Shergold Marathon

[Chris P.]

This week I did a trade with a friend. He got my reissue short scale Vox (the coffin model) and I got his '79 Shergold Marathon. I paid a little on top of it.

Here it is! In fact it's P-ish. P-style fat neck, P-style pick up and sound. Rather light, and even the bridge cover looks P, but it's plastic and broken as you can see.

It's an Mk 1a, btw. With stereo-output. Or EA and DG or - like Rickenbacker - one output for both.

[Pilgrim]

Neat looking bass!   

[Highlander]

One of the few bass's I've managed to break... never got on with the beastie... do like the shape though, including the Hayman, Wal stylee...

[Chris P.]

How did you break it? It seems to be a pretty solid bass!

[Dave W]

Very cool!

Mike Lutz of Brownsville Station played an earlier Shergold-made Hayman 4040 -- essentially the same bass -- but I think you need to emulate his outfit and stage moves. Especially the boots and open-chest shirt. 

[Chris P.]

Dave, I thought you would keep your fantasies about me in direct/private messages only... Now everybody knows.


Great vid and song btw! If I had the head hair I would def start a glamrock band!

[Dave W]

 

BTW, Mike Lutz now gives guitar and bass lessons in Ann Arbor, Michigan, the band's hometown. Sadly, Cub Koda is no longer with us.

http://mail.musicenvironment.com/mike_lutz.html

[FrankieTbird]

Very cool!

Mike Lutz of Brownsville Station played an earlier Shergold-made Hayman 4040 -- essentially the same bass -- but I think you need to emulate his outfit and stage moves. Especially the boots and open-chest shirt. 

That bassist is cool as all get out.  The guitarist on the other hand, looks like a cross between Geddy Lee and Garth from Wayne's World.  Probably the one rock band where the bass player got more leg than the singer.

[Highlander]

How did you break it? It seems to be a pretty solid bass!

Things happen...

Had a neck issue I couldn't resolve and I just smacked-it one... split the body from neck to bridge... rip...

[slinkp]

That bassist is cool as all get out.  The guitarist on the other hand, looks like a cross between Geddy Lee and Garth from Wayne's World.  Probably the one rock band where the bass player got more leg than the singer.

I think you nailed it.
My main reaction though was "oh my that is a lot of Sunn gear".

[Dave W]

That bassist is cool as all get out.  The guitarist on the other hand, looks like a cross between Geddy Lee and Garth from Wayne's World.  Probably the one rock band where the bass player got more leg than the singer.

I think you nailed it.
My main reaction though was "oh my that is a lot of Sunn gear".

It was the 70s. It was an outfit. I doubt that Cub had any problem getting women.

He later became a respected blues writer and reviewer, He died young, of kidney disease.

Some post-Brownsville footage from 1984 and 1999, showing him out of costume.

[Alanko]

My band shared a bill with another band whose bassist was playing a Shergold Marathon. From memory it was a natural, maple finish with big cracks in the lacquer. I guess it was an early poly finish experiment. He was playing through some sort of cheap multi-effects pedal so his bass sounded like a distant rumble with some chorus mixed in. The only interesting thing was that he played the bass at all the times I wouldn't, and didn't play the bass all the time I would, during any given song. It was like meeting my musical opposite.

Alongside HH amplifiers there is something of a cool, brutally ugly 'Brave New World' aesthetic to the Hayman/Shergold stuff. Long, square metal control plates, aluminium stereo knobs, smoked acrylic plastic covers... exactly what the future looked like in 1975. They are interesting as a link in the chain of British guitar production. You start at Fenton Weill, enter the wonderful world of Burns, then end up at Hayman, then Shergold. By the time WAL and Status came along we could actually make top quality gear! Shergold gear always looks a bit less agriculturally built than, say, John Birch.