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SurfGuitar101 Forums » Gear »

Permalink How’s they afford the gear & Off brand guitars…

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I know that a lot of the musicians during the first wave of surf were teenagers, which begs the question: how in the world were they able to afford all Fender gear…?!

Also , what were some of the popular off brand guitars among surf bands back then….?

Very good question. I'd also like to know.
Jazzmasters and Jaguars were the top of the line back then. It's possible they had already fallen out of favor and ended up being cheaper than Strats and Teles. Or maybe those boys were affluent.

They saved their pennies and worked paper routes and gas station jobs? Great question!!! Did Sears had a brand of affordable guitars?

Daniel Deathtide

OK, here's an answer from a real first-waver...Me!

I started playing guitar in 1964 and was in a band that started later that year. I was a Junior in High School at the time as was the rest of the band. We were huge fans of The Ventures and the surf music that was being played on the radio.

Regarding the equipment - We all had jobs, mostly fast food at the Burger Broil or working at the local Goodyear tire store installing new tires and balancing wheels. Our first guitars were very inexpensive Japanese ones. Mine was a Zen-0n that was $50 in a Lafayette Radio catalog. I bought that one wth burger-flipping and lawn mowing money. Our rhythm guitarist had a single pickup Sears Silvertone and our bass player had a Kent bass that sort of looked like a Fender Precision, Our guitar amps were Sears Silvertone 1484 "Twin Twelves" that had built-in reverb. Those are now collectors items. Our bass player had some sort of oddball bass amp but I don't recall who made it. Our drummer had a pretty nice Slingerland kit that he bought used.

As time progressed, we were making decent money working our jobs and playing local gigs, so we were able to upgrade our gear. I got a Fender Deluxe Reverb and later the same year (1965) a Bandmaster. New Bandmasters retailed for $390 back then, I still have both amps. The bass player got a piggyback Bassman which was $410. My Zen-On guitar had a very high action that was literally causing bleeding the fingers on my left hand. My dad felt sorry for me and offered to get me a better guitar as an early HS graduation gift. He asked me what I wanted, I said "Fender Mustang". A few days later he brought it home and it was a freaking JAGUAR! List on those was $368 then. But remember, in those days a dollar was worth 6 or 7X as much as it is now....so, do the math.

The quick and easy answer the OP's question is that we mostly worked our butts off to have decent gear. And once in a while, a dad who understood what we were doing musically would do something very nice. None of us came from wealthy families.

Yes, I still have the Jaguar, too.

Jack
aka WoodyJ

The Mariners (1964-68, 1996-2005)
The Hula Hounds (1996-current)
The X-Rays (1997-2004)
The Surge! (2004, 2011-2012)
Various non-surf bands that actually made money
(1978-1990)

Last edited: Oct 07, 2021 09:36:37

WoodyJ wrote:

He asked me what I wanted, I said "Fender Mustang". A few days later he brought it home and it was a freaking JAGUAR! List on those was $368 then. But remember, in those days a dollar was worth 6 or 7X as much as it is now....so, do the math.

The quick and easy answer the OP's question is that we mostly worked our butts off to have decent gear. And once in a while, a dad who understood what we were doing musically would do something very nice. None of us came from wealthy families. C

Yes, I still have the Jaguar, too.

AWESOME dad!!! Great story Jack thanks so much for sharing! And now I must complain about the lack of photos.

Daniel Deathtide

Last edited: Oct 07, 2021 10:15:40

Just for you, Dan.... Smile

image

Jack
aka WoodyJ

The Mariners (1964-68, 1996-2005)
The Hula Hounds (1996-current)
The X-Rays (1997-2004)
The Surge! (2004, 2011-2012)
Various non-surf bands that actually made money
(1978-1990)

If a Jaguar was $368 x 7 = 2500, that is basically a decent iPhone and a MacBook. Nice, for sure. Pricey, for sure. But I don't think you have to search far to find teenagers with both of those items these days.

My first guitar (nowhere near that nice, it was a Washburn Strat-style in 1989 or so) was brought home with a little Fender Squier amp on a rental basis. This might have been an option back then too, when music stores were also catering to school band and orchestra gear?

WoodyJ wrote:

Just for you, Dan.... Smile

Thank you sir! That thing is just beautiful, I can tell it’s got some serious pedigree!

My first guitar, in 1990, was a black used 80s Japanese Strat, got it for $200 from a pal when I was 18. And then a few years later I got a ‘72 Twin for $400. That’s all I had until just a few years ago when I realized offsets contained the sound I was looking for. Good thing that the jag was instantly comfy as heck - I woulda been screwed if it had been uncomfortable haha! The TR sounds super punk, dirty and kinda noisy. I’d guess about 80% of the resistors / caps have drifted very far out of spec haha.

Hey can we turn this into a “what was your first setup?” thread? I’d be into reading that, but it’s so obnoxious to start another thread. And besides some of the stories fit the OP perfectly?

