Music videos that feature Thunderbirds

[lowend1]

[uwe]

That's the late Nick Massi on bass. He left the band in the mid-60s.

Yes, he became an actor and changed his name to Joaquin Phoenix.

[uwe]

A Thunderbird and a Firebird look good together.

They were designed to look elegant - and they did.

[lowend1]

They were designed to look elegant - and they did.

Without question. However, I think the ad agency elected to scale down the the image of the Thunderbird to fit the wee man playing it. Something looks distinctly "compact" about it.

[uwe]

Now that you mention it ... I think the picture of the bass player is a photomontage with the bass superimposed - unlike the Firebird player in the background.

I keep repeating myself: Everything about the TBird cries "Art Deco!" to me. It is the design era Ray Dietrich was a child of.

https://www.onallcylinders.com/2021/08/03/what-do-checker-cabs-coachbuilt-luxury-cars-gibson-guitars-have-in-common/



Because strictly speaking, the Fire- & Thunderbird designs of 1963 were not so much something head-turningly new in design language (certainly not Pop Art which arose at the time), but more of a nod to the elegance of a glorious pre-WW II past. The necessities and constraints of wartime production ended the Art Deco movement prematurely.

[Ken]

I wonder at what point Thunderbirds became associated with hard rock, metal, etc.

[uwe]

Glenn Cornick and JAE were early TBird players with a harder edge, but neither Jethro Tull nor The Who were ever regarded strictly heavy rock, much less heavy metal, though their music had components of both. Overend Watts with Mott the Hoople was an iconic early TB player too as was Martin Turner of Wishbone Ash, but Mott the Hoople were too glam and poppy to be really considered heavy rock and Wishbone Ash were too melodic and folky.





Honestly, I think it was Pete Way of UFO who gave the TBird a hard rock image. (Just as Michael Schenker reinforced the hard rock image of the Flying V, even though Jimi Hendrix, Leslie West and Andy Powell of Wishbone Ash had all played Vs before him.)





Way didn't play a TBird before 1978 or so when he got his Bicentennial,



in 1976/77 he was still pummeling his P Bass.



Which goes to say that the hard rock image of the TBird only came into existence with the Bicentennial reissue of the model.

Pete Way would become a role model for Nikki Sixx and from then on the TBird image as a hard rock bass was pretty much set. Sixx played TBirds already pre-Mötley Crüe with his outfit London.



But before I continue mansplaining things, Jackie Fox rocked hard with a TBird as early as 1977. She loved that bass and was heartbroken when the headstock eventually snapped off on the Japan Tour.

[Ken]

Fantastic post (mansplain?), Uwe.  Thanks.

[planetgaffnet]

[slinkp]

I used to have that "my amp is essential" feeling, but sometime in the past decade or so it totally shifted.

What happened was, I started playing Gibson-style basses that have a big growly midrange and a subdued high end.  First I got the Greco bird clone, then I got the LPB-1 which is still my favorite sound of the bunch, though lately I'm playing the single-pickup DC tribute junior a lot. 
All of these, especially the LP, give me a direct sound that I like, even with no EQ. In fact, it's almost hard for an engineer to screw it up, even if I dislike their EQ choices.

I used to hate going direct, because I was playing through 12" drivers that had the typical huge presence peak and no treble above about 5k, like a guitar amp; and I was playing an Ibanez with Alembic active pickups to get the brightness I wanted, which meant that if I went direct there was suddenly a lot of very obnoxious sizzle in the top octave and it just sounded awful. I hated bass cabs with tweeters, especially because so many of them frankly had terrible tweeters so they weren't even good full-range speakers.

So I relied on the speakers as a big part of my EQ, and would always beg the FOH guy to mic my amp, and if they refused (which they often did in the low-end clubs I played; those guys are paid almost nothing and they just don't want anything that adds hassle to their night) ... then I would have to warn them about the distortion pedal and beg them to turn down the treble, which just sounded bad.

Life is so much easier now and I like my sound better.

My current preamp (Genz-benz shuttle) adds a little growly saturation, which is like the icing on top - I love it, but I can get by fine without it, and there are lots of other amps and/or plugins and DIs  that work well too.  I'm thinking of trying to find a pedal that does something similar for me when I go direct or use a house amp.

[Basvarken]

Aren't you forgetting someone, Uwe?

[Ken]

What are the modifications to Glover's Thunderbird?

[Basvarken]

Total coïncidence:   
But this week I saw someone on Facebook who has scored the carcass of this very bass together with an old Oxo tin box full of parts. And he is now putting it back together.
I'll look it it up to see if I can find more info

[Basvarken]

Found it.

Jeff Beer @ Zero One Guitars from Wales.






Apparently the restoration was already done in 2020

[uwe]

Aren't you forgetting someone, Uwe?

Not really. By the time I saw Roger with Rainbow playing a TBird (at a gig at Festhalle Frankfurt) in early 1980, the TBird had already a hard rock image. Besides, I was disappointed back then that he was not playing his 4001, which I had always identified him with.

He liked the TBird, he said in an interview, and would have played it with DP had it been available to him then, but it didn't last long. He snapped its head stock off during a Rainbow gig when he collided with a mike stand. Someone must have saved the parts. He then switched to an Ovation Magnum I for the rest of the tour, a bass not entirely dissimilar to a TBird in sound, wood and feel, more sudden-impact-resistant though with its graphite reinforced neck and with a smaller head stock as a target too!