OT: Earliest Music Gear I Went Ga-Ga Over

["RICK WALKER" <looppool@cruzio.com>]

In my first year of college , I went and saw the group
Three Dog Night play up at the fairly recently constructed
Oakland Coliseum (the first of many shows I'd see there over the years).

The drummer was playing a double bass drum set of the brand new released
Ludwig see through Vistalite drums.      I had never even heard of such a 
thing
and it was so wonderfully modern and psychedelic I became obsessed with 
them.

I had been drumming for about 4 years at this point on the first drumset
that my parents had purchased for me (a decrepit blue sparkle Stanford 
brand)
and these things were like a spaceship to me.


As chance would have it,  I dropped out of college that Winter quarter 
(much 
to the chagrin
of my parents)  and the next summer got a job working graveyard,  6 nights 
a 
week, 10 hours
a night at a Tomato canning factory in Eastside San Jose.

My station at the canning factory was about 20 feet above the canning 
lines 
where mostly hispanic
women in hairnets picked through freshly boiled whole tomatoes were two 
very 
long lines
(the length of two football fields in this enormous tin sheds) that 
carried 
two different sizes of
empty cans that flung by my face at an amazing rate of 7 per second.
These cans would then hit can diversion machines that would send a number 
of 
them down
to each individual canning station with a dozen or so women
at it.

On the average of every 20 minutes a can would fall over, jamming the 
machines and making
an even more horribly loud sound than that of thousands of empty cans make 
hurtling down a line.

My job was to pick up the can.

On my station (and I was the only person up above the canning lines)  the 
rising steam from the boiling
tomatoes was so thick that I could not see the ground and the women (and 
more importantly,  the
supervisors) could not see me.      The sound was so loud that I was able 
to 
play for hours
each night on the big metal canning lines with enormous 2S drumsticks (the 
closest thing in the drumming
world to small tree trunks).    Mind you, there was NOTHING to do at this 
job for 10 hours a night.
I would play for 4 hours with my left hand and for 4 hours with my right 
hand each night and I did religiously
for the whole summer.   Lol,  I thought it would make me a stronger 
drummer 
to do so (and I knew nothing
about good technique or the ergonomics of sticking at the time).

Well, I was being paid the ungodly sum of slightly over 5 dollars an hour 
(this was close to three times minimum wage)
and at the end of 10 weeks of this,  I marched to the store and proudly 
bought a huge six piece Ludwig Vistalite
drum set, with a 22" kick, 13", 14", 16", and a custom 18" floor tom with 
a 
deepshelled 14" X 6 1/2" chrome
Supraphonic snare drum (that is still my favorite snare drum in the world).

For the first year I owned it, I was embarrassed to play in public with it 
because I thought it was a way better drumset
than I was a drummer.

As the years went on (forgive me, this was the early 70's)  I added on to 
that drumset (and even had Metheny drummer, Danny Gottlieb
send me a 14" X 14"  floor tom shell that matched it for free when he 
heard 
I was looking for one) and even ended up replacing
the toms and built 8 octobans out of clear plexiglass shells so that by 
the 
time I sold it, it consisted of
2 22" kick drums
2 10"  toms
2 12"  toms
1 13" tom
2 14"  toms
a set of concert toms (6",8",10", 12")
8  6" octobans of various lengths
1 14"  snare drum

When I finally sold it,  I did so to a friend of mine who had been  a big 
fan of my band Tao Chemical for
$600 and a Purecussion flat drumset.

This was about 2 years before Vistalites suddenly became huge collectors 
items.  I would have made four times that much had
I waited as it turned out.

I wish I had it to this day but I have to content myself with my custom 
maple drums with vintage Leedy art deco hardware on 
them............probably
a vastly better drum set.

I tell you though,    there's a reason that John Bonham played that huge 
kit 
of Orange Vistalite Ludwigs with Led Zeppelin.
They sounded like GOD on big rock and roll numbers...................just 
enormous!!!!!

But we had entered the era of small drumkits and they were dinosaurs and 
had 
to go.

I miss that kit.

********************************

Here's what it looked like except that I had an extra 16"  X 18"  floor 
tom 
on mine.
http://www.ludwigdrummer.com/Other%20Peoples%20Drums/kevin%20masterson/clear%20vistalite.JPG