The Last Bass Outpost

Offspring can be disappointing sometimes and the Patridge Family wasn't everybody's cup of tea, but IMHO self-burning is carrying things a bit too far.

This man has real problems. Of the luxurious kind.  

Look, Edith claims I have a 170 basses. Or so. That number is uncorroberated and a figment of female imagination, but do I ever complain? Some of my basses have their batteries drained by the time I play them again!!! And I really don't like playing my Kubicki Factor anymore - I realized that yesterday. It feels weird and sounds weird. And that was my mainstay bass for many many years.

Well, I tried!

Why on earth woud someone glue a Gibson neck to a Ventura body? Set neck instruments are not exactly fake-prone. Too much trouble.

  They can't even count right:

"It has a glued-in neck made from superior quarter-sawn mahogany for improved strength and superior resonance, and a rosewood fingerboard with 22 frets. The neck is carved to a comfortable Thunderbird profile and measures .850" deep at the 1st fret and .900" at the 12th, with a width of 1.60" across its PLEK-cut Corian nut."

If only. How can anybody be so careless and sloppy in a description. A high E on a TBird would have been really something - alas!

I wonder if the frets are PLEKed too though? In general, the nut-cutting (come to think of it ... an unfortunate teminology to say the least) is the final stage in the PLEK-process and follows the fretwork, not much sense in cutting the nut without it. That might explain why they are dressed flat and not crowned? While the PLEK machine (at least the new generation) can crown frets you can find reports according to which it tends to flatten frets. That said, Gibson was not above putting out flat-fretted basses in the sixties and seventies too. Some of my vintage pieces could only be called crowned with the best of intentions.

Gibson never officially used ash, but would they have cared if they had it stocked at the time? Of course not. It was a preferred Fender wood and construction-wise Gibson was emulating Fender with the Ripper more than ever. If seventies Jazz Basses used ash what should have kept Gibson from doing the same? No one gave a damn at the time what a Ripper was made out of just as long as it wasn't mahogany (to set it apart from its "too dark-sounding" predecessors).

That wood looks exactly like the wood on my SB-350/450 - basses that came out around the same time as the Ripper. I always assumed that to be alder, but I suck in telling alder and ash apart except via the weight test (and of course, too confuse matters further, there is light ash too).

UnZeppelinish?  If you increase the tempo it's basically 'Rock and Roll' unplugged.  Sounds that way to me anyway.

The tempo is unzeppelinish - somehow Zep always avoided mid-tempo stuff, they were either faster or slower. And both drums and guitars take a backseat to the music. Of course you can't hear the bass really well either, but then that is with almost all Zep production jobs, Dazed & Confused perhaps excepted! 

Jack Cassidy (David's father), as opposed to Jack Casaday.
Jack Cassidy met his maker after falling asleep in bed with a lit cigarette. He had to be identified by his dental records.
http://www.findadeath.com/Deceased/c/Jack%20Cassidy/jack_cassidy.htm

That is brilliant. And you, Sir, have a demented twisted mind!