Bottom-End, Writings and Reviews from Music Producer Pete Strobl

I don’t believe in the supernatural. I don’t believe in ghosts and spirits, good or evil. I think readers of minds, palms, tarot cards and tea leaves should be licenced with the Better Business Bureau after they’ve proven their skills at the race track, the Big Spin or the New York Stock Exchange. I spent the better part of the summer between second and third grade obediently following the instructions of Sister Veronica of St. Ambrose Catholic School in Cleveland, Ohio, praying for roller skates to no avail. To say that whatever “faith” I have is based solely on empirical evidence is a vast understatement of the facts.

Having said all of this, I had an experience the intensity of which would have convinced a weaker soul than mine of the likelihood that supernatural or paranormal forces are at work in our lives. In the summer of 1976 I had a dream of such vivid character that I remember every detail even now, many years later. That dream came back to me, in all its vividness as to colors, textures, sights, smells and sounds at what may well have been a critical moment four years later.

In 1980 I was playing around Southern California in a club/dance band. I had traded an old Rambler wagon for a ‘68 Olds Cutlass that looked like hell but went really fast. One of my band-mates and I switched off driving to the club. This particular night, it was my turn to drive, and after the gig my band-mate, Ivan and I were packing up and making our way to the door. Just as I was walking away from the building, Ivan called out to me from the doorway and asked if we could give a lift to a guy that had been at the bar most of the night. He lived in North Hollywood, which was on our way, so I told him to have the guy meet us at the car and it wouln’t be a problem. As I opened the trunk lid, Ivan and our passenger rounded the rear fender of the car. I couldn’t put my finger on it but something about this guy made me feel as if someone had dropped an ice-cube down the back of my pants. We shook hands and made small talk while we loaded up our instruments and as we were opening the car doors, the guy asked if it wouldn’t be to much trouble to give his friend a ride as well. I nodded okay, and his friend came out of the darkness between the buildings toward the car. The moment I saw this “friend”, a shudder of absolute fear shot through me the likes of which I had never experienced…EVER. I shouted to Ivan to get in the car, NOW, and screamed out of the parking lot in a cloud of blue burning rubber, leaving our two riders to fend for themselves.

I didn’t say a word until I had reached the freeway on ramp. Ivan’s eyes went from the white knuckles on my steering wheel to the road speeding by and back again, wondering just what he hell had just happened. by the time we were half the way home, I told Ivan the story of the dream I had four years earlier.

In my dream, I was driving the long stretch of highway which follows the Platte river across the state of Nebraska. I saw a hitch-hiker at the side of the road and pulled over to give him a ride and to have some company. He was of medium size and very fit, wearing engineer boots, jeans, and a white T-shirt with a pack of cigarettes rolled into one of his shirt sleeves. Across his other arm he was carrying a brown leather bomber jacket. As I rolled down the passenger window to ask him how far he was going, he looked into the car and smiled crookedly. I noticed that he had the kind of brown teeth you only find in a Midwest tobacco-chewing farmboy type. He started to open the car door and, pointing past my head, he asked if we could also give his buddy a lift. I turned toward my left and saw an older, white-haired and unshaven guy in jeans and a sweaty undershirt grinning at me and holding a shotgun to my chest from outside my car window. I stepped into the gas pedal and sped off, waking from my dream in a sweat.

As I told my dream to Ivan, describing every detail in the appearance of the two hitchhikers, it became clear to him that I was also describing the two guys we were going to take to North Hollywood earlier, because they were dead-ringers right to the stained shirts and teeth. My heart was still pounding when I finally pulled into my driveway.

I have no rational explanation for the events of that night. All that I do know is that it happened… and it scared the shit out of me.

My first band was called “The Blue Bathtub.” At least this was the first band I was in that made money. I was in the eighth grade and had played around the neighborhood with all the guys that had electric guitars, garages and parents who were either deaf or on the back patio, looking for solutions to the world’s problems in the bottom of a rocks glass. I played bass on a Teisco Del Rey copy of a 335 with heavy, flatwound strings tuned down as far as they would go. My pal, Don, got to play lead guitar because he had a Kalamazoo amp…with REVERB! I remember walking into his garage one day, it was a week before Christmas, and he was sitting on the top rung of a paint ladder with his guitar cord disappearing into a gift-wrapped box hidden in the rafters where his parents had stashed it. He grinned and whispered, “Reverb!”

There was a high school kid who lived up the street called Dave. He had a sister that let us…oops, wrong story…he had a blond Fender Bassman and an Old Kraftsman short-scale bass and that shit changed everything. Dave wasn’t a dropout, he just didn’t like to go to school. I would go to his house after basketball practice and he would be sitting next to the radio, playing along with everything. I mean everything, every song, every commercial, every news bump…everything. When I think about all the phrase samplers and tempo slower-downers you can get now to help you learn solos, and all old Dave used was his ears. What a concept.

