PEARLS
origins - from Jack Hudock
May
I follow up on the Pearls’ instruments briefly?
It really helps to have the financial support of parents who don’t think
playing rock ’n roll is sacrilegious.
When George first began to take lessons, Mom and Dad bought him a used
Gibson ES-175, a big fat (about 3 inches deep) hollow jazz box with two PAF
Humbuckers, split parallelogram fret board inlays, tobacco sunburst paint job,
and a single Florentine cutaway. I
believe it had an ebony fret board, but maybe not. I was largely unaware of such nuances back
then. You, or your parents, can still buy
one of these new, but at very close to $4,000 you had better be serious.
The
Pearls rhythm guitarist, Bill Crepet, still has one of the original ES-175
models with a single P-90 in the bridge position. That was the original configuration beginning
in the late 40s. It has a very ballsy
scream through some solid state electronic distortion and is a dream of easy
playability. Nice catch, Bill.
George,
who (like me) was spending our parents’ money, discarded the 175 for a
Stratocaster because the 175 was prone to feedback. Who knew that feedback would become a trend? When it became a trend, the Strat went down
the well in favor of another Gibson, the big ES-355 TDC. In the photo at the top, George is playing a
Gibson ES-335 he borrowed. He’s standing
next to a Fender Jaguar (I believe) he also borrowed.
Bill
Crepet who, in retrospect, seems to be the sensible Pearl got himself a
beautiful black Gretsch that he still owns.
It served him, and the band, well through our lives together as a band. I played it recently. I’d keep it too if it were mine! What a great guitar.
At
one point, my Mom bought me a Guild F-212 12-string guitar made in the old
factory in Hoboken. This was long ago,
after Guild had left Manhattan, and before Guild moved to Westerly,
Connecticut. We never used it in a
performance because we couldn’t figure out how to amplify it. And, I couldn’t play it very well! It was a great guitar that I ruined by years
of neglect and clumsy luthiery work.
Eventually, it had to go because I wanted to be Steve Cropper, but I had
Leadbelly’s guitar. I traded it for
another guitar I no longer own.
Regarding
the PA we finally acquired: Bill Crepet
got a Traynor column with 4 twelves in it and we drove that baby with a Bogen
50 watt PA amplifier. In an effort to
polish our vocal style, Bill found a Fender tape echo machine that made our PA
sound like the voice of the almighty. It
didn’t change the fact that we couldn’t hear ourselves sing over the
instruments but it was tough as nails especially considering its many moving
parts. I don’t know if you can get such
a sweet and versatile echo effect out of the modern solid state gear. That Fender echo was another dream.
THAT
NAME. What are these Pearls of which you
speak? Here’s what I think I remember:
At
the time the name was coined, George was living with Dan Mahoney in the
dorms. Dan was a tough, serious guy who
could be flamboyantly and distinctively funny.
I remember him sticking his whole body, from the waist up, out of the
dorm windows from time to time, waving his arms in an imitation of a papal
blessing on St. Peter’s square. In the
persona he occupied on those occasions he was “Mighty Yascha” and all men bowed
before him. Dan, I think, suggested that
it wouldn’t do for us to take ourselves too seriously. Boy, was he right. He also wanted to have
some involvement in the band. For
reasons of self-deprecating humor content he suggested we name ourselves (just
as The Ink Spots did) with some reference to skin color. Mighty Yascha & the Pearls filled the
bill perfectly. Dan was in, and we were
white.
Dan,
as I recall, promised (or perhaps threatened) to make himself a “Mojo Stick”
out of a tomato pole with soda bottle caps nailed to it, and show up at gigs to
stomp around on the stage while we played.
He never did. I recall having to
announce from the stage repeatedly that “Mighty Yascha ain’t here
tonight.” I had to, on occasion, also
announce in the first set that we had already received numerous special
requests but we were going to play the whole four sets anyway!
If
by now, gentle reader, you can’t see why all of us thought this was great fun
then you should blame it on your browser and click to some less comical
adventure story.
HIRING
BILL BENDER. An attempt at self improvement.
We
never figured out, until too late, that our vocal failings came as a result of
not being able to hear our own voices through the PA. We brought Bill Bender on because we figured
he could make us sound better. The man
can sing harmony (by instinct it seems) to this day. We had no idea he’d already been to New York
and recorded. We also had no idea that
we should figure out how to drive at least one stage monitor with the PA. It was long ago in geological time, children,
and I’m not sure any of the local bands had monitors then. These days, you ain’t nothin’ if you don’t
have lights, a smoke machine, eye make-up, and a cape. But we worked back in the day.
We
had toyed with the idea of bringing in someone with a keyboard to enlarge the
sound. The one fellow we briefly
considered (name? Who remembers names at this point?) wasn’t very good and he
had a small, wheezy Farfisa Combo Compact that didn’t have an impressive sound. It seemed like a bad bet to all of us that he
could help us and truly earn a share of our revenue. The revenue was skimpy to the point of being
ridiculous; we didn’t mind because it was a great hobby. But splitting it 5 ways instead of 4 seemed
dopey until we got the chance to make Bill Bender a Pearl.
I
seem to remember Bill requiring us, as part of basic training, to sing the Don
and Juan hit (What’s Your Name?) in
the dorm’s concrete stairwells in harmony (well, the best we could approximate)
so we’d get the hang of singing together.
In the stairwells, we could hear our own voices, you see. It was fun, and it may have made a
difference. The fun was what we were
after. And Bill didn’t mind the skimpy
pay. He already knew, I think, the
lesson Billy Preston taught us all when he sang Nothin’ From Nothin’ Means Nothin’.
Bill is still a Pearl, still playing his Strat, and jamming with Doug
Morgenstern.
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