Jan 21, 2008 7:26 a.m.
And that wraps up formal coverage of WinterNAMM 2008.
There will be some post-mortems in the associated personal reflections thread, and the pics of many other booths on the convention floor.
And I assume this thread will continue to have a life of its own as y'all absorb all the info, samples, music, etc.
Last trivia winners!
Q: What do The Who, Joe Walsh, Wishbone Ash, and The James Gang have in common?
A: They were all produced by Bill Szymczyk.
Two winners of Gretschflame ball caps for right answers: DrNyl and Zuma.
Q: What do the #1 hit of 1954 and Chet Atkins have to do with each other?
A: "Mr. Sandman" was the hit, and Chet's cover of the song is one of his essential classics.
A Gretschflame hat to both ScottieDawg and bigalthethird for their correct answers.
Many thanks to Joe Carducci and Mike Lewis at FMIC for allowing and facilitating this extraordinary undertaking, a leading-edge experiment in managing a highly interactive, positive and fraternal relationship between a brand and its fans. There are many ways it could have gone wrong – but the integrity, good intentions, transparency, and camaraderie of everyone involved prevented any of that.
Let me say that no one from FMIC ever once suggested what I should or shouldn't cover, what I should say, what the slant ought to be. Joe told me the theme of the show, consistent with the 125th anniversary of Gretsch, was "making history" – and he mentioned the amps were being rolled out again.
In terms of direction, that was it. "I trust you," they said, and "you have the run of the booth, whatever you want." This is an incredible thing, guys – that the biggest MI company in the world would accommodate a fanatic and very small group of customers to that extent.
But the secret to that is this: the guys at FMIC may have JOBS at the biggest MI-whatever – and consider themselves lucky for that – but they are all players FIRST. They love the music, they revel in the great history of Fender and its brands. They are fans first – and that's why they work there.
They also work harder than you might expect.
Mike and Joe are roughly contemporaries with us 40-50 somethings. Their lives and musical experiences have been little different than ours: as kids they were inspired to play and wanted instruments they couldn't afford, and they progressed as we have through cheap first guitars, garage and basement bands, gigs, occasional recording, all of it. Most of them still DO gig, and at the same local level many of us do.
In other words, there is no "they" here. We are all us.
I haven't talked much about Fender's approach to the show either, since the emphasis has been on Gretsch. Fender's theme was "Making History" – not just that Fender as a company has made history, but that when we make music, we make our own histories, regardless how widely known.
Their emphasis is on getting young people to play instruments because they're FUN, and on enabling players as they age and their tastes change to keep ON having FUN, at whatever level they play. It's about the personal and even social value of participating in making music – not just passively absorbing it second-hand.
An acute awareness of just HOW music is fun (and many other bigger words) showed in the talent Fender had on their stages and at the concert. It was American roots music in its purest form. No synthesizers, no sequencers, no slice-n-dice. You could hear the difference walking through the aisles between Fender's musical tone and the mechanical, rigid, over-complex, technologically and often technically difficult music-making so many companies promote.
At too many exhibits, you had multi-everything sampling guitar processors tied to sequencers and loopers, drum samples, and a shredder wheedling. That music did not look or sound fun. It looked intimidating and sounded daunting, and while I occasionally heard power and pompous majesty in it, I heard no joy.
At Fender, a series of hard-working musicians demonstrated not so much the gear as the pure joy of playing musical instruments directly, not by proxy. So often it came back to fundamental forms of the music we love: western swing, rock & roll, rockabilly, surf, blues, r & b, funk, and combinations of those forms.
People coming through the hall responded to the presence of live music passionately played and professionally presented. If you wanted to see what the joy of music was about, and what Fender consciously promotes at every level of their business from 99.00 Squiers for kids to 30,000.00 relics for big rich kids, you only had to hear the roar of approval when Dick Dale kicked his reverb unit, or the thrill that went through the room when he lit into "Miserlou."
Or the grin on Joe's face when he climbed up on a chair to sway his way through the Shack Shakers' set – or the look on that spiky-haired kid and his mother's faces when the primal raw power of the Shaker's live music hit them for the first time.
And that, guys, is what it's about, and why we do it.
Thanks are due to Fred Gretsch as well, for his perseverence in reclaiming and preserving the heritage of his family business. Congratulations to you and Dinah, Fred, and thank you.
Finally, all of us here owe a major debt of gratitude to the long-suffering Bax. Mike Lewis again told the story that when he was assigned the Gretsch marketing job after the FMIC-Gretsch deal was done, he googled up Gretsch. The GDP was the FIRST hit that came up.
He visited the site and knew, he said, that these were his people, that these were the people he had to LEARN from. This site has had a profound effect on the products we love, and Mike and Joe are members along with the rest of us. I heard managers from other divisions of Fender thank Mike and Joe for teaching THEM what Gretsch was about. It's a chain of connections, and the result is that Fender has handled Gretsch deftly and respectfully.
Bax should be duly proud of his role in the history of Gretsch. We all like to make a difference, and Bax, through his diligence and commitment, most surely has. Hats off to you, Bax, and thanks for the GDP.
One last anecdote illustrates who the people at FMIC really are.
At the very end of the show, when guitars were being packed away and hordes of contract workers were breaking down displays and rolling stacked carts out – after many weeks and months of frenetic preparation, a million details, the pressure of the setup for the show, four days of nonstop interaction and activity – when we all ought to have been beat to a pulp –
Joe and I stood talking near the curtain to the Web Den, and Mike came over and took the 125th Annie off the rack. He strummed it string by string, played a few licks and said "Listen to that...you can hear it, can't you?"
I thought he meant the hall was now quiet enough to hear an unamplified guitar. But what he meant was that you could hear the new ML bracing. You could hear the difference in sound. He picked up a Setzer to illustrate it.
At the end of the day, corporation and exhaustion aside, it was still the guitar that motivated him.
And he wasn't the only one. Many other FMIC staffers, even after four days of din, picked up guitars as they packed them away, to noodle a bit, to appreciate a particular instrument, or just to feel that familiar profile of wood and steel in their hands.
You know what I'm saying?
(p49)