Every once in a while, Dave would let me borrow his amp and bass for band practice. I would take my skateboard to his house and with the bass slung over my shoulder, I’d put the amp on the skateboard and try to get to Don’s house without dumping everything into someones ivy. Don’s mom worked late as a waitress at an all night coffee shop and she slept into the late afternoon, which is why we couldn’t practice in Don’s garage but which also made it perfectly plausible for us to think that his mom really would let us use her car if she were awake for us to ask. Don was just fourteen but had the keys and the balls to use them. So we would load up his Kalamazoo, the Bassman, and Fat Mitch with his drums. Fat Mitch couldn’t play that well, but he was the only guy on the block with a real drum-kit, which was enough to pass the audition.

The car was a powder blue Ford Falcon station wagon and we would drive up to Harrison Elementary school, pass the amps over the 10 foot high chain-link fence, plug in and practice on the outdoor lunch area until dark.We played “We Gotta Get Outta This Place”, “Shapes Of Things”, “House of the Rising Sun” and about five other songs. After practice, we’d boost the gear back over the fence, load up and get the car back before Don’s mom had to leave for work. Every once in awhile that crazy bastard would have a hair up his ass and would cut across the grass ball-field spinning dough-nuts in that old Falcon, gear sliding around in the back and all of us laughing our asses off.

At some point, Don and I discovered the Blues scale and we became a Blues band. It was so much easier than learning all those songs. Fat Mitch learned how to play a shuffle, and we just played a twelve bar, sang some bullshit we made up on the spot, and thought we were heavy enough to have a name. That was the birth of “The Blue Bathtub.”

There was this rich girl in our school who lived up on the hill above our neighborhood (isn’t there always). Her dad was letting her throw a barbeque birthday party. We were loud, somewhat avant garde and poor. Just what she was looking for to piss off her dad, so we got the gig. At the end of the party, she gave each of us a five dollar bill. Man, I was hooked for life! In one night we became professional musicians in every sense of the word. We played music, ate their food, tried to make out with the rich girls… and got paid.

Later in the year Fat Mitch thought it would be smart to stick his head in a bag of airplane glue fumes. His shoes disappearing into the back of the ambulance were the last I saw of him. Don got into motorcycles and the Kalamazoo went back up into the rafters. I started to think I had a shot at playing some real hoops, and that was the end of my first band. But everytime I see the the black and white photos that Astrid Kirscher shot of the young Beatles in Hamburg, it hits me that no matter how much fun it gets to be, it’s never as much fun as the first time.

My favorite bass is a mid-60s Fender Jazz. It was originally sold during the time that Leo Fender was in the process of turning over the keys of the Fender factory to C.B.S. I bought it in 1973 for $150.00 to clear a debt and at the time, thinking it was rather ugly, I thought I would hang on to it until the seller had the money to buy it back…WRONG!I took the bass on a road trip and fell in love. Luckily, the $150.00 never came back to me and the bass stayed. Unluckily, at least from a collector’s point of view, I still thought the bass was ugly. I decided that I was much smarter than Leo and made some design changes. Can I get a “what a dope” from the congregation? Had I left it alone, it would be worth 12 to 16 thousand.

I started by sanding off a perfect nitrocellulose sunburst finish and oiling the bare wood with Watco walnut oil…NICE! Then I decided that Fender really blew it with their bridge design. So I bought a Leo Kwan Badass bridge in Lawton, Oklahoma. By the time I got around to installing it, I was playing in some dump in New Mexico and realized that the model bridge I had was made for Gibson basses. Problem solver that I am, impatient as I was to customize my bass, and bored as one can be in a motel room on Rte. 66 somewhere in Shithole, New Mexico, I carved out the footprint of the wrong bridge…in the wrong place, and installed it (see my post entitled “Do It Right Or Do It Twice”). Yes, Swiss Army Knives are cool tools, but no, they can’t replace a router. After fighting the intonation nightmare of my misplaced bridge for a few nights, I fixed the placement problem with the aforementioned router…I mean army knife. And that’s the way it stayed.

My next bit of brilliance I’ll blame on Jaco Pastorius. I’ve often wondered how many perfectly good basses he fucked up with that goddamned solo album of his. Here I was, playing in a club band, singing half the night and I thought it would be a great idea to rip out my frets and surprise the band with my brand-new Jaco sound. Jesus! Good thing I’m 6′7″ and they were scared of me or they would have beat the hell out of me on the spot. They had every right to. I ordered a new neck the next morning.

As the years passed, that bass became an extention of my hands and we became inseparable. I have had many arrows in my quiver but this one has always hit the mark. It is still without a proper finish, still has the wrong bridge (but in the right place) and I’m on the third neck, a “62 Fender Custom Shop reissue. It has become a family member returned from travelling a world of wild adventures. Missing an ear lobe and a few teeth, one leg carved out of a table leg, but with great stories to tell in an old familiar voice. The old girl is ugly as ever…and I love her like the moment I met her for the first time.