Dan

image

Daniel Deathtide

...and if you were The Challengers, for example, and from Palos Verdes or other such affluent beach communities in SoCal, the parents bought the equipment for them, along with a beautiful new car...

http://www.satanspilgrims.com
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Satans-Pilgrims/8210228553
https://satanspilgrims.bandcamp.com/
http://www.surfyindustries.com

Will Glover of the Pyramids recounts in a video how his mom surprised him by spending a bunch of her hard earned money on a brand new leftie Strat for him.

Michael Lloyd of the New Dimensions credits his Godfather Jimmy Durante for helping his family finance his brand new white Fender Jaguar.

I'm guessing that was unusual though. Big Grin

I'm started playing about 5 years after the first wave bands, so my experience is similar to Woody's. My parents helped me out with my first electric, a used Harmony Rocket. They paid for half of it, which was about $50-60. Everything thereafter came out of my own pocket. Shortly after buying the Harmony, I bought a used Fender '63 Deluxe, which I still have. At that point, my income was from doing yard work for a number of people in the neighborhood. I'd typically get about $5 to mow each of their lawns.

In those days, a lot of music stores had payment plans. If your parents would co-sign for the gear, they'd set you up with a plan for something like $10-15 a month. My drummer bought his Rogers drum set that way. If you couldn't get your parents to co-sign, they often offered layaway plans, where they would hold gear for you (with a deposit), and you'd make monthly payments until you paid it off, and took possession. Another thing they sometimes did back then was "rent to buy". You could rent an instrument for roughly $10-20 a month, and if you chose to stick with it, the rental money would go towards purchase of the instrument. A friend of mine bought a guitar this way.

Bob

Last edited: Oct 07, 2021 18:24:43

Here is an early band pic of the Chantays. I see a tweed and a couple of tanks, but no Fender guitars. Maybe Pipeline was recorded with those instruments? Probably more typical of most bands at that stage of their careers.
image

Fender may have outfitted some bands after their hit singles or regional successes.

I had friends that were about 7 years older than me. Their 1st band would have been around 1964. 60 miles away was Brier and Hale music company. Everyone that came in the store was given a credit account to buy equipment. After playing a dance on saturday, they mailed a payment on monday. I was never told how much they were. The lead had a strat and a bassman. The rhythm played had a Guild and a Gretsch with another bassman. The bass player at one time had a Kustom stack that was almost 6' tall. It had a warning sticker on the back about hearing loss with loud volumes. They started out with cheaper equipment but as soon as they became a real band and booked dances, they got better equipment. I know the payments couldn't have been much because of when it was and the employment circumstances. Bare in mind that the min. wage in 1964 was $1.15. Smile

I started playing electric guitar in 1967 - I was into classical piano up until then. Blues, Ventures, Psychedelia and some standard Surf tunes - but I wouldn't exactly say I was really a fledgling surf guitarist at that point. Surf intrigued me, but for most teenagers, it was on the way out. Starting that summer, I worked on a tobacco farm - it was the only regular work legal for me to take at my age - starting at a buck an hour minimum wage for farm work.

I had to save most of that money "for college", but did get a $39 violin-shaped Kawai solid body in red burst from Boston Music on Tremont St. Had to have a vibrato bar, which it had. I wanted a Fender Mustang, which I got a couple of years later used, in a trade - white with bright red tortoise guard (someone on another thread called it clown barf - I never saw a Mustang with an original true clown barf pickguard). I made my own cabinet, into which I put 2 Oxford or Jensen (can't remember which) speakers I got from Lafayette Electronics on Comm Ave. Painted it black, stretched some black cloth across the front, and powered it with a 35 Watt mono Bogen tube head with 2-6L6 power tubes that doubled as a hi-fi amp. My dad scrounged that, I put in a 1/4" jack, instant guitar amp. After a while, I did manage to scrounge a used circa 65 or 66 Bandmaster head cheap. I eventually got a cheap small Japanese amp with reverb, which I extracted from the cabinet and used to preamp the Bandmaster, which needed some help in the gain department anyway.

I think a lot of people these days get the wrong impression about the availability of discretionary money for most people back then. Most teenagers didn't have the kind of scratch to buy $300-500 worth of equipment - hell, I didn't make that much that whole 1967 summer of 40+ hour work weeks. But I worked right through high school, which gave me a bit of discretionary money.

There were kids who had a bunch of high-end gear, but most of them had parents that could afford it. Most of the rest of us cobbled together whatever we could on a limited budget. Lots of Teiscos, Kawais, Silvertones, Danelectros, Harmonys, and Kays.

The Delverados - surf, punk, trash, twang - Facebook
Chicken Tractor Deluxe - hardcore Americana - Facebook and Website
The Telegrassers - semi-electric bluegrass/Americana - Facebook

Nailed it. I played in a band with guys from Bishop Montgomery High School where the Bel Airs came from. All the guys in the band had beautiful guitars, ES335s and Les Pauls, Ampeg and Rickenbacher Transonic amps, all paid for by their affluent parents.

spskins wrote:

...and if you were The Challengers, for example, and from Palos Verdes or other such affluent beach communities in SoCal, the parents bought the equipment for them, along with a beautiful new car...

