an unreconed factory 4-ohm JBL!) AND a 2X15 cab (which I never ever play cause I love my tone ring cab so much). We rehearsed for the show in Randy's living room at full (and I mean FULL) volume, and he sounded epic! Flash forward to the present: To make a long story longer, my Showman has been sitting at his house ever since the show in 2016, and I figured it was time to go get the thing. It was a sad day for Randy, BUT---I agreed to sell him the 2X15 cab for a modest fee, and he was really stoked! That's where the Fun with Speakers part comes in: he wanted to use the JBL cab as an extension speaker for his 1970 Marshall 100w half-stack, a combination that COULD, dare I say, rule the world. Only problem: the Marshall cab is 16 ohms and the Fender is 4 ohms, not a happy match. (We tried it anyway, with the amp on its 4-ohm output setting into a 3.2-ohm load, but you could barely hear the Marshall cab). One option would be to rewire the Fender cab in series for 16 ohms, which seemed like a good plan. The first snag occured when it turned out that one of the Celestions was blown. So, the backs had to come off BOTH cabs, and we had to send the Celestion out for repair. We finally got the whole thing up and running today:
So, what does a 100w Marshall with a 4X12 cab and a 2X15 JBL cab and a reverb unit sound like for surf? First, the Marshall head has a huge bark and a big midrange bump, so some EQ tweaking was in order, dialing out most of the mids. The cabs were pretty evenly matched, and together were LOUD. REALLY loud! Randy let me play some trad surf stuff and it was definitely fun in a non-Fender sort of way, but this is an amp that really is meant to be cranked. Randy got out his plexi Strat through some sort of Roland midi unit, and holy shit, it was just huge. We jammed (does anyone jam anymore?) for about 90 minutes at massive DB's, and I could tell he was really stoked. The cab's work surprisingly well together, and, for a brief moment, we did indeed rule the world. Thanks for reading!
Last edited: Feb 21, 2018 04:22:45
). These were custom built for Randy a few years back. Not sure by who.
