Really good show at the Mercury Lounge in NYC - aside from an unusually large crowd of extremely tall dudes... I am 6' tall (that's 183 cm to most of the world) and never had so much trouble seeing the stage in my life... Oh, and a couple of really obnoxious people loudly fake-laughing and talking their heads off during the few really quiet numbers; they managed to anger not only the entire crowd but the performers too.
Anyway, the band was great and the bass sound was quite good. Powerful and had more clarity in the lows than last few times I saw Watt, which would have been when he was playing one of his much-modified EB-0 or EB-3 basses, and I don't remember what amp rig at the time. For a long time, I found his live tone merely loud and murky and much prefered his tone on recordings.
Of course with so many variables, I can't be sure what to attribute the improvement to - could be the bass, could be the new DNA / Barefaced rig, could be the PA and engineer at the Mercury Lounge, which seem to be pretty good - the whole band sounded great. Could be all three!
Anyway, at some point I briefly got a good look at the bass and was surprised it did not look like a stock Reverend Wattplower which he's been mostly playing on recent tours. This one was a yellow Wattplower but had a very odd pickup arrangement, with what looked like a P pickup with two halves for the lower strings - very strange.
Then I saw this, from a few days previous on Watt's twitter feed - this is surely the same bass:
Looks like it has a neck pickup too? Wonder what that is.
My first thought was: Of course, the guy who endlessly hacked up and modified his old Gibsons can't stop doing the same with his own signature model
Then I saw this on his homepage - maybe an earlier stage of the same bass? It's missing the pickguard and has different controls:
And this description:
2018 reverend guitars "wattplower" bass
mark II prototype
design is a total joe naylor/mike watt collaboration
short scale neck, twentyone frets
passive volume/tone controls
joe naylor designed "p-blade" pickup
hipshot 'a style' bridge w/solid brass spacer
strings are loaded through the body
hipshot 'ultralite' tuners
this protoype includes mark I pickup mode
(low strings coil closer to the neck on)
+ mark II mode (low strings coil closer
to the bridge on) selected via
push/pull switch combo tone control
(the high strings coil is always on)
Interesting, wonder if they will ever put this model up for sale and likely replace the existing Wattplower.
I guess either enough of these have sold that Reverend thinks it's worth their time, or maybe they just enjoy constant tinkering along with Watt!