Nice to hear stories from you guys!
I'm writing this on a 10 yr old iMac that I bought after saving for 4 years. A couple of upgrades but I'm going to milk it until it's dust. Eventually however it will be dust.
Guitars last decades and longer.

DaveMudgett wrote:

I think a lot of people these days get the wrong impression about the availability of discretionary money for most people back then. Most teenagers didn't have the kind of scratch to buy $300-500 worth of equipment - hell, I didn't make that much that whole 1967 summer of 40+ hour work weeks. But I worked right through high school, which gave me a bit of discretionary money.

There were kids who had a bunch of high-end gear, but most of them had parents that could afford it. Most of the rest of us cobbled together whatever we could on a limited budget. Lots of Teiscos, Kawais, Silvertones, Danelectros, Harmonys, and Kays.

I'll add my voice to this. When you see a picture on an album cover, you are not seeing the typical teen band. I grew up in a very prosperous town, but my family was near the bottom rung of the middle class. My first guitar cost $20, and to my parents, that was a lot of discretionary spending. Harmony guitars, and Silvertone amps were the order of the day.

In Junior High, I met and rubbed elbows with the kids from more prosperous families. During the school talent show, there was some decent gear, but even among the "rich kids", most of the gear was nothing to brag about.

For the average Blue Collar worker, back then, a $368 Jaguar was out of reach, unless they were working full time and bringing in extra money playing gigs. At the time of the first wave of Surf music, $400 would buy a pretty nice used car. If you were poor, your family car may have cost considerably less than even the discounted price of a Jaguar.

I would venture to say that the well-equipped bands you saw in promotional photos probably were making payments on that gear. The only real money being made would have been in the Publication rights to the music, and in many cases, the record company held those.

No differently from today, making big money from music was more myth than reality. Even in the upper reaches of the business, very few people were dripping in money. I recall reading that after the breakup of the Beatles, even Paul McCartney had to tighten his belt until his solo career took off.

For the average musician with one or two hits, there may have been a few months of prosperity, but a lot of these guys ended up working Joe Jobs in the long run. We hear about the exceptions, such as Jim Messina, but he was smart enough to realize that the money was in producing. His partnership with Kenny Loggins was more the exception than the rule, as far as his music career goes.

Speaking for myself, and from firsthand experience, I never could truly afford good gear until I got a regular job. I had one very nice guitar, but that was the exception, and not the rule. When I was a gigging musician, a great deal of the time, I didn't even own an amp. I taught in music stores, and would borrow a used amp when I had a gig. Pedals? Forget about it, I didn't own even one. And I was actually doing fairly well as a local musician, getting called for gigs and having a decent student count.

Keep in mind, also, that bands with recording contracts may well have gotten their gear from advances paid by their record company. Record companies had a strong motive to promote a band in every way possible, but the band members may have labored for years to pay off their advances.

No one knows what instruments we may have heard on the recordings. They could have been the Danos and Silvertones the band started out with, they could have been rented, or we may have been hearing session musicians.

I would venture to say that the reality of the situation was far less prosperous than the publicity photos might lead us to believe.

The artist formerly known as: Synchro

When Surf Guitar is outlawed only outlaws will play Surf Guitar.

WoodyJ wrote:

Just for you, Dan.... Smile

image

WoodyJ…wow, that is amazing you held onto those pieces all these years, and props to not selling them to fuel the eternal gear search over time. They even look museum quality condition. Drooling!

Thank you for the kind words!

My wife says that I am OCD, I think "precise" is more like it. Yes I've always done my best to take good care of my gear. Also, I was a LOT younger back in those days and carrying those behemoths wasn't an old age problem like it would be now.

A short back story: The original lineup of The Mariners lasted until 1968, which is when three of us received our draft notices from Uncle Sam. There was a (needless) war going on at the time. The Bandmaster didn't get much use because at the time, I much preferred the Deluxe Reverb. Decades later, I discovered the problem sound-wise with the early blackface BM's was the crappy Oxford speakers. Thanks to sage advice from my X-Rays/Surge! bandmate and electrical genius Eddie Katcher, I installed a pair of E-V EVM-12L's and instantly it became one of the best-sounding amps I've ever played a guitar through.

I was very careful and very lucky that the Jaguar has survived with no dings, dents or wear marks. When dad bought it for me, it was Olympic White with a matching headstock. A few months later, the part where I rested my right arm became a really ugly pink-ish color. It was still under warranty, so I wrote a letter to Fender with a close-up pic of the affected area, Fender replied quickly and told me to send it back and they would do a refinish. I asked them do do it in Sunburst if possible, which they did. A few months later it returned back home looking like it does now, there are stampings under the pickguard and on the neck heel verifying that it is the same guitar with a DEC 1964 neck date.

The pic below was taken when it was still white. Hopefully, I look less nerdy now!

image

Jack
aka WoodyJ

The Mariners (1964-68, 1996-2005)
The Hula Hounds (1996-current)
The X-Rays (1997-2004)
The Surge! (2004, 2011-2012)
Various non-surf bands that actually made money
(1978-1990)

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