But always 100% guaranteed is that you'll get one of the guitar playing assistants insisting on demonstrating and showing off his latest Joe Satriani or Van Halen noise, which every time without fail is a multitude of garbled notes played with so much distortion that they can't be deciphered into any recognisable tune.
I usually ask for the guitar and find the cleanest tone possible and pick a few Hank or Chet Atkins or Duane Eddy notes first, followed by a few adjustments to the amp, then I rip into Beck's Bolero or the solo of Shapes Of Things To Come and a few snippets of The Sabre Dance, which usually leaves them with their mouths open and lost for words that this old geyser has just trumped their best efforts. I always say,'Let's hear it clean, I can make it distort myself if I want it to".
Back in 1964 when we were still very much influenced by The Shadows, the flavour of pop music had taken a big turn and we had to go with it or be left behind. The Beatles were well established followed by The Rolling Stones, Hollies, Yardbirds, Who, Kinks, Animals et al and I'd picked up this Gibson Fuzz Tone pedal from one of The Cruisers who backed Dave Berry. At the time it was a bit of a novelty, as we didn't like distortion on our guitars. Hank went on to use something similar on 'Stingray' a little later but it wasn't a great asset because the notes it produced were short and fuzzy, without any sustain, a bit like the intro to 'Satisfaction'. We had no desire to play that song so discarded it until I heard Jeff Beck a little later, in fact we were on the bill with The Yardbirds at Hull University on Jeff's very first appearance with them but at that time he was yet to get his Tone Bender. Jeff pushed his Vox AC30 amp with his Fender Esquire and really made it sing and it turned my head because he used the distortion in a melodic fashion. Later of course we heard 'Heart Full Of Soul' and 'Shapes Of Things' and I discovered he had a pedal called a Tone Bender. The story behind that is interesting, as Vic Flick of The John Barry Seven had got one of the Gibson Fuzz Tone boxes and didn't like it so he took it to a music shop in Charing Cross Road to see if it could be given more 'sustain' where Gary Hurst had a look at it and ended up inventing the Tone Bender, building it firstly in a wooden box, until it seemed every guitarist in London had heard about it and wanted one, and Macaris, where Gary worked, took on the project and built the Tone Bender in a metal box that we all recognise today. Jeff Beck was also there at the beginning and he got Gary to make him one too, in a wooden box, which can be heard on those Yardbirds hits.
Back in Yorkshire, we couldn't get a Tone Bender because of high demand, so John Hornby Skewes of Leeds, licensed the product and built the identical 'Zonk Machine', one of which I bought and used from 1965 onwards with me buying a second one (£7-10 shillings) followed by various Colorsound models over the years as they wore out and didn't work.
I now get that same effect using my Vox ToneLab LE or my Zoom G5n, but recently I was talking to Gary Hurst and he built me a special Tone Bender and sent it to me and it's absolutely wonderful and sounds exactly as it did on those hit records on which it was used back in the day. As it's very special to me, I don't take it to gigs but use it in my studio where there's no danger of losing it. So I still use the Zoom G5n to re-create the sound of the ToneBender.
The distorted sound of a guitar does have it's place in popular music, but like I said earlier, let me hear the amplifier's clean sound above any distortion and saturation and I can do the distortion thing myself thanks